Brent Chaters leads the Marketing Transformation practice at Accenture and is a noted expert and popular speaker on search marketing”.
Any way you look at it, these are troubling times if you’re in marketing.
You’ve got AI coming full speed at you, maybe about to take away your job. No one understands what you do – not your mother, your best friend, or most of the people outside of marketing in your company. And even worse, just about everyone thinks they can do your job. Which leads to imposter syndrome because you likely don’t have a whole lot of training yourself. Fake it until you make it, you keep saying to yourself.
Your CMO keeps changing every few years, forcing you to prove yourself all over again. And the career ladder looks pretty shaky right now, with tighter budgets and almost no senior mentoring (no one sticks around long enough or is too busy to take the time). Most of your younger colleagues think marketing begins and ends with communications. Clicks, followers, fans – that spells success for them. They can’t understand why finance folks are so dismissive of their requests for more dollars at budget time. And geez, what happens when Google starts phasing out cookies? How will we prove all those digital media dollars are actually working? What will finance have to say then?
Maybe this wasn’t such a great career choice after all, you think. And yet … you love what you do. It’s CREATIVE! You get to have a say in how the company represents itself in the marketplace. If only the CEO could appreciate the fact that marketing is in the front lines of the battle for growth. After all, we’re the company’s connection to the market! But you worry the CEO has no real clue what would happen if the company stopped marketing altogether. Most CEOs, you’re told, come out of finance or operations. To them, marketing is and always will be a cost centre.
That last concern may be the most troublesome of all. Only 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing experience, according to McKinsey. They don’t really appreciate the power of branding and they see marketing primarily as the brand steward rather than a growth driver. And even when they acknowledge that a great customer experience is crucial to success, they don’t necessarily see marketing as the ones who should be in charge. In fact, marketing, for the most part, has been shut out of the strategic conversation at the Executive level.
This growing divide between CMOs and the C-suite – the furious pace of technological change – the rapid rise of generative AI – the complexity of managing customer interactions across a myriad of channels – the criticalness of delivering memorable experiences – these and many other stress points are forcing marketers to rethink what they do and why. How can marketing find common ground with Finance? How can they spike company growth? How they can they play the long game at the same time as generating quick wins? How can they avoid spreading their budget dollars too thinly across all of the available media options? How can they build a leaner marketing technology stack that makes everything easier? For that matter, where does AI fit into the picture exactly?
These challenges, and many more, haunt today’s marketer. The only solution is to transform marketing: make it more relevant, more strategic, more impactful. Scrap the orthodoxies. Empower marketing to become agents of change rather than foot soldiers. Teach marketers to speak the language of the boardroom. All of that falls within the mandate of Brent Chaters at Accenture: to drive transformational change in marketing organizations that recognize the importance of rapid adaptation in times of uncertainty. Brent got his start in digital marketing, became a renowned expert in search marketing and today leads a team that helps CMOs reenergize their operations.
I started by asking Brent how he made the leap from an English degree at McMaster to launching a digital career during the formative years of the Internet.
Brent Chaters (BC):: I went to Mac with the plan of either going into journalism or medicine. That was the original plan. And Mac was ideal because you didn’t have to have a science degree to go into it, so it made sense. And then before that, the high school I went to had a graphic arts program, so I was always, like, Photoshop, Illustrator, like, very early days. And then my mom worked at HP and she was very heavily into technology. So, when she grew up, she actually was learning how to code on punch cards and, you know, very old school technology, but she was really dialed into what was happening and she was just like, “Hey, like, there’s this Internet thing, it’s kind of got a little bit of graphic design, you love technology.” And I was like, “That sounds interesting.”
So, I made a pivot in university and did my postgrad after, but yeah, there was no real planning. Like, 2000 was the Wild West for the Iternet, right? Like, there was no rules and nobody knew what it was gonna be. And so, went out and explored it and learned a little bit of coding. Like, I was able to take some of my graphic design background, lace it in with my English major degree. And so kind of it just brought, you know, a little bit of, like, left brain, right brain altogether.
Stephen Shaw (SS):: Do you sort of wipe your brow now and say, “Phew, I could have gone the journalism route and possibly be out of work by now?”