Marketing Has Lost Control - Marie Bahl

0:00Marie Bahl:Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Marie Ball, Chief Marketing Officer at UpTempo. A few weeks ago, Marie published an article called Martech Built Empires, Now It Needs Bridges. More recently, she shared a manifesto with me that expanded on many of those ideas.

0:43Marie Bahl:And what struck me wasn't really the technology discussion, it was a much bigger idea. See, Marie argues that marketers have spent years becoming data janitors, spreadsheet detectives, and professional explainers of their own value. Instead of building brands, driving growth, and shaping business strategy, too many marketing teams are trapped by trying to prove they deserve a seat at the table. She also believes that AI won't fix that problem. In fact, if we don't address the underlying issues first, AI may simply help us fail faster. Today we're going to talk about why marketing finds itself in that position, what leaders are getting wrong about AI, and what it'll take for marketing to reclaim its role as a true growth engine.

1:22Marie Bahl:Marie, it's so good to see you again. Hey Steve, how are you? I am excellent. Thanks for having me. Pleasure's all mine. Buckle up, people. I'm just telling you right now, buckle up. Yeah, I feel slightly passionate about this subject. Just slightly. Just slightly. Just slightly. So if you have a seatbelt, strap it in. Okay, here we go. I just want to start at the top. What inspired both the article and the manifesto? So I've been in marketing for 30 years now. Getting old, Steve. Here it goes. But, you know, we are critical to the business and yet have been relegated to cost center kids table at the corporate table, in the corporate room is kind of the way I reference it in the article that I wrote.

2:03And it's a frustrating experience. And I think there's a bunch of reasons why that happened. First of all, marketing was always seen as a cost center. And second, I think a lot of the C-suite doesn't really understand what it is that we do. So this language that keeps going around, do more with less, deploy AI, right? My question is, why don't you tell me what I do before I do more with less, right? Most of the C-suite can't really articulate effectively, nor do they understand the complexity of what we manage. Everything from agencies to performance marketing to billboards and television ads and media buys, et cetera.

2:40And every one of those metrics comes to us in a different method, manner, and has a different proxy indicator to explain itself. And so when we end up trying to explain the value of our effort and really translate into the only language that matters, which is finance and return on investment specifically, we struggle. And that struggle has become a credibility issue for people in market.

3:06Marie Bahl:So, OK, how did I know this is a very open ended question, but how did we get here? So I almost since it's almost the part I want to start apologizing. I've been in enterprise software for a really long time. And as a technologist, we actually solved this problem for the rest of the enterprise decades ago. I mean, literally mid-90s, early 2000s. Manufacturing isn't running around trying to figure out where their data is. Finance is not running around trying to figure out where their data is. They have reconciled data sets that make sense. They have signals surfaced to them. We do not have signals surfaced to us.

3:41And I think there are two reasons why this happened. When everyone else crossed over in the 90s, marketing was still perceived as a cost center. You give them X percent of revenue, they spend their money, they get, you know, we assume that that's going to fill the pipeline and on we go, right? It was probably, I'd say, from maybe the early 2000s that people started to recognize, wait a minute, marketing is actually a growth engine. This is part of our business. This is actually the machine that fires up the business. And so they started to build solutions, but that was about the time that SaaS arrived.

4:15So software as a service, God love it, was only intended to be a mechanism for delivery, a better mechanism for delivery. So we weren't shrink-trapping software and mailing it in the, you know, on disks in the mail. We were updating it in the cloud that had just arrived. Except that the attributes of scale, security, reliability, availability, extensibility, became synonymous with enterprise value. and nothing could be further from the truth. You can scale whatever you want. And it's kind of the same thing with AI, as you said at the onset, right? It'll only amplify what's missing. So you can scale a point solution, but it's never going to give you the complete picture of your marketing effort.

4:56And so those two things, the seeing as a cost center and the move to SaaS created a dynamic where we were being served by roughly, I think the last time Chief Mark Tech counted them, It's 5 ,000 plus point solutions that are being offered to marketing. And marketers, we're marketers, right? We're brand experts. We're experts on penetrating markets and positioning ourselves as premier. We're not expert technologists, except for those of us who work in technology. And so, you know, they did their best. They're like, okay, great. I guess this is what we're being served. I guess this is the enterprise software that I'm supposed to be getting.

5:32and the likes of Adobe and Salesforce and all the other large names are serving them up. So obviously this is gonna be the end to end that I need, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's proxy indicator after proxy indicator after proxy indicator and data that's not reconciled one to the other.

5:48Marie Bahl:What's the biggest lie the Martech industry has told CMOs over the past decade? Will will be your single source of truth. I don't know how many single sources of truth are out there, but they're all lying, right? I mean, listen, you know, when you're, be critical, and this is one of the recommendations I give to marketers all the time. Adobe is great for design. Stop looking at them to reconcile your data on the back end. They're not data experts, right? As soon as Salesforce figures out CRM, let me know because they still have it, right? It's the biggest piece of software in the world that no one can use effectively.

6:24There's a$4 billion, anytime a$4 billion industry springs up around your software, it may be the software. So, you know, a lot of these players, right? And these are players with a lot of longevity that should know at this stage how to serve marketing. But back to the thing I said at the very beginning, do designers really know the end-to-end of marketing? Probably not. They know their function pretty well. Do sales teams know what we do? We already know the answer to that. They don't. So, you know, this is really up to marketers to create a platform for marketers. We know what we do. Demand something that meets that requirement.

7:02Marie Bahl:So if that's the lie, then the next question, of course, is where's the truth? What's the truth? The truth is that every enterprise class, and I mean an enterprise class software system built for functional excellence, has three components. It has always had three components. It will always have three components. They may look different depending upon the time period we're in and the architecture of that framework. But it's an underlying infrastructure first that reconciles disparate and discrete data sets. So not every data set in the world, but the data sets that matter to you. Specifically for us, it's budget, plan, execution, and performance.

7:43four data streams that really matter when we're when we're trying to figure out did the plan that we put in place actually work so those four data streams reconciled one to the other so taking in all of the execution that you've got and making sure that that data set data sets reconciled the next layer is analytics not mmm and attribution over in left field that you tap once a quarter to kind of give you credibility when you have to go ask for budget again but an actual analytics backbone that's running on top of that information architecture that is then informing the third and final layer, which is the application layer, and giving those applications the insights that they need based on underlying data sets that give you a signal.

8:28So not just here's some data, isn't it interesting, go see what you want to do with it. But hey, five data sets are showing that a signal, showing a signal that your campaign's off, the segment you're targeting isn't working, The campaign that you chose is ineffective. But guess what? Something else is overperforming over here. You could reallocate that budget and move it and be more effective. And the only way we can do that is something that's in real time. And by the way, that's the backbone of Agentic. Once that's in place, sure, you can start building agents that make you more effective in there.

9:03But if you are, there's a lot of boards that have kind of fallen in love with, you know, deploy Snowflake and chat GPT and you're going to, you know, it's going to solve world hunger. You know, if you're buying into that, you're diving into the deep end of the pool and there's no water. So good luck with it. You need that information architecture and that agenda can help.

9:22Marie Bahl:So we've established where we are today, right? Give me a percentage, what marketers themselves share responsibility for where we are. I mean, it's a difficult one. I actually answered this question last week at Gartner, and we are partially responsible. I think for, we're a service organization first and foremost, and I think we come from that perspective. We're here to serve. And therefore, every criticism, every critique, every you should buy a Super Bowl ad, you know, every recommendation that comes out of left field, we feel beholden to have a service-like mind when we respond. It's time for us really to stand up and say, you know, hold up, you want us to do more with less, you want us to deploy AI, you want us to capture more of the market, you want us to move faster, then you're going to have to give us the infrastructure that everyone else has had for going on three decades.

10:16And you're going to have to figure out exactly how you want to leg your way into that. Because let me tell you the other part of this. In the 90s, right, when you were crossing over into this new world of enterprise software, you could call a buying group together and say, oh, we're going to take two years to deploy this amazing software. We're going to take everything offline. We can't do that now. There's no opportunity for us to do that. So you have to have entry points. You need to start in one of four places. And then they are aligned with the four data sets that I just cited. You can align your finance.

10:53You can align your budgets with the actual back end of your finance. You can align your plans with ERP systems and CRM. You can align your, you can integrate all of your execution elements into one data set so that you can have those translated together. So you just have to start legging your way into it. And there are benefits along the way that kind of get you closer to where you need to be.

11:17Marie Bahl:One of the many bold things you say that I love is that AI won't solve marketing's data problems. Why not? For all the reasons I just said, right? AI was not designed to understand how to go to market. It was actually, and it doesn't yet even more than a teenage boy, potentially early college, code. It's been training on that for a really long time. All you have to do is open Twitter or any other social media and find out where it's lacking. And you can also see where the big boys have been investing a ton of money in AI and are now pulling back. Uber is a great example, right? They spent, what was it?

11:58A quarter of their AI budget in the first three months and the CFO said, whoa, right? So it's not there yet. It will get there, right? We will have fully agentic solutions here. And by the way, pointing AI at marketing content is not where we want it, okay? I'm a writer, you're a writer, my daughter's an animator. Creativity and strategy, those are our core tenants. Those are the values, the human value that we bring to this effort. Why are we allowing AI to be pointed at that? And honestly, it's not our choice. We're just like, okay, well, we'll, you know, start creating more content. And so we seeded the MDash already.

12:41I'm upset about the MDash, right? Oh my. I've been using MDash for 30 years and now all of a sudden it's an AI tell. Thank you.

12:47Marie Bahl:Yes. Right? I mean, let's stop seeding the things that we do valuably and let's point it where it's valuable, at the data. But the only way to point it at the data is to get that reconciled. Oh, my God. You just hit a nerve. I won't get down this rabbit hole too far, but I've had so many people. Steve, I can tell you're writing a – I'm like, I'm not. How do you – why do you think that? Because I see MDashes. So what? Right? I'm telling you, I'm making a shirt. It says, first they came for the MDash. I said go back and read any of my Forbes articles. MDash. MDash everywhere. I love it. I mean, if they come for the Oxford comma, I might not be too upset, but whatever.

13:22Marie Bahl:No, I won't die on that hill, but I will die on the end. I'm telling you, it's destructive, right? And so, you know, I think, again, we come from this place, I can now say this being 30 years into it, where the service organization mentality is something we can maintain and need to maintain, but we equally need to just kind of stand up and say, wait a minute, right? I teach a class. I teach a class, Steve. I don't know if I share this with you. At CU, I teach the entrepreneurial capstone class at CU to seniors. And I brought in a VP of sales who will be unnamed from a large multi-billion dollar tech company who put up the funnel from marketing, from awareness, marketing and sales, from awareness to purchase and said to these students, the great thing about being in sales is that we are the only revenue drivers of the business.

14:15And as she went on three slides, it took me three slides to recover from that statement and pull her back and say, it's really interesting because I kind of feel like speaking in football terms, we kind of own from the one to the 80 yard line and you guys fumble half the time going into the end zone. So, you know, we've got to start reclaiming the work that we do. There was another article, I think I shared this with you before, where they called the CFO the new performance leader. So they would be able to take over marketing. And I said to a group of CMOs, I said, I say we do it. I mean, I say we do it.

14:53Let's take a year and let them run marketing. We can take finance, right? It's just numbers. How hard can it be? Good luck with that. Yep. You know, and so I think we need to get a little bravado going here. Thank you.

15:06Marie Bahl:Yeah. A little. I always say, if you think about it this way, marketing is the only role in a given company where everybody, and I mean everybody, and their sister and their brother and their mailman all think they know marketing because they are all marketed to. That's right. Oh, no one goes into a CFO and goes, I can balance the books because I balance my checkbook. No one goes into a CFO and says, I got my new iPhone. I know. Marketing is the only. Think about it. The only department. Right? And you asked me earlier, that's the answer to the question. What are we responsible for? We're responsible for not standing up for our function.

15:43And also, we've done a lot of finger pointing internally, right? Every decade, we're in love with some part of marketing, and then that becomes the end all be all. Back in the 90s, that we can attest to, Steve, because you and I are still alive and sitting here, it was a press release every other minute, right? That was the answer to everything. We're going to issue a press release every five seconds, and it's going to be great. And then we got performance marketing and all of a sudden the first metrics showed up and, you know, we're all hung our hat on that. And anybody who's an actual marketer knows that's what each of those is a fraction of the effort.

16:18And yet, did we stand up and say, don't value that as the whole? It's only a part. We just kind of went, whatever. It makes them happy. You know, we didn't fight back.

16:28Marie Bahl:I'm having flashbacks of, you know, all those decades and it's decades because we've been in this long enough where marketing goes, no, now we're going to start the relationship marketing era. Now we're going to do that, right? Yes. Influencer marketing era, you know. All that does, and I'm kind of having an epiphany here right now in real time, but all that does is just confuse the rest of the C-suite. It's marketing. Stop fucking. Stop doing it. And, okay, I said this to you before too, like we are brand experts and somehow we are brand experts and somehow an entire financial portion of our budget is called non-working spend.

17:14How in the world and who did that? Whoever, we're going to find them. Whoever did that, like if I'm a CFO, we let it happen, right? We let design, PR, all the things we value get put into a category that was called non-working. I mean, I don't know if there's any greater insanity. We never fought back. And so we've got to coalesce around one another and say every aspect of this. There is no function that is more diverse than marketing is. We've got creatives, we've got writers, we've got technologists, we've got data scientists, we've got analysts. Every one of those people works in marketing.

18:01And yet somehow we have this fragmented organization. And sometimes, by the way, analytics doesn't maybe even live in our organization. It can be live over in left field, right?

18:11Marie Bahl:Exactly. So we've got to coalesce. And CMOs, if you guys have not figured out that you need an information architecture and that you need your teams to be one whole entity that is fighting, that fight for each other, then you got to figure that out immediately. Or we're going to seed this highly complex function to lesser parts of the organization. And we're going to keep seeing, God help me if I see, but it's going to keep coming. These average tenure of a CMO is. Two years. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I always say this platform, and you know me, I'm bold, so I'm just going to say it's you.

18:53But it's going to separate the wheat from the chaff, okay? If you, if there are CMOs out there, whoever isn't to the top, without, with a lot of personality and a lot of, not a lot of substance. Great CMOs are actually very strategic, highly data-driven, wildly creative individuals. And, you know, that's not the vast majority of all the CMOs out there. There are a lot of them. And they need to start getting the credit for being that quality and that caliber. And that's how you should judge the value. And you should hold on to them with everything you've got. Right? It shouldn't be two years. You should hold on to those people with everything you've got.

19:31Marie Bahl:I don't like doing what I'm about to do what I'm going to. And that's the talk about the company that I'm building with my partners. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because they're former CMOs, right? Our advisory board is made up very strategically of CEOs, CIOs, CFOs. And the reason we did that is because otherwise it's just one CMO talking to another CMO. There has to be those mending, not mending, but opening lines. Bridges, the bridges. Yes. Build the bridges. That was the title of my last article. Listen, we want to be active members of the C-suite and we need to translate ourselves into the language that the rest of the C-suite speaks, right?

20:15Showing up with impressions and click-throughs when everybody else is talking about revenue and return on investment is not helping our cause. So we've got to start, we have to, you know, you don't show up to Italy speaking Russian. You have to speak the language of the team that you're with. You can, but you're going to end up exactly where we are right now.

20:40Marie Bahl:Exactly. You're going to be, you know, and keep it in the CMO terms. You'll be out of there in two years or three years. And there's no way to defend it without a common language. And the common language, like it or not, is one that's financial. It's not changing. Yeah, and to keep your analogy going, it's literally the loss in translation between the Italian and Russian and marketing and the rest of the C-suite. I mean, I speak four languages. My mom put me into a French school when I was in kindergarten, thank God. So I get to go to Cannes and actually speak French next, what is it, two weeks from now?

21:09You know, I watch because I'm a linguist and a writer and I love language and positioning. I watch people, even when I was traveling just this last month over in Japan and Vietnam, you can see how things get lost even when somebody is intentionally trying to translate it effectively. Language, you know, we are more than anything else storytellers, right? No matter how we tell that story, we're storytellers. And the story that we're trying to tell at the board level or in the C-suite is a financial one. Stop trying to talk about it in design or performance metric terms. Talk about it in the terms that they speak there, and that's finance.

21:51And that requires a translation. And that's what this information architecture does. It translates all of the programs into one language that then interpret back into a budget language that everyone can understand. And then you can defend your position. You can mic drop in the boardroom ROI and walk out with your job secured for the next 10 years.

22:13Marie Bahl:There's a lot of other topics I want to talk to you about, and we're definitely going to have a part two, but I want to jump ahead to one thing that I want to get your thoughts on in this part one, if you will. So CMO is listening today and they're hearing you're talking and they read your article. What's the first thing you think they should evaluate or look at inside the organization? We spend somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of our budget on functions and activities that are designed to prove the rest of our effort. Marketing ops, spreadsheets galore, analytics that sit outside of our function.