January 2010

I’m very excited to have been asked to write a weekly blog for MinnesotaBusiness.com. I will be focusing on positioning digital media as a key strategic priority for business leaders. Hopefully, we’ll debunk myths, contextualize jargon into real business terms, and help companies get in front of this beast. I look forward to engaging dialogue with business leaders! So check in starting February 2nd.

An entire generation of marketing leaders are stuck in a crazy professional vortex right now. They find themselves in positions of power, having climbed up the professional ladder by perfectly executing tightly run campaigns, developing mass market brand positions, and sticking to a tried and true media buying methodology. They have been extraordinary successful in their careers. So much so that they now find themselves in charge of marketing entirely — they’re the CMOs and VPs of Marketing.

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The marketplace is no longer defined by the movement of atoms. That was the 20th Century. We live in a world defined by the movement of bits and bytes. Anyone in the world of process engineering or finance — which I am not — knows that it’s the bits and bytes that tell you how to move the atoms around. Marketing seems to be that final frontier to undergo the full transformation, and I fully understand why it’s taken so long: marketing is the most human (emotional?) side of business. There’s always been this fear that the digital people are trying to replace the humans with computers and gadgets and whizbang web sites.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
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