Event Wrap Up:

Michael Lacorazza, EVP and CMO at Wells Fargo, and Christine Cutten, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Customer Transformation practice at Deloitte, led a recent CMO Club Virtual Roundtable discussing the most significant findings from this year’s CMO Benchmarking Survey.

Listen to the full Virtual Roundtable [53:20]

Listen to the Virtual Roundtable Highlights Trailer [1:26]

The study was conducted by the CMO Club in thought leadership with Deloitte to examine the state of marketing organizations today. We analyzed the CMO’s role and reporting structures; marketing organization design structures; current and future scope, skills and functions of team members; and measures and performance standards of marketing organizations and their leaders.

Winning Patterns Revealed for Marketing Leadership

Perhaps more than any other C-suite executive today, the Chief Marketing Officer continues a near decade-long process of evolving, embracing, assimilating, and adapting to its ever-changing role.

No longer an “artsy, creative” storytelling function, marketing and its stalwart leaders are now accountable for an expanding array of responsibilities and talent from data analytics to customer experience and everything in between.

In our virtual roundtable discussion on the CMO Club Benchmark study, we explored three emergent patterns trending with CMOs:

1 – Creating In-House Agencies

• From the study:
• 60% of organizations in the survey have created in-house agencies
• Respondents cited greater agility, speed and savings across owned and earned channels as a primary benefit of in-house agencies
• Key insights from the discussion:
• In-house agencies often begin on the creative side, then expand into channel management and full ownership of the marketing stack
• One of the greatest challenges cited for building in-house agencies is tools acquisition, from a technology perspective

“Yes, you CAN get the kind of talent that you find at the great agencies.” – Michael Lacorazza, EVP and CMO at Wells Fargo

2 – Harnessing Insights and Analytics

• From the study:
• More than 50% of respondents said CMOs are either accountable for insights and analytics, or that insights and analytics were reporting to marketing within their organization
• Analytics are key for deciding where marketers are placing new bets on paid media and customer communications strategies
• More sophisticated organizations are implementing disciplined, cross matrix frameworks that enable them to leverage insights

“One challenge that CMOs and marketing organizations have is more to do with the data and data architecture — often that responsibility of how it’s architected and managed is led somewhere else in the organization, and not set up in a way to be most useful to marketers.” – Michael Lacorazza, EVP and CMO at Wells Fargo

3 – Exploring Dynamic Content Capabilities

• Key insights from the discussion:
• Dynamic assembly is taking hold within marketing, as organizations aggressively seek to optimize across collections of channels and customer segments
• One of the primary challenges to dynamic assembly continues to be heavily regulated environments with strong requirements on asset approvals
• Another challenge to dynamic assembly is the human intervention required for marketers to tailor messages to different audiences and emphasize specific messages

“As consumers have shifted to an almost all-digital experience, dynamic content provides huge opportunities, from a scale perspective, as well as a spend savings perspective.” – Christine Cutten, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Listen to the full Virtual Roundtable as Cutten and Lacorazza discuss practical takeaways from the CMO Benchmarking Survey and how they apply in today’s environment for marketing leaders.