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Recently Youmark, a leading Italian media outlet focused on advertising innovations and trends, interviewed our Global Marketing Director Christoph Kruse to gather precious insights about the pivotal role of Marketing in continuously evolving enterprises.

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Read on to discover our perspectives and the innovative spirit that drives marketing leaders forward.

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Marketing Leadership in Data-Driven Companies

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CMOs are key in innovation and development, but the majority believe they are continually subjected to the need to show their results with numbers: a request from the C-Suite that shows how 'mistrust' is still widespread. How are things really?

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While “mistrust” might be a too big word for the constant challenge of demonstrating marketing’s value in a company, there is an urge to underline the effectiveness with results.

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When Gartner defined the top three priorities for CMOs for this year, it is no wonder one was recasting marketing’s value in evolving enterprises.

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By nature, Marketing leaders are in an exposed position as they and their teams are key in bringing products to the market - so they need to make sure that the market needs and the product match. Marketing is - or should be - a whole cycle that starts with customer and market intelligence and ends with the campaign.  

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Marketing leaders need to make sure that they offer business intelligence that leads to business guidance, are connected to the product departments to have a robust product positioning and messaging and are not informed about but involved in strategic business decisions.

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If their work and perception is limited to just executing campaigns - or the delivery that should only be a fraction of their impact - it will be this delivery that will be judged.

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The challenge to prove the department’s effectiveness is not limited to marketing though.

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In data-driven companies, “numbers” are key not only to demonstrate each contributor’s impact, but also to identify potential for improvement or adapt to a dynamic environment.

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It is key for marketing leaders to have a clear overview over all relevant data and be able to pivot in real-time. It is not enough anymore to start a project and wait for its completion to receive a report. It is mandatory to track success in real-time and shift budgets accordingly.

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The Focus on Short-Term Impact

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Marketing budgets are shrinking while focus on short-term results is growing.  How can these two opposites be reconciled?  


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The focus on efficiency is not only true for Marketing but plays a very important role as the effectiveness in fact depends on the budget you have at your disposal. More budget doesn’t always mean better results, but it will be extremely difficult to reach higher goals with less budget.

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One way to overcome is creativity and we are seeing some great case studies at the various marketing award shows every year that demonstrate that you can have great impact with limited budgets if you have a great idea and execute it well. But equally important as creativity are process optimization and advertising spend optimization.

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For process optimization, AI tools already play an important role. They take the burden of repetitive tasks and enable the marketing teams to focus on strategy or more demanding tasks. It is key for CMOs to review existing processes and look for improvements.

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The other large factor is advertising spend optimization.

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While various platforms and channels offer AI-based optimization tools, these tools are built to increase not only the performance, but also the spending on the specific platform.

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This is strongly connected to the AI capabilities. According to a recent report by Ad exchanger, in the next 12-18 months, 73% of marketing leaders at brands and agencies will focus their AI implementation efforts on campaign budgeting.

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It is also key for marketing leaders to have a holistic overview over all advertising expenses and optimize those across the various channels. They need to be enabled by real-time views of a campaign’s performance and – ideally also AI-based – recommendations on how to shift budgets for maximum impact.

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AI Role in Marketing Teams

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Martech tools and AI adoption: how can the CMO influence the spending of company resources? And how can AI be used in the search for process efficiency: replace workers or accompany them to new possibilities and functions?

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Responsibilities shift, in fact, surveys show that other departments are increasingly stepping in and taking over the ownership of Martech solutions. Marketing leaders need to be actively involved in the decisions, demonstrate clearly the advantages of specific solutions and back these claims with data.

Building AI-enabled teams already is one of the key priorities for CMOs.

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At the moment, most teams are leveraging single to support with individual tasks.

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Marketing leaders will need to think of AI holistically and build processes and systems in which AI is an integral part. Think of AI as a new team member, taking over tedious tasks, accelerating certain initiatives, supporting team members, but also enabling activities that weren’t possible before.

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For example, AI can be used to build individual messaging at scale - something that you couldn’t do before because it involves collecting and processing massive amounts of data needed for a very specific outreach.

As these systems are being built, the roles of marketers will evolve.

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Their jobs will grow in terms of complexity and AI will be the only way to keep up with the complexity. Marketers will find their roles becoming even more demanding.

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Now equipped with AI superpowers, they will be asked to do more in less time which will increase the fragmentation in their tasks even further. On the other hand, there will be also new possibilities to grow, and many marketers will appreciate focusing more on strategy instead of manual tasks.

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Collaboration and Communication as Key Drivers for Success

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The CMO is at the center of a crucial transition phase: what will the roles be in the future and how are his corporate functions evolving?

How to define collaboration with CIOs and CFOs to build a new business reality?

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In addition to the core marketing tasks of the past, CMOs now need to better understand data and emerging technologies like AI which asks for a strong alignment with CIOs.

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As mentioned before, since other departments are increasingly involved in martech procurement, CMOs need to make sure these technologies support their goals, really improve their team’s operations and are embraced by their colleagues.

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To support the new focus on customer centricity, CMOs need to make sure they integrate data-driven insights into their strategies, enable teams and build processes accordingly.

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In the end, CMOs need to make sure their department is rooted deeply in the business, not as a service provider, but as a key contributor to the company’s strategy.

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Collaboration and communication will be key to reduce friction and remove the cross-functional inefficiencies and misalignments that plague many companies.

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The original Youmark article is available here.

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