We are at the forefront of a new movement for the CMO — where technology and software will revolutionize the work of marketers everywhere. For entrepreneurs this will make for a massive opportunity to innovate on a global scale and transform the function of marketing into a technical discipline for CMOs and their teams worldwide. And whether a brand is a traditional or digital one, it's clear that the tools and skill sets they will need are poised to evolve faster than ever before. So much so, that we expect CMO's overall spend on technology to increase from $12 billion to $120 billion in the next ten years.

Expending resources, guesstimating results, and hoping for the best?
That’s all in marketing's rear view mirror.

Technology is giving CMOs the tools they need to do more, and do it more effectively –whether they bring that capability in house or hire an agency to manage it. This includes buying media more programmatically, optimizing advertising creative, as well as placement and audience targeting —all while measuring results in near-real time. And companies like TubeMogul, AdRoll, and Localytics are helping to make it all happen.
Marketers should view these new platforms and activations not as campaign tactics but as elements of a constantly evolving strategy. Beyond delivering the most creative advertising, marketers will need to broadly apply this increasingly powerful, highly technical version of marketing in order to deliver the best business results possible.

Doug Milliken, VP of Global Brand Development at Clorox says it best,
"Marketing is a technical discipline now. We have to re-frame things we have been doing for 100 years."

This continues a trend, developed over the past few decades, where each successive wave of technology has disrupted a new line of business and catapulted its executives into an expanded role. In the 1980s, tech vendors like SAP, Oracle, and JD Edwards empowered CFOs to better manage buyouts, outsourcing, and increasingly global operations. In the 1990s, with the rise of the information age, Siebel, Scopus, and Vantiv helped sales VPs grow the topline. And in the 2000s, Citrix, VMware, and Symantec gave CIOs the ability to improve efficiency by consolidating and improving the core IT infrastructure. Now, it's time for the great disruption of marketing and the decade of the CMO.

A recent survey of CEOs by Gartner found three tech capabilities singled out as their most important near-term needs. Those crucial areas are: digital marketing, e-commerce, and customer experience management. Each regularly falls under the purview of the CMO and will require a breadth of new technologies in order to execute.

These new technologies will drive greater budgets from marketers that will ultimately impact the C-suite in powerful ways. CEOs already give the CMO and CIO relatively equal importance in driving digital initiatives—that will likely change by 2017, when Gartner estimates that CMOs will begin to spend more on technology than their CIO counterparts.
Throughout the years ahead, shifts in CEO priorities will drive a shift in power with CMOs becoming CeOs, Chief Experience Officers.

53% of CEOs believe their current CMO could one day replace them
-From a recent survey by Korn / Ferry

And those marketers who are able to adapt and thrive will become indispensable to the CEO, finding themselves on a path to becoming CEOs themselves. That's the shift in power that will drive the decade of the CMO and the MarTech revolution.

To learn more check out my new whitepaper, MarTech and the Decade of the CMO.