These Marketing Experts Shared Tips on Process
ANA events bring together some of the smartest and most-talented marketers in the industry to share insights and best practices that help ANA members get the most out of their own marketing efforts.
Naturally, when ANA members and other top marketers get together, the potential for a great soundbite or two is very high. For this reason, we'll be collecting and sharing the top quotes from ANA events during each month throughout 2024.
Below, you can find the top quotes from ANA speakers for January:
"Sometimes we have a tendency to fixate on the technologies themselves. But with big tech partners, the technology is almost the easy part. It's almost always the human factors that hold us back from success."
— Greg Verdino, founder and principal consultant at CognitivePath
The technology your marketing team uses is only as good as the people operating it. That was the theme of Greg Verdino's presentation to the ANA's AI Forum Committee last month. So, while AI is a new, exciting tool that has the potential to take your marketing team's work to a new level of optimization, it is important to remember to also invest in your people. If they don't have the skills necessary to maximize your martech stack, all those technological investments will just be a giant waste of valuable budget.
"Marketers have to create the perfect conditions to harness amazing creative ideas and put the right resources behind the idea to motivate consumers and drive business."
— Andrew Kirk, executive director of marketing operations at CVS Health
Andrew Kirk says marketing's chief role is serving as the bridge between creative and finance. To do so, it's important for marketers to build strong relationships with both sides and work to better understand what makes each team tick. It's also important to align marketing objectives directly with overall business goals. For example, when investing in new martech, outline how the new tool or platform will directly contribute to business outcomes.
"The accessibility of things is sometimes halted by doing things the way we've always done them."
— Scot Crooker chief content officer at Tilt Creative + Production
When evaluating new technologies or refining relationships with stakeholders on the finance or creative side, marketers must be vigilant in not falling into the "this is how we've always done things" trap. As technologies evolve and societal standards change, marketers need to strive to be on the bleeding edge, while also ensuring that everything they do is in service to driving business growth.
"To achieve our goals, AT&T needed a marketing operations program to strengthen its foundation and strategically invest in new and different capabilities."
— Janna Ducich, SVP of marketing planning and operations at AT&T
Marketing operations or "MarOps" seem to be all the rage lately. At AT&T, MarOps took the form of a steward that oversaw integrated marketing planning, investment management, and vendor and agency management. In practice, the model looks like a strong way to build that bridge between finance and creative, like CVS's Andrew Kirk recommended above. Perhaps it's no wonder then that so many brands are pivoting in this direction. Will "MarOps" be the ANA's 2024 Marketing Word of the Year? Only time will tell.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Ryan Dinger is a director of editorial and content development at ANA.