CCO Replica Sample - 11

B

efore breakfast, I check my Facebook and
LinkedIn newsfeeds for a quick synopsis of the
day. As I jump in the shower, I hit "download"
on a recommended movie on Netflix, knowing
I have a long flight this evening. While wolfing
down my cereal, I click once to buy a gift for a
friend's birthday next week. My iPhone pings to tell me that I
need to leave now if I want to make that early meeting 54 miles
away. And as I get in my car, I use voice activation to play my
favorite Spotify playlist, and Apple Maps informs me it will take
five minutes to drive to the train station this morning.

With real examples of demonstrable value in the
market, we can no longer sarcastically joke that
AI means "almost implemented."
We are all being conditioned to rely on technology in our daily
lives, not just for communication, but also for decision-making.
This ever-deepening interface with technology is rewiring our
brains to process information differently, as Nicholas Carr
writes in The Shallows. It is the same with our customers.
Popular consumer apps have led to the unconscious mass
adoption of advanced, predictive technology. And yet ... while
we are increasingly outsourcing our cognitive processes to
myriad consumer apps and tools, the enterprise is only now
waking up to this new level of customer expectation. This
lopsided adoption is most clear when we consider that we now
trust a car's in-built collision-avoidance system to protect our
lives, yet still question whether a machine can recommend
what to write next in a marketing program or which customer
should receive a new product offer.

We trust artificial intelligence to drive our cars
safely but not to recommend marketing strategy.

THE FUTURE OF
MARKETING
IS PREDICTIVE

We've seen huge advances in consumer technology.
It's time for the enterprise to catch up.
Andrew Davies

THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH
ABOUT MARKETING AUTOMATION
Over the past 10 years, marketing automation has grown
into a billion-dollar industry by promising to bring
personalization and efficiency to marketing programs. The
siren call of automated lead nurturing, lead scoring and
triggered responses to critical prospect activities has proved
irresistible to B2B organizations: there are nearly 11 times
more companies with marketing automation today than
there were in early 2011 (SiriusDecisions), and 60 percent of
companies turning over at least $500 million have adopted
marketing automation (Raab Associates).
However, the inconvenient truth about first-generation
marketing automation is that it is not really automated. It is
a fantastic central workflow tool that can achieve scale, but it
requires resource to set up, integrate, manage and optimize.
Indeed, in many B2B organizations, the phrase "feed the
beast" has been accepted into marketing parlance as a way of
describing the resource demands of marketing automation.
Most fundamentally, there is the issue of rule creep. As you

CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER | CONTENTMARKETINGINSTITUTE.COM | 11
http://www.CONTENTMARKETINGINSTITUTE.COM
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CCO Replica Sample
