Ever since we originated the position “Marketing Engineer,” people keep asking me: What, exactly, is a Marketing Engineer? I typically respond that since we first came up with the idea for the role some time ago, we’ve thought of it as a kind of great Glee mash-up of Madison Avenue plus Silicon Alley, but it’s taken a while for the harmonies to get worked out.
To set the scene, have you ever found yourself talking about something other than the stated agenda in a business meeting? I’m sure we all have: small talk, whether it’s about the weekend, weather, or sports, allows us to warm up and establish a personal connection before we move into the real purpose of the conversation.
I had a surreal twist on this phenomenon when I took a People and Culture leadership role in the Advertising Technology (or Ad Tech) industry in 2011. When having small talk with my colleagues before a meeting, I feared transitioning to the real business conversation, as I couldn’t understand a lot of what they were talking about. This was particularly distressing for me as I pride myself on being a talent professional whose deep insights into core business dynamics inform well-aligned recommendations on how to best recruit, reward, and retain stellar talent.
As soon as my colleagues would launch into the dialect of Ad Tech, using terms and acronyms like behavioral targeting, DMP, dynamic creative, SSP, and VAST, I would suddenly feel like a tourist in a strange land. This was doubly disconcerting as I’d spent the bulk of the previous decade working at ad agencies and had naively thought that moving into the technologist end of the business would be a small step to the side, not a quantum leap in a whole new direction. But as soon as I started, it was clear that this Irishman was not in Kansas anymore.
My coping mechanisms included:
• Deepening connections through HR HumoR. I lost count of the number of times I told the one about how I came to America based on a misunderstanding: having seen those 19th century signs that said “No Irish Need Apply,” I thought the Irish were so beloved in America that that they got jobs automatically, without even having to go through the application process.
• Staying within my talent management comfort zone of strategy and tactics on employee engagement: positive candid management, careful hiring for cultural fit, clear company values, accessible managers who provide real-time coaching, etc.
• Spending a lot of time discreetly scribbling down the myriad of mysterious terms and acronyms I didn’t understand and looking them up afterwards on resources like the IAB Interactive Advertising Wiki.
Having compared notes with members of the team across departments and people in peer companies, I found that the excessive use Ad Tech jargon was hurting not only internal communication, but also frustrating clients.
Three years later there is a happy end for this tale.
• We rose to the challenge by raising the Ad Tech industry bar on education and built a world-class learning and development arm, New Marketing Institute, to help us, our clients, our partners, and anyone else who was invested in staying abreast of this technological transformation.
• Madison Avenue and the brands it serves have embraced the power of technology platforms that give digital marketers unprecedented insights into data, a revolution destined to sunset the old John Wanamaker quote of, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” On a global level, the new generation of technologically savvy marketers confidently leverages increasingly user-friendly Ad Tech platforms to the delight of their clients and stakeholders.
• Additionally, Ad Tech has found better ways to speak English to convey its value proposition in the language that business-savvy progressive marketers understand, like ROI and goal-based marketing; where data-driven decisions to ramp up one kind of marketing investment versus another have unambiguous correlations to moving product off shelves.
And while there’s continued rapid growth in the area of programmatic automated marketing investment decisions, it’s clear that somewhere between the bleeding edge of technology and a breakthrough marketing outcome is a professional that is savvy in both business and technology: the Marketing Engineer. That is why our own entry-level immersive rotational training program for our client success organization is called the Marketing Engineer Program.
Yes, we veteran Ad Tech folks still like to geek out on the tech talk from time to time, but so much of the technological advances are now automated in the platforms that a lot of the old terms of yesterday are now more “nice to know,” vs. “need to know.” This means that the new breed of Marketing Engineers can choose to respond with a smile and an eye-roll – or jump right in and geek out with us!
Viva La Mash-Up! Viva La Convergence! Viva The Marketing Engineer!
This post orginally appeard on Peter’s LinkedIn.