About Birds and Hidden Lakes

Report: CMOs are not prepared to deliver marketing ROI »

IBM survey of 1,734 highlights a frankly disgusting lack of accountability in the marketing ‘industry’. Some highlights:

-56% are not prepared to be held accountable for marketing RoI (what the hell have you been doing for the last 60 years???)

- 44% do not view social media as a key engagement channel - a shocking 74% do not track the landscape. Fair enough - I mean, its not like your consumers matter to your business or brand perception at all, is it?

- Despite this, 80% still primarily use market research as a primary source of information - you know the kind, the ones that say to 25 people ‘I’ll give you £50 to tell me what you think of me’.

- 70% of the marketers surveyed said they feel incapable of analyzing and responding to the glut of data available about their consumers, yet only 28% want to increase their technical skills. Translated: 42% of CMOs do not understand how to deal with data but don’t want to do anything about it.

It seems to me that marketers everywhere are being found out (finally). Its no longer enough to hide behind TV audience figures and statistically insignificant market research data as measures of success. The world has become more open, collaborative and insightful, and this report suggests that (most) marketers are not willing and/or equipped to deal with it, and sooner or later they will be usurped by smarter, rational people who can prove the value of what they are doing.

I imagine that it will be sooner rather than later.

I played a lot of chess when I was growing up, and it’s similar to some elements of chess, where you can see some moves but you can’t see to the end of the game. Even a computer the size of the universe couldn’t actually analyze it. There’s, like, 10 to the 117th power possible games and something like 10 to the 80th atoms in the observable universe, so it’s off by something like 37 orders of magnitude. And chess is something much simpler than reality—it’s 32 pieces on an eight-by-eight board. Figuring out the complete future of a chess game is a problem more complicated than anything that can be solved in our universe, so figuring out this planet or just our society in the next 10 or 15 years is just not a solvable problem.

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—	Paypal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. His next venture is ‘start up countries’ - floating islands off the coast of San Francisco freed from international law.