So What? Review of the September 2023 CMO Survey

Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I am Katie joined by John. Chris is on the road this week.

Hello. Yes, Chris is taking the train to DC and trying not to be sick, basically. That's his. John, the pushing the buttons, being the button pusher stresses me out. Like because there's like just enough of a delay between hitting the go live and it actually going live.

Ay, yeah, yeah. That's it. That's every marketer's thing. That's it's always the click that button that like makes the stuff happen that you sweat, you know. Oh my goodness.

Well, uh, so today, John, you and I are going to be talking about the latest edition of the CMO survey. So the CMO survey comes out twice a year, I believe February and uh September. So we're gonna be looking at the fall 2023, which just launched in September. Um and we're just gonna be reviewing it because one of the things so the CMO survey is a really great tool for getting a like general understanding of what's going on with the marketing industry. But what it doesn't do is do like a full narrative and tie all the different data points together.

Um so that's something that John, you and I want to try to do today. So we're gonna be looking at this survey as a whole, and then we'll also be sort of like piecing together the data points into a narrative that makes sense for us, but also makes sense for um general marketers. So let me pull it up. So if you're not familiar, you can actually just search the CMO survey and you'll see past editions. There's no form to fill out.

It's basically just a PDF and it comes out, like I said, twice a year. And the uh, you know, they have their methodology. Um it started in 2008. I didn't realize it had been going on for that long. That's pretty impressive yeah Duke and Deloitte and then having American Marketing Association the three of those you know it's been a a stalwart for many years and yeah it makes it a fun report um so there's the contents and then the methodology so I did want to just sort of point this out you know as we're getting into it so this is wow the 31st edition um it goes out twice a year they sort of say when the questions were asked how they were responded to and what I find really interesting and this is something I just want to make note of is that we're looking at a sample of 316 respondents which by no means is representative of every single opinion so as great as this report is you also need to sort of take it with a grain of salt to know that it may not represent the views that are going on in your particular industry or your company but it's a good way to just sort of gauge you know the general overall opinions.

Yeah there's a number of of things to dig into that really so you know like you said 316 responded they have a library of just over 3000 CMOs. So even the total universe is not that huge. So at 10% we're at least getting a chunk of it the other thing that's interesting is only 12% of the respondents are companies under 10 million. So these are all large organizations and when you talk about huge bureaucracies so far as um only 40 per 40% of them do no online sales whatsoever. So, you know, almost half of this group are petroleum companies, pharmaceutical companies, you know, big giant places.

Um, the only other weird stat that's not here up front that's kind of buried in the end that I found really interesting is that the senior marketing leaders in this study have 5.2 years experience, which is really crazy because we know that from other research we've seen, when you just look at all CMOs across the board, they only have 18 months experience. Like CMOs tends to be a revolving door. So the fact that you've got, you know, 300 in huge companies and they have a, you know, odds are they're gonna last three to five times longer than the average CMO, uh, at least, you know, we've got a few things that give us some reasons to trust this more than just a random sample of 300. Yeah, no, I think that that's a really good point. I was gonna call that out as well.

But it's also interesting because the flip side of that is what I thought I learned, and I've been unlearning uh what I thought I learned early on in my career, is that you couldn't consider yourself senior in a role until you've been in it for at least a decade. And that was it's a very old school way of thinking. But, you know, when you and I started working, John, that was the way that it was. Like the senior team had been sitting in those seats for, you know, 10, 15, sometimes 20 years, which you could argue makes for a very stale vision and strategy for a company when you have people who've been doing it for so long. The other side of that is when you have people who've been sitting in that seat for so long, they know it in and out.

And so there's definitely some pros and cons to leaders sitting in the role for that long. But then also when you have someone who's only been there 18 months, which to your point is uh the gen is now sort of like the accepted tenure of a CMO, which is ridiculous. Um, you know, it takes 18 months just to really sort of understand the culture and inner workings of a company. So by the time you get it, you move on. Yeah.

And so much of that is it's just tied to, you know, does the organization do they live and die by the quarter or not? Because you know that 18 months, that's three quarters, right? If somebody gets three quarters and they can't move anything, then they get the axe. So those kinds of organizations, yeah, are just not where they want to go. Um, you know, another thing with this too that you wouldn't get from just viewing a single survey, but we actually did some research on it in previous rounds, is this um audience is relentlessly biased toward optimism.

When you look at them, anytime they're talking about their budget going forward, they're always thinking it's gonna increase. And when you think about it, it's because they do it twice a year, it's always if they're in a bad cycle, well, they think, okay, this is gonna end in the next three and I'm gonna get more money. And if they're in a good cycle, they're like, well, things are good, I'm gonna get more money. So there's never a time where they're like, oh yeah, we're our budgets are gonna be cut 10% next quarter. So there are some things you have to keep in mind as far as how they talk about things are going and their rosy take on the world because they do tend to have quite a bias.

Well, and it's I like that you brought that up because that was one of my first gut reactions to this report in general, is the overall setup of the report does not reflect the actual data that is then reported slide by slide by slide. So they're saying marketer optimism rebounds as recession fears abate. And then all of the rest of the slides are around all of the issues and the budget cuts and what they're not doing. And sure, they're thinking they might be spending more in social media, but it's the first budget that they cut. And so it's very interesting to me that this is one of the first questions.

Like, I'm optimistic, but it doesn't reflect my reality of what's actually happening. Yeah, yeah. No, that that's par for the course for these guys. They're always uh everything is a little brighter sunshine six months down the road. Um, you know, and so again, sort of that optimism.

Um, and so this report is broken out into sections, and that was something we kind of skipped over, but they do have a table of contents. Um, so this so every time they do this report, they have their base set of questions, but then they tend to do a little bit of a focus on different things. And so one of the things to keep in mind with uh using the CMO survey or other data sets is it may not be one to one every single time it comes out, and so while they're collecting the data, they may not be publishing the data in a report. So you can't say, well, six months ago it was this, so now it's this because the data does tend to change from report to report. That's actually um as someone who cut their teeth on data analysis in clinical trials.

That is like my number one criticism of any data set is you can't keep changing the survey questions and then say, and this is what it was last time. Like it's not a one-to-one, it's that's not good data quality. You can't say, okay, now I know exactly what happened. And so, but that's just me. I personally am very like strict about those things, um, even down to like, well, last month we looked at it from the first to the 30th.

This month we looked at it from the 31st to the 28th. So that's the comparison. I'm like, it's not, because it's not the exact same down to the second. So I tend to be very critical of those kinds of things. But it's also, you know, again, use this as a guide, not as your strict decision-making tool.

Yeah, and I don't know the report intimately enough to know I from what I understand from what I remember, there were things where it was like, okay, this set gets asked in the fall and this set gets gets asked in the spring. So they do have annual on some of those questions. But yeah, I think it's a matter of they can just only ask so much stuff before it starts to impact the response rate. So they have some stuff that they only touch every other year and go. Right.

I agree. Um, so the first section is monitoring partners and competitors. Um so there's a lot of, you know, as companies right now are going through a lot of layoffs and re reorgs and restructures, they have to rely on channel partners and other agencies like Trust Insights to pick up the Slack rather than you know, rebuild their whole team or figure out what the heck it is they want to do. Um what's interesting is we're seeing that uh companies are less likely to use channel partners. They want to keep everything in-house, which you know, in some ways is good, but because you run the risk, if like the partner walks away, you lose all of that institutional knowledge.

But in some ways, you don't have the team to do the thing. Yeah, yeah. No, they're they're lacking that. And it was weird with this too, in that um, I noticed that brick and mortar budgets are bouncing back, but online is actually still falling. So that was kind of weird.

I don't understand if the um brick and mortar, you know, is a leading indicator, or is that just still COVID, you know, coming back for us? And then the fact that online is still kind of diving. We've seen that seen that with Martech taking some real hits this quarter. Um, so yeah, I don't know. That was just interesting.

And then was it slide 11 had a thing about B2B being the hardest hit, which I I get that kind of going hand in hand with the Martex stuff that we're seeing. But it's so I don't know. It my gut was that we're kind of maybe we're near the bottom and on the width a little bit back up, you know, things are kind of coming out of the hole a little bit. That's was the overall feel I got from that data. But, you know, again, like anything could turn around at any point.

Did you have a feel for what kind of, you know, did you think in general this was good or bad that we were heading deeper in the hole or that things were actually getting brighter? Oh I mean, uh honestly, my opinion of that changes minute by minute. Um, you know, I feel like, you know, ever all of my peers that I've talked to, everyone has struggled this year uh in the B2B sector to, you know, bring on new clients, retain clients, not have budgets cut. It's been really hard. I mean, we know for ourselves, you know, we were talking about uh just a couple weeks ago.

What is it gonna look like in 2024 to have more retainer clients, more projects, and people are just withholding their spending right now for a variety of reasons. Some of it is inflation, the cost of goods, and some of it is they just don't know what's gonna happen. And we'll sort of get into it when we get into the AI section. But there's a lot, a lot of it has to do with, you know, over the past 18 months, the advances with artificial intelligence really sort of changing the conversation of where we're putting our money. But so I guess I'm seeing for us specifically, I'm seeing it start to turn around a little bit as people are like the the initial shock of artificial intelligence and the initial shock of Google Analytics 4 is starting to wear off.

And people can say, okay, now I can start to understand really where I want to focus. Now I can bring in someone like Trust Insights to help me do that. I'm seeing a little bit of that, but it's still very slow, slower than I think we would like it to go. Yeah, I agree. I don't know.

It's crazy in that, you know, two weeks ago, I really thought it was ugly and gonna get uglier. And in the past week and a half, actually, things have we've seen more activity and more action. Um, you know, obviously data point of one, but it is just interesting to see that it's not all doom and gloom. I will say though, that John, we know that this is your trend is that you basically have to get to the edge of the cliff for things to turn around. And this has always sort of been uh, you know, you jokingly say, like that's your pattern.

Like as soon as I'm ready to jump off the cliff, things turn around. I know I did I should really be complaining more because every time I reach that point where it's like, okay, the whole village is dead, you know, then suddenly the next week things seem to turn around. So yeah, is that some kind of karma thing or what the deal with that is? But yeah, maybe and uh the other bias is uh Chris has been traveling like a madman. He we've seen demand for his keynotes and his seminars like never before, and that is all in line with AI.

Um, one interesting data point, too, that in a different report I saw this morning. This is the first month that chat GPT new accounts and usage was less than the previous month. So perhaps we have reached the end of the mad insanity and hype with that, and we're getting closer to the you know the actual you know usage and adapt people getting it into their daily work instead of it just being the next um Bitcoin blockchain NFT, you know, panic. I have a feeling you're right. I think coupled with that is that we're now at end of year planning and budgets are being scrutinized.

I mean, I was looking at our budget uh just this morning for the different pieces of software that we're paying for, and I'm like, well, wait a second. What are all these things on here that you know we're no longer using? Uh, you know, where can we cut costs? And one of the first places that people should be looking to cut costs is software versus people. Yeah, try and uh just keep the cash flow going long enough to get to the uh the other side here.

Mm-hmm. Um so speaking of, so we get into the marketing spending. Uh and it says despite optimism, marketing budget as a percentage of a company drop to 10% near pre-COVID levels. And that's where when I first started to look at this, I was like, okay, so great, people are optimistic, but they're still slashing marketing and sales budgets, like nobody's business. So we saw um in basically a year ago in September 2022, when we were looking at this, we saw, you know, a great increase in um, you know, the overall company budgets, but now we're starting to see it drop down again.

Um, and it hasn't been that low since uh August of 2021. So it's been two years. And so in two years, we've gone up and we've gone down again in terms of the actual spend. And it's really frustrating because we only get so much insight into why that's happening. Yeah, it's weird.

There's different levels with that, right? Like you've got the startups that are just trying to stay alive. They will cut advertising off anytime they start running short of cash flow. And then at the top end, you've got everybody that's again slave to the quarter. So they will cut and burn uh cash.

And that's weird. You get that's where we get that pulsing effect where it's like for one quarter they cut spending way back, and then you know, two quarters later they see the result of that. And so they have to let it go. So, yeah, you're only stuck with the companies in the middle or the apples of the world that realize when everybody else is cutting your budget, that is the best time to raise your advertising budget and to renegotiate all your ad deals. You know, you can totally buy up all kinds of inventory right now.

Uh unsolicited plug for the marketing over coffee podcast. If you're a Martech provider and you want to own December, you can get it, you know, dirt cheap compared to what people were paying middle of last year. Um the same with hiring too. You know, in a down cycle like this, everybody's laying people off. If you have a war chest and you're a big enough brand, this is the great time to go and scoop up talent.

You know, because now is when they're thinking that, yeah, maybe my third startup in a row, this was a bad idea. I might want to be able to get groceries next week. So you know, it's a chance for the big guys to jump in. But yeah, it's it's definitely if you're uh responsible for the ad campaigns, it's been a bleak, I don't know what, year and a half. Well, and it's you know, something that uh our advisor, Ginny Dietrich told us very, very early on when we started Trust Insights was to make sure that we are diversifying our offerings enough so that you know, during these down cycles, we have passive income and things that are still bringing in money that you know aren't requiring, you know, big price tags for people to feel like they're really um you know having to spend a lot.

And so that comes in the way of like, you know, speaking and courses and more educational things that help get people through this, you know, uh down period of well, we can't really spend that much right now, but we still have people that need to know what they're doing. We're trying to train up our teams, you know, because we can't afford an agency right now. Well, those people still need to know how to do it. So you can be the agency that helps train them, and it sort of gets you through that down period. Um, you know, and so you can start to see in the report, you know, how these vary by uh firm and industry.

So you have the employees, the revenues, the economic sector, and so on and so forth. Um and then when we see we see here, and this sort of aligns with, you know, the previous slide, marketing spending growth flat, predicted to rise over the next year. That goes back to that optimism, John. Um, you know, they don't know that that's for sure. Oh, yeah, no.

For these slides, the dotted lines always go up, right? When they're looking at their projection there, there's never a good time when they're going downwards. Um, which is great to think that like they want to spend more money, but I'll believe it when I see it. Right. Well, that's yeah, the reality can come crashing down on them at any moment.

Um and this is this was something that I found to be incredibly helpful in terms of our planning. And so if you're looking at this for the first time, um what this is telling you is the breakdown of those marketing budgets. Um 92% is direct expenses of marketing activities, and then you start to go down the list. So brand related expenses, social media, employees, which is interesting that social media uh they're spending more on social than they are on the actual employees, but you know, here we are. Uh marketing analytics.

Um actually surprised to see analytics in such a big bucket because that's something that historically has been very deprioritized um by CMOs in this particular survey. You have marketing technologies, which is all of your software market research, um mobile marketing, customer experience expenses, marketing training, so not huge but still exists, and then you have sales support tools. Um, those are like your Salesforce, your CRMs, and so on and so forth. So did any of this surprise you, John? Well, yeah, you hit the one that was the most interesting one that marketing analytics is actually higher than just Martech in general.

So we have reached that point where people want to analyze the data and get some actionable insight out of it as opposed to just adding yet another thing to automate email and ads and you know that kind of stuff. So I think that's the big one. Um the other one, and it's beefed up in the other slide too, is that brand related expenses, because that's actually way off this year when we look at how much is being spent on that. Again, that's just like kind of the classic big advertising and all the stuff that is in that bucket of stuff that gets cut first when things start to get ugly. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So brand building spending drops by 43% while customer experience spending drops by 19%. This was something this is something that Chris talks about a lot. Um, is that the use of artificial intelligence as it increases, everyone starts to get that sameness. So your differentiator is your brand and your customer experience.

And so if those are the two things that are getting cut first, then you're gonna you're basically letting go of your differentiators from your competitors. Like what makes you unique? Why would somebody buy from Trust Insights versus anyone else if you know we don't have a really strong brand or a really good customer experience? Yeah, and it's just, you know, this is just purely a budget thing. Like no CMO would want to give up on any of the stuff they're being told, hey, you gotta get X number of dollars out of your budget.

And so it's the easy place to cut. Mm-hmm. Um companies to spend more on new service introductions while budgets for new products. And so basically, I mean, what this tells me is that people are just scrambling to try to figure out what people want. You know, so artificial intelligence changed a lot of things.

It changed the way that people use and interact with certain products, certain technologies, certain experiences, and companies like, ah, crap, we didn't have a plan for that. Yeah, and I don't know, that was uh one interesting and weird part of the data that I couldn't find anything that seemed to explain with what's the story with why is it that they're spending so much more on services, you know, it I don't get I the only thing I can think of is when you're in these monster companies, you know, their budget just will still get cut and that they're not going to go looking for 40 million barrels of oil in, you know, in a new place. So they have to do some kind of services or something. You know, that that's the only thing I I can think of is that some of these product related expenses are just so massive that it it makes services look like they're gonna, in fact, actually when you run the numbers, if you were to have your budget completely cut back and your product expenses drop down, it would look like an increase in services when really you're just doing the same number of services, but you've gotten rid of a ton of right. So that's the problem when we get to two stats get too digested.

You know, we're looking at budget changes um on a percentage basis and then comparing that against uh unrelated percentage spend for a different product. So it gets a little wonky. Maybe we're being misled by the data here. But I but that's sort of the picking apart that excuse me, I was hoping that we could do because one of the things that this report doesn't do very well, in my opinion, is put all of those pieces together. Like it has a little bit of an introduction at the start of each section, but the sections themselves aren't necessarily tied together in that way.

And so, you know, do we start to compare introduction of new services to the use of artificial intelligence, to the budget cuts, to where people are spending, to the optimism? When you put all those pieces together, John, you're absolutely right. You can start to understand why some of this data looks the way that it does. Yeah, and it's, you know, they cast their net, and unfortunately, they don't, you know, have any idea what the picture is gonna be like until this stuff, you know, comes in and they compile it. So I'm sure they have the same bunch of questions.

And yeah, it's just a you know, we can't go back to them for another six months, so we're kind of stuck. Yeah. Uh and so this was something that you uh touched upon when we first started talking about budget cuts was that um advertising is one of the first things that people always cut. So it looks like it is rising a little bit, um, but it's not great. It's still in the negatives.

Yeah, right. Well, I don't know, where they anchored that to a pre-COVID number, I think was what the deal was. And yeah, it's you know, uh so the spring was horrible. Now it's only a little bit ugly. We're still not anywhere near happy.

But and again, too, you know, take a look at this whole graph here, right? Where from negative six percent to four percent. I mean, this is not a huge expanse. If we were to show a full hundred percent, this would be a nearly flat line. So uh, you know, without knowing the total amount of ad spend, we're a little bit stuck as to what what this really means.

And I think that's another really good point that you bring up is making sure that you're actually looking at the ranges because you can see the peaks and valleys on it and be like, oh, it's going up. But in the grand scheme of things, to your point, John, it's minuscule. Yeah, yeah. Again, this is the classic uh spinning your story based on how you want to adjust the axis. Um, and so now the big ticket item that everybody cares about right now is artificial intelligence.

Um, and so this is a newer section in this report. So they I think they did touch upon it in the February report, but now they obviously have uh more data to work with. And um, I don't know, I loved this slide because it just reconfirmed a lot of things that we've been talking about in terms of, you know, the experts that are out there and the companies that actually know what they're doing and what sets apart companies like Trust Insights. And so unsurprising, 60% of companies say that they've been using AI and marketing for less than a year. Makes sense.

It hasn't been mainstream available for longer than that. And then you start to get down to really small numbers of companies that have been using it for much, much longer. But to your point, it's not talking about agencies like Trust Insights, it's talking about these big pharmaceutical companies, construction, wholesale biotech, companies that have the resources to actually implement these technologies, not the smaller companies that are struggling to figure out where does it fit into my overall process. Yeah, right. It's a little bit misleading really because it's um you know you could kind of put a line in the sand with chat GPT and say, okay, so those are all the latest AI adopters in the the year or less you know you look over in the breakdown there of the earliest adopters two plus years, you've got mining and construction, you know, that's like the ultimate um huge dollar industry, right?

Like they have AI because they probably have five engineers, you know, in house that are doing this stuff and have been helping them to try and find gold and oil for decades. So this is nothing new to those people. But I wouldn't put that in the same bucket as the AI, you know, wave of insanity that we've seen in the past 12 months. Yeah, no, these are the companies that can afford IBM systems, you know, which are meant for companies like this. They're meant for these uh enterprise sized companies.

Um this also I loved this slide as well because it once again reconfirmed that artificial intelligence isn't being used the way that it could be used, that most companies are uh using it for content personalization and content creation and then sort of ignoring the rest of the things. But when we look at where budgets are being cut, you're cutting customer experience, you're cutting brand, but you're not replacing all of those things. You're just creating content. It's not a one-to-one substitution. And that was a huge thing that I sort of like that was my immediate.

I was like, oh, you're cutting these budgets, but artificial intelligence isn't the magic tool. It's not solving the problem. You're not like replacing those things. You're just generating more content that is the same as the content that everybody else is creating because they're using all the same AI tools. So that's not a great customer experience, but you cut that budget.

So how does that like it became that sort of cycle in my head of like I couldn't find the beginning or end of the conversation? Yeah, well, it's like you said, it's two independent things. One is the customer is just gonna get shortchanged, right? They're gonna get less services or lower quality product or have to pay more or whatever. And then you have this tsunami of crappy blog posts that is just you know, washing over the world, and that's a different thing and different problems.

Yeah, I mean I don't I mean, you can definitely talk to you, you've seen more of this stuff than I have as far as you know, organizations cranking out a bunch of stuff and then having to deal with the aftermath of like, okay, yeah, we thought this was gonna replace a bunch of people, but actually, no, we've come out with a bunch of crummy content and we're paying the price on SEO or engagement and or you know, a whole bunch of other things. It's just not the golden goose that it was sold to be. Yeah, I think one of the number one questions we get, regardless of what we're talking about is how is artificial intelligence going to impact my SEO program? And you know, obviously it's going to impact it if you're just using AI to create content because there's no, you know, there's no customization to it. So there's like, you know, content personalization.

Well, we don't really know what that means in this context. Um what is interesting though, so you have programmatic advertising and media buying. It that's not a new technology, though. Like AdWords has had that for a long time. StackAdapt has had that for a long time.

So what's interesting is that now it's just sort of becoming like, oh, now I'm using AI. Well, you've been using it for a long time, actually. Right. Yeah, that's another, you know, that's always been a problem. This kind of there's no hard and fast definition of like, okay, these things are AI AI and these aren't.

It's like anybody that's doing advanced data analysis and um, you know, like you said, automated ad bidding, right? You can argue that we've had that kind of AI for years. So yeah, that's nothing new. Um, predictive analytics is another one for customer insights. I remember I remember the exact meeting, and it was nine years ago.

I was sitting in a meeting when Chris and I worked at the old agency, and Chris introduced our ability as a team to create predictive analytics because Facebook had come out with you know, some sort of like uh code library. It was profit, so a Facebook profit. And myself and the whole rest of the team just sat there and we're like, wow, this is so cool and so powerful. And then it's evolved since then, but we've been doing it for almost a decade. And so to me, when I see things like this, I'm like, oh, we've had this for so long.

You know, and so this is the struggle for companies like ours who've been doing artificial intelligence for a long time. It's exciting to see people like see what we've been talking about and catching up, but at the same time, it's still lower on the list. People just want that, you know, just have it churn out a bunch of content. Yeah, lowest common denominator on that. It's uh you know unfortunate.

But yeah, hopefully more people will start to realize that they can do a lot more with it and take it further. Um yeah and so you know sort of digging deeper into that how people are using it again it goes into that sameness of if everybody's using chat GPT to create their blogs and their website content, where's your brand? You know, where's your customer experience? Those things aren't getting uh the attention that they need a lot of this I mean it comes down to just a whole bunch of different kinds of content. Yeah and it's like we it's interesting we're definitely seeing a surge in real estate like that totally makes sense you know the ability to take 50 properties and just do a general description of them that's something that's classic AI like that can be done and you can, you know, maybe it's not perfect but you can cover a lot of ground that up until now was some unfortunate realtor having to grind that job out.

So that there are huge opportunities to take advantage of this and you know we're starting to see it pop in certain verticals where it makes more sense. Yeah, I think real estate is a really good example of that. Um, yeah, there absolutely is a need for using artificial intelligence to create the content. The risk is when you get into uh just being a hundred percent reliant on it and no customization. And it's just like, oh no, it just AI will do it.

Yeah, yeah. You still want to have somebody proofing or have readers be able to give you put feedback positive or negative because otherwise you have no idea kind of what's going on there. Mm-hmm. Um interesting, and this so my you know, unscientific opinion of this particular data point is this is why companies are okay with cutting costs in sales and marketing and customer experience, because in the very short term, they're seeing increased sales productivity, probably because they're using AI to sort of clean up the database and like rearrange customer stuff. So they're able to like get a hold of their leads a little bit faster.

They're seeing increase in customer satisfaction. Um, you know, that's real estate because real estate, they're probably able to get the listings out there faster. Um, and they've lowered marketing overhead costs. Again, someone doesn't have to sit there and slog through every single new property and type up a one sheet for that. I personally feel like this is really short term.

I think that these improved sales productivity and increased customer satisfaction will be short lived if companies continue to cut those budgets and not have actual humans assisting the AI to do those things. Yeah, and it's I, you know, these numbers aren't massive. I mean, you have a couple of uh huge winners there, you know, communications and media, 14% improved sales productivity. So that's that's a sizable thing. But uh yeah, and I guess these are the kind of numbers that you would see long term too, you know, is that people will see uh less than 10% lift once everything is all accounted for as far as building it, having to go through testing, having to still have some people on the team to monitor it and clean it and fix it and update it.

It's not, you know, this is not gonna be like a plus 40% thing. Mm-hmm. I think, but I but I think that's the expectation. Yeah, it's at full hype. I think we can pretty much point to that right now.

We're on the Gartner hype cycle, we are at the peak of inflated expectations. You know, it we're just gonna there'll be more and more uh calling it out now as not the shiny object over the next six months as uh that's yeah, it doesn't just deliver a bag of gold to your door. Mm-hmm. Um, so next, so digital marketing and spending strategies. There was a stat that I wanted to get to, actually.

Um well, digital transformation is led by senior marketing leaders. To your point, John, marketing leaders haven't been sitting in their seats for that long. Um plus it's so who were the 30% that said that they were not on marketing? Like that number's high, and yet I would expect it to be higher in this audience. They're like, eh, I'm busy.

I can't, you know what, just let me know when it's done. Yeah, let the CEO tell me where I should go with that. Um marketers focus on LinkedIn, company blogs, Instagram, and Facebook with influencers. Not that's not surprising. Yeah, but I was interesting to see that like LinkedIn is definitely the king of the hill now, with with X being a you know raging dumpster fire and Facebook having kind of dried up.

Um LinkedIn just does it better, right? It's a subscription model, so you don't have as much of the spam and garbage. People are validated, it's always business discussion. Uh yeah, I would go long on LinkedIn over the next five years. It seems like they're just positioned to still kind of, you know, we've got threads coming up, which has been really interesting, but you know, LinkedIn is established and just they seem to have prepared themselves best for this future.

It is interesting because I remember LinkedIn was always the well, no, that's just your resume online. Right. And now it's really they've been able to turn themselves more into a you know water cooler community, um, where people go to like actually make connections because it wasn't that for a very long time. And I'm getting it really feels like they were just sort of in the background watching what was going on with Twitter and Facebook and all of these other others, and they're just like, nope, stay the course. We got this, we're just gonna keep marching forward.

And now people are like, oh, LinkedIn, that's the place to be. Yeah, it's a classic Microsoft play, right? Like let somebody else let Facebook burn in the fire and then walk in and take everything that's left. It's right on the and then them doing stuff like the acquisition of Linda, you know, adding training and education into that. I yeah, I don't know.

I mean, you could in theory see a future where they they know everything about employment, like who's where, how long they've been there. There's I only see that database getting more valuable as time goes on. I think you're right. I think that's a really good prediction. We'll uh we'll have to come back to that one and see how long it takes for that prediction to come true.

Or go up in flames. Uh influencers. This one I thought was interesting. So mobile spending predicted to increase after a recent drop. Um, I feel like so a company like Trust Insights, for example, we don't really have mobile to spend money on.

And so this is assuming that you have some sort of mobile experience, some sort of an app. Um, you know, so I just thought it was really interesting because there's not a lot of I shouldn't say that. There's a decent amount of companies that still don't have anything to do with mobile. Yeah, right. There's a lot of laggards in this space.

And again, let's look clearly at the they're expecting it to, you know, be as good as it has been in a year and 12 months, and in five years it's gonna be 5% above everything else ever. I don't it's it's you get into weird stuff with these big huge players. Like, you know, you think about like the McDonald's app or banks having better online apps. There are segments where you could handle a lot of the customer service and so many more parts of the business with a mobile app. So I think as the these laggards kind of catch up, or these companies that you know, until now considered themselves too big to need that kind of stuff to be able to dictate the terms.

Maybe things are changing on that. But yeah, I don't know. This this one for me was really kind of gray. I wasn't really sure what the heck was going on here. You know, there's nothing too clear about what's going on with this.

Mm-hmm. Um, this slide. I know you have opinions on this slide as well. Um, so this data point companies continue to struggle tracking the entire customer journey, not just the touch points. And so it, you know, it harkens back to where people are spending their money.

And so, yes, the budget for marketing analytics has increased, but clearly not enough. Yeah, and the unfortunately, you know, the part of it is we have kind of realized that we've left the golden age of marketing. Like we used to be able to track just about everything, and there's been so much going on with privacy and then the major players like Apple deciding to close the doors on a bunch of stuff that used to be tracked. So people are are fighting over this turf. And unfortunately, you know, marketing's at the losing end of that.

It's just more difficult to track everything that's going on. So um, yeah, I you know, I mean, worst case, we have to go back to the old days of like, okay, what was the marketing spend and what were sales? Like, you know, and look at that over time. Yeah, we can still do all kinds of regression analysis on that. And that's the stuff that we specialize in.

If you are not able to figure out where the traffic is coming from or what programs are working, that's right in the wheelhouse for us. We can help you get on track and at least figure out what's working. Because we see it over and over again with clients. They're like, Yeah, we thought these programs were all dogs, and so we killed all the spending, and then 16 months later, you know, the pipeline went to zero, and so we had to start spending again. And you don't want to get caught in that kind of trap because um if you're in the average 18-month tenure company, that's going to be the end of your your time there.

So hopefully you're somewhere that has a little longer term view so you get a chance to survive. Mm-hmm. So we're in the last few minutes of this uh episode, John. Is there what other data points did you want to cover before we wrap up? Yeah, there's a the whole final section was DEI.

They're talking about diversity inclusion and uh um I always screw this up. Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Um, and the big takeaway from all this was these were all nice to have programs. Like everybody wants to do this and wants to get here. But I don't know at one point, yeah, there you go, 79% decrease like that just falling off the floor.

Like it's basically, oh my God, you know, we are have to start laying off people and things are going south. So we can start to kill some of these programs to stay alive and hopefully they come back next quarter. But that that was really the the it was interesting that the spending has plunged like a rock and yet social issues are up. You know the companies are more companies are taking a stand on social issues. And yeah I should I should have dug in more because I imagine this is United States biased heavily if not entirely because of the political situation here.

I think has really driven um a lot of DEI stuff to become core for a lot of companies and it's really interesting to see the impacts that it has on sales in so many places it's been negative under a lot of situations. But yeah like that's an ugly slide there right that's horrible especially in America being non white and losing 10% of ground over last year. Like that's just um you know more of the same bad news as far as we're concerned so I don't know yeah what did you think about this stuff? Well it's well first of all it's very disappointing to see but it also goes back to who's responding to this survey it's enterprise size companies that um traditionally are slower to adapt. So you have healthcare, you have transportation, you have pharma, you have retail, uh, biotech, all of those.

Those tend those larger, and the larger the companies get, this goes back to like the tenure of the people sitting in the leadership seats tends to be longer, which means that things tend to change slower, which means that issues like this tend to go unaddressed because they're not seen as priorities because there's a bit of tunnel vision when you get to that leadership team of like, well, no, this is what we've been doing, this works. Like, you know, that doesn't apply to us. That could be someone else. And then you have, you know, these companies are so big and so siloed. So, like, on the one hand, they've been using artificial intelligence because they can afford the IBM systems, but on the other hand, their culture is stuck in 1950.

Yeah, yeah. Trying to dig their way out of uh decades of bad behavior. Mm-hmm. And so that's when we get into the marketing leadership. Um rate weather marketing feels increasing pressure from the following leaders to provide uh value.

So unsurprising, the CFO wants to know what's going on. That's the money person. They want to know what the heck they're spending on because they're the ones making the decision of what to cut. Um, so that is that was an unsurprising stat to me. The board, CEO, like those are pretty consistent.

They want to know what's going on, but they're not necessarily the ones that are, you know, holding the purse strings. Um senior marketing leaders are more likely to be asked by their CEO and or CFO to participate. Makes sense. They should probably have a seat at the table, let you know what's going on, how people are coming in. Um, and then which activities does senior marketing find challenging to implement, demonstrating the impact of marketing.

Again, that's sort of what we do. That's what we help you with. That's what a lot of our regression and attribution and marketing mixed modeling and all that sort of good stuff does. And if that's what you're struggling with, then let us help you figure that out because it shouldn't be this high. It shouldn't be 61.2% can't demonstrate the impact of their marketing on finance.

Yeah, again, this is just uh this is like the crying section of the report. This is why the CMO's life is so bad. You know, I I don't really understand why we care if you're getting punched by the board, the CMO or the CEO, but uh, you know, here we are. Um, you know, focusing data in analytics on the most important marketing problems. Again, using your data to make decisions.

We can help with that. But these are the things that, you know, if you're trying to figure out where to cut your budget, you should be stronger in these pieces so that you know where in your budget it's safe to cut. So for us, you know, we know that focusing heavily on social media, not a strong channel because we've done the analysis. We know that influencers, not a strong thing for us, so we don't even spend money on that. You know, that could change over time.

You have to redo the analysis, but man, it I mean, this slides like this just break my heart. Yeah, these are well, and there was a similar slide too that totally matches with you know, about 34% are actually doing testing. You know, there's a huge weath of organizations that don't test anything. Well, now they have to pay the price for that. You know, they have to find the budget money in the budget to cut, and they have no idea where to cut first.

Mm-hmm. Um, and then you have the section on the marketing organization itself. Um this is helpful, but I don't think that this section of uh at least for me, I didn't find this section to be all that helpful. I know that there is forever the debate over who should report to who should sales report to marketing or should marketing report to sales. I mean and so this could at least give you some uh semblance of what you could be doing.

And I agree that sales and marketing work together on an equal level equal level probably makes the most sense. But you're gonna have people who strongly disagree with that sentiment. Yeah it's you know it's interesting to see I don't I've always kind of gone with the traction research that said that like it doesn't really matter. It matters that everyone works together well. It doesn't really matter what badge they wear as far as titles you know that this is one of those things where you can't just throw people in a certain bucket and it's going to work out right like the people need to be able to work together and do the right thing.

It is interesting to see some of the um distribution of where employees are like are the larger orgs shifting more towards work from home and that kind of stuff or having more marketing out in the field. But yeah I I'm with you in that I you kind of don't see a lot of there's not a lot to glean from this info because it's like so okay so the multi-billion dollar companies yeah they have a hundred employees at the home office because they're making TV commercials and they're doing all this stuff that the you know under 100 million group is not doing so yeah I don't know you know what that really tells you but it is interesting just to kind of get a lay of the land. Mm-hmm and so the last couple of sections, so you have marketing jobs. Um, and so I mean, but we've seen this, you know, with our peers and you know, all the time is that you know, what percent has the size of your marketing organization grown or shrunk. And so you can see there was a huge growth period last year, and then it's just little itty bitty.

And we can see that by the number of people who've been laid off, people still looking for jobs, people who are picking up contract work, people starting their own thing for lack of any other jobs available. Um, you know, it's it falls in line with the budgets that are being cut as well, because there's a lot of pressure to save that money. Um, so you get into the you get into all the breakdown marketing hires, it's gone up, but not substantially. And so people are still struggling. Right, yeah.

But you know, and that is fall data that's not projected. So uh I think what you've got is massive churn, right? Like the total number of new jobs is increasing, but you've got a massive number of layoffs on top of that too. So it's uh yeah, it's ugly, but it's not as ugly as I thought it was gonna be, to be honest. Um, and the very last section before we wrap up is marketing performance.

Um it's interesting because this, if you look at it, it says rate your company's performance, but yet 61.2% struggle to understand what their marketing is doing. So this is just a general like gut feeling, like ah, I think it's doing okay. Um, you know, and so this bothers me a lot because we know from the previous analysis that people don't know what their marketing is doing. Yeah, they're using the force when they are coming up with this answer here. So yeah, it's very, very true.

And it one interesting thing is just the you know, they feel like the value of marketing is going down, but profits are actually going up because they've managed to find that money elsewhere. And so whether that's via just inflationary pricing, which is huge for this segment of food manufacturers, oil companies, you know, those kinds of people, um, or is it more efficient operations? But I don't, yeah, I don't know. My gut is that's looking like a real inflation number there. Well, you know, I mean, it sort of goes back to what you're saying.

Like, yeah, if you cut all of your marketing activities and you cut half the team, of course your profits are gonna go up. Yeah, right. Duh. Take those salaries off the table and start looking great. All right.

So what is our overall takeaway of this report, John? What do you think? The overall ultimate summary for me is like it's bad, but not you know, uh pure Armageddon. Like maybe we have and this is always the way it works with these economic indicators. Is somebody six months from now will go back and be like, oh yeah, that was the recession there because we were down for three quarters in a row and things were bad and hiring us off.

So yeah, I don't know. It we've made it to October 26. Usually the stock market explodes before now, you know, if it's gonna be a year from hell, and you know, of course, I'd probably just change state. I've got five days for things to go to hell, but uh, but there's a weekend in there in New York doesn't do anything over the weekend. So, but yeah, I think you know, the situation's grim, there's still opportunities, but yeah, this is not one of the sunny years, that's for sure.

I I would agree with that. I think that if you're looking to cut budgets, you know, take a look at the software that you're not using. Um, take a look at all the free trials that maybe you signed up for, and then they're like, oh, well, we're just gonna charge your credit card because you're looking at it, you're not paying attention in the background. Um, you know, talk to your teams. Like, you know, maybe, you know, maybe John is a content writer, but really he, you know, has a specialty background in SEO and you just haven't been utilizing those skill sets.

You know, so really do that deep dive with your team and do a skill set audit before you start just blindly making cuts. And if you're cutting brand, if you're cutting customer experience, then I would, you know, be so bold as to say you're already doing it wrong because those are your differentiators from your competitors. Yeah, that's solid advice. No, I would definitely go with that because it's and I for you know, kind of a plea for a different approaches at any org, if you have the option between doing a layoff or talking to the team and say, hey, do we, you know, cut out but bonuses or trim salaries for two quarters to keep everybody in on the team, those are the kind of places you want to be at. Those are the places over the long run where you look back on your career and you're glad to be there, as opposed to some place where you get kicked to the curb because it's Christmas and the CEO wants his 200 million dollar bonus.

Well, on that happy note, um, if you want help to determine the value of your marketing, you can reach us at trustinsights.ai slash contact. And if you want to join our free Slack community to join the conversation where people are asking and answering each other's questions every single day, I think we're up to over 3,000 members, maybe closer to four at this point. Um, we'd love to see you there. We'd love to see what you have going on with your marketing budgets, your annual planning. So you can join us there for free.

You'll find myself, John, and Chris. And until next time, uh, I think that's it for now. Have a good week. Thank you. Thanks for watching today.

Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.