Have you seen the television show Mad Men on the AMC network? It is a television drama set in the early 1960’s, and the primary characters are Madison Avenue advertising executives at the fictional, and archetypical, firm Sterling Cooper. It’s fine entertainment, and as a marketer you owe it to yourself to check it out and enjoy a glimpse of the primordial days of marketing. In the very first episode of the first season (season two just started in July 2008), the ad men run a market researcher out of the room for providing quantitative and psychological insights on an upcoming campaign tagline. After she departs in a hail of mockery, the execs literally throw the research report into the trashcan and proceed to pour themselves another drink and light up cigarettes to get the creative juices flowing to brainstorm campaign concepts off the top of their heads.

These attitudes are shocking by today’s enlightened marketing standards; this approach, with its fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants demeanor and disregard for quantitative information, is clearly not the right way to go. Obviously, these days are long gone, and not just the three martini lunches.

If we fast forward to 2008, our industry is several years into a push to bring science to the art of marketing. Managing the marketing department with hard-nosed metrics, KPI’s and dashboards is de rigueur in today’s challenging environment. Quantitative management is a noble cause that is endorsed by many leading CMOs, experts and suppliers. The drivers for analytically-led marketing are clear and numerous. At the top of the list are the rise of the internet, increasing consumer sophistication and increased demand for accountability at the regulatory and corporate levels. Of all the reasons that come to mind, the most compelling explanation may be the simplest: analytically-led marketing increases relevance, which in turn leads to better campaign results. After all, who doesn’t prefer to receive communications that are timely, consistent with our interests and behaviors and match our preferences? To illustrate this point further, think of the flip side; everyone has an entertaining horror story to tell at cocktail parties that illustrates the negative impact of poor marketing. The only way to devise, execute and track relevant communications is with an analytical approach to marketing.

And yet it seems as if the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of pure analytics. Databases, marketing technology and analytical processes are very clinical and tactical. These things ultimately lack the sophistication of human thinking. Like any other transition or evolutionary change, we run the risk of creating imbalanced priorities by focusing too much on current trends and dropping the ball on marketing fundamentals.

It is time to find a new balance in marketing, to bring the pendulum back toward the center.

First, let’s state clearly that analytically led marketing is here to stay. It isn’t a trend and it isn’t an option. We can all accept that analytics is crucial to a well-run marketing department. Analytics support the segmentation, targeting and validation for marketing strategies. It is the fundamental basis for testing, which is the very essence of direct marketing. Analytics is literally the only way to manage the sheer volume of marketing, given the accelerating number of campaigns, messages, segments and inbound and outbound channels today’s marketers operate in.

But analytics must be married with content, the traditional bastion of marketers, as gloriously depicted by the Mad Men. And content has never been more important. Marketers are sending out more messages with more campaigns through more channels than ever before. All of that activity requires content; new content, versioned content, dynamic content. Customers and prospects don’t see our dashboards, they don’t care about marketers’ KPIs and they don’t appreciate the algorithms that directed which offer they would receive. Customers see only the creative elements of marketing, the content, and they expect it to be good. It is the face of marketing to customers and prospects. Ultimately, human beings react to content.

Analytics and Content are therefore intrinsically linked and cannot function properly without one another, yet they are often silo’d by organizational and technical obstacles. It is not productive to put too much emphasis on one or the other as each is a potential point of failure that marketers must vigilantly guard against. In our defense, the traditional separation of content and analytics is historically legitimate. These are challenging as individual pursuits. Each requires its own skills, technology and knowledge; people spend their entire careers mastering one or the other.

It is no longer sufficient to be good at content and analytics separately. It is time to move marketing to the next level, to bring content and analytics together. It is time for Smart Content. And it isn’t going to be easy for any of us.

Smart Content requires advances in marketing technology. Initially, marketing needs a fit for purpose asset management system that contains all of their creatives, templates and documentation. This centralization drives consistency, leading to an improved customer experience, and also makes marketing more efficient by enforcing standards and reducing the effort required to pull campaign elements together.

Next, the marketing asset management system must be integrated with the marketing team’s campaign management and execution facilities. Again, this drives efficiency by distributing content from a single system and avoiding duplicate effort. It also encourages marketers to consider content up front in the campaign design process. As content becomes a component of campaign set up, similar to key codes, test cells and suppressions, it gains equal consideration and achieves a stronger sense of balance with the tactical components of campaign design.

Ultimately, marketing needs to track content consumption throughout campaigns. It is a new set of questions: what path did recipients take through channels and communications, which combinations of dynamic content drove activity, how long did viewer read or “hover over” content with his or her computer mouse, how did online and offline content affect one another, how does content impact the social distribution of marketing messages in email, networks or blogs? This is more than web analytics or response analysis; it is an extension of traditional analysis called asset analytics with a view toward the events that matter to marketing and its customers.

Smart Content also requires some adjustments in the marketing department. Fortunately the foundational elements already exist – a large majority of marketing organizations already have some capability for generating content and analytics, although this will vary by industry and relative level of sophistication. Obviously, marketing must be willing to marshal the budgets, resources and technology to support Smart Content. But the primary task for marketers is to co-mingle the creative and analytical functions to encourage the collaboration required to develop and execute the best possible customer experience. The analytics team will need to start tracking and communicating Smart Content metrics to the campaign and creative teams, and the creative team needs to start factoring segments, channels and results into their design work.

We don’t need to make all of these changes today, nor would it be reasonable to try. Smart Content will evolve through a phased approach from both technology suppliers and marketers themselves. But it’s important to recognize the long term need for the convergence of content and analytics, and the opportunity it represents.

Company: Alterian