EVENT

The CMO Council's esteemed Africa Advisory Board will reconvene at the Accenture offices on Tuesday afternoon, 4 November for a strategic discussion around key challenges, best practices, and new technologies. Conversation topics at this executive roundtable will include:

More CMO Syncro with the CIO

While CMOs and CIOs are viewed as endangered species by some consultants, they should be joined at the hip to map strategies that make technology pivotal to customer insight, experience and interaction, thus improving results, revenue and retention. Some smart CMOs, of course, are recruiting from their IT departments to staff up web, social, mobile, application management and data analytics functions. But the real priority should be a tighter CMO-CIO partnership to address data sprawl and bring more commitment and rigor to customer-centric practices across the enterprise. The two chiefs have an urgent need to collaborate as their fiefdoms are being somewhat eroded by new C-level executive appointments with a mandate to drive revenue, digital, innovation, customer experience, insight and relationships. These new "chiefs" are poaching territory that should be owned by both CMOs and CIOs. This session will discuss the urgency for greater CMO-CIO alignment, critical areas for strategic engagement, and best practices for the integration of marketing and IT teams.

Business Value Creation from Marketing Technology Integration

Chief marketers are challenged to improve the economics and value of random and disparate marketing cloud investments across multiple platforms and solution areas. Proliferating marketing technology applications, digital engagement channels and customer-driven interfaces are spawning vast volumes of data and insight, which need to be integrated and unified across diverse silos and ever-growing digital data stacks, without investing heavily in back-office data warehousing projects. Marketing groups are in need of consultation, guidance, and direction when it comes to helping them specify, implement, and adopt digital marketing technologies, strategies, practices, and solutions. They have to staff and resource digital marketing programs, integrate offline and online campaigns, as well as unify disparate marketing functions, data sources, and go-to-market processes. More importantly, they must be effective at making a business case to management on how digital marketing technology investment and migration will drive business performance, increase customer lifetime value and retention, and create more adept and adaptive organizations. How unified are your marketing technologies? Expect a robust discussion on this topic.