NDA’s series, CMO Confidential: Adtech, profiles CMOs at leading adtech companies to discover what the CMO role means to them, why it’s needed and what industry trends they are harnessing to drive success. Next up is Matthew Duffy, Chief Marketing Officer, Pixability.
What does the CMO role mean to you?
As someone who works with CMO customers daily, I’ve seen that the role means something slightly different at each organization. That said, I think the most simplified definition is that the CMO is the person responsible for generating revenue for the organization through marketing activities.
Those activities usually include top of funnel initiatives in PR, social media, and thought leadership all the way down to bottom of the funnel conversion activities through advertising and website or ecommerce strategies. The most important piece however is to be the steward for the brand, maintaining the organisation’s voice and integrity across all touch points.
Why does an adtech company need a CMO role?
Adtech companies are often solving complex advertising problems that advertisers either didn’t know were a big problem or they did know they were a big problem but there were already many other companies trying to solve it.
Because of this, the adtech CMO has the difficult and important job of making sure brands and agencies see the value in investing in their specific tech solution because of its unique way of driving return on ad spend (ROAS).
How has the CMO evolved over the last 5 years?
The CMO role continues to move more and more towards being tied to revenue as digital marketing becomes measurable. This is a good thing and a bad thing.
It’s a good thing, because it forces every CMO to be able to connect how each initiative may impact revenue directly or indirectly. It’s a bad thing sometimes because I think many have lost faith in branding as a way to impact revenue, so it’s often tossed out in favor of performance-only marketing.
With such wide-ranging responsibilities, how do CMOs keep up with the speed of technological change and the change in customer behaviour it drives?
Most good CMOs keep up with technological change through constantly reading marketing publications and blogs and participating in as many CMO-networking organizations or advisory boards as they can. The real key however is to surround yourself with team members that each bring a level of tech expertise to the organisation.
What misconceptions of the CMO role come from the rest of the C-Suite – and how do you overcome them?
As I mentioned, I think there is an over-emphasis on the CMO being simply a generator of leads or conversions. Because of this, many companies, especially in B2B, hire performance marketers as CMOs. While this works well for certain companies, the best CMOs I’ve seen have a working knowledge of every piece of the marketing puzzle, while being most adept at building and inspiring a good team.
What technologies at your disposal are you most excited about at the moment in your role?
I’m going to give the cliche answer and say AI as we’re using it across our product, marketing and sales activities.
For marketing and sales, my favourite application has been through Gong which does an amazing job capturing information from prospect and client meetings, and distilling it into actionable, revenue-generating insights through Ai.
Who is your biggest personal inspiration in our industry and why?
I’m going to cheat a little bit and pick a brand.
I’ve always been impressed with Patagonia as an example of a brand the expresses its values in everything they do from their amazing product to their commitment to the environment. As a marketer, you want to build a brand that people want to work with not just because of what they do, and how they do it, but why they do it.
