A CDO Playbook for Driving Marketing Impact
The Chief Data Officer is a relatively recent addition to the classic C-suite roles. C-level’s in larger organizations are focused on enterprise-level strategy and asset management. The presence of the CDO among that cohort represents the growing realization that “Data” has become a true strategic asset that requires highly specialized management and dedicated resources.
Central to the CDO value proposition are the specialized skills and resources to administer data— and effectively manage data sources, transformation, usage, storage, etc. In addition, the CDO is responsible for activating the data they manage on behalf of the various functional areas of the organization. This activation work comes in the form of easier access to higher quality data as input to (broadly) improving decision making, leading to revenue generation and lower costs. By making the data work as hard as possible on the most strategic opportunities, the CDO can maximize and optimize the business impact of the organizations’ data assets.
Why Prioritize Marketing?
When the CDO is focused on activating data to drive revenue, the single best path to that goal leads directly to the Marketing function and a natural partnership with the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
The CMO and the marketing organization are laser focused on generating revenue, and often are spending huge budgets to do so. The CMO knows there is an opportunity to increase revenue through better decision making, and better decision making is dependent on better data (Columbus, L; Venturebeat.com). The overall business rationale for prioritizing the CMO and the marketing organization is compelling when large volumes of data, heavy analytics and complex data handling are foundational to revenue generation. The CDO has expertise and resources to manage complex data, which can serve as an accelerator to the CMO’s financial objectives.
Thus, the CDO and CMO have joint interests in optimizing data and decision making to drive revenue. This sets up a shared objectives scenario, ideally a partnership, where the CMO gains additional resources to better operate their complex data environment, and the CDO is more directly aligned with revenue generation.
An observation specifically for CMO’s and marketing leaders:
The level of skills and resources that a marketing organization can direct against “data” is obviously limited. There has been and will continue to be huge growth in volume, sources, and complexity of marketing data. Customer data in particular has been an ongoing management challenge due to its various structures and rate of accuracy decay. Plus, there are sophisticated marketing analytics applications, such as real-time predictive engines (and more) that need to ingest high-quality data to yield important customer-level decision making. This scenario resembles the relationship between the CMO and the CTO (or CIO), in terms of providing services to operate MarTech systems such as CRM and Email platforms (EY.com; Baylis, J; Moore, B). If it is not already happening, these are now the business circumstances to engage and partner with the CDO to optimizing marketing data, and in turn directly improve marketing decision making.
The CMO and Their Operating Environment
It is very helpful to have a deeper understanding of the CMO’s operating environment in order to understand how the CDO and their data value proposition benefits marketing.
The primary responsibility of the CMO is “demand generation.” That means creating a pool of potential customers, with needs that can be fulfilled by the organizations’ products or services, and who have the ability to actually make a purchase. Because it takes time to build the pool of prospects with these qualifications, marketing is usually focused on future sales revenue months or quarters out. There are exceptions by product and industry but marketing is usually not tasked with very short-term revenue.
