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When it comes to marketing, creativity and data are inextricably linked.Marketing is data AND creative

Two areas under the spotlight in marketing today are creative and data. In the past they were often dealt with in silos: The stereotype was that the creative team worked on projects such as gut-based branding and ad campaigns, while the data analysts focused on tasks such as market mix modeling and segmentation—rarely collaborating on campaigns. Today creative and data are two sides of a coin that double its value.

jamie-gutfreund

One marketing leader who’s a proponent of the creative/data partnership is Jamie Gutfreund, global CMO of Wunderman. During her upcoming session at DMA’s &THEN 2016 conference in Los Angeles she’ll be pulling back the curtain on trends to watch in 2017 and beyond. I caught up with Gutfreund jetting between meetings and asked her for a preview.

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CMOs and CIOs speak different languages; taking time to translate each other’s priorities goes a long way toward accomplishing them.

Dice on keyboard

CMOs have a relationship problem. They need to win the hearts of their CIOs, but when it comes to communicating, the two are more like cats and dogs than colleagues. In fact, only 9% of marketing leaders surveyed think that IT understands what they do, and just 19% of IT leaders polled feel understood by the marketing leaders they work with—according to the Rackspace study “Marketing and IT:Overcoming a Cats and Dogs History to Create a Seamless Customer Experience.”

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Executives from Alaska Air, John Wiley & Sons, and Vans discuss how digital and customer expectations are changing their approach to marketing.

Driving marketing forward

Yvonne Genovese kicked off the Gartner Digital Marketing Conference reminding attendees that, in marketing, old and new are colliding: “The theory of ‘right’ [right customer/message/time/channel] is still here,” the Gartner group VP said, adding the caveat that the explosion of channels has many marketers challenged to get “right” right. “You have to find customers where they’re living,” she added. In many cases, she said, this means rethinking how marketing is organized, adding or changing roles, and learning new skills.

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Avanade’s CMO asks and answers questions troubling many marketing leaders today.

Winning the marketing race

“Everything is changing from a marketing standpoint,” Avanade CMO Stella Goulet said when we met to talk trends. “The fastest way to get to a mass [B2B] audience in the 1980s was the fax machine. Now, there are so many choices and so marketing is so complicated.”

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