The essential strategic partnership for 2023: Marketing and IT

Marketing is an art that relies on the science of customer data tracking and analysis. That requires a partnership between Marketing and IT teams, who agree they must assume more responsibility in contributing to the organization’s bottom line.

Lytics recently commissioned Sapio Research to survey 202 IT and Marketing decision makers in the U.S. and Canada. Each respondent worked in companies that employed a minimum of 500 people. The specific goal of the research was to focus on the dynamic between Marketing and IT departments.

In this article, we will highlight the findings of the Sapio Research report with a brief overview of the following topics:

• The demise of the third-party cookie and the role of owned data
• The heavy lifting of AI
• The growth of IT’s Marketing influence

1. Owned data is the new Marketer’s treasure

Web cookies became the foundation of a billion-dollar worldwide digital marketing industry. While ostensibly anonymous, cookie-based technology spearheaded personally-targeted ads and tracked users relentlessly as they retargeted consumers across multiple websites.

Along came consumer concerns and worldwide legislation specifically targeting online privacy. Third-party cookies are now blocked on most major web browsers, with Google committed to banning cookies by 2024. (Read all about the impact of the disappearance of cookie technology in our whitepaper, “Life after the third-party cookie”).

So, now Marketers must rely on first-party data from a variety of sources—their CRM, website, POS, mobile app, and e-commerce platform. The data is there, but it is segmented and housed in their data warehouse under the care and feeding by their IT team. In fact, the Sapio survey found that over 70% of the Marketers surveyed said that their IT teams control access to their data and that the Marketers rely on the IT teams for data modeling.

Not surprisingly, many Marketers are uncomfortable with relying on IT to scoop, serve, and analyze their data. In fact, about 50% of the Marketers plan to hire marketing data analytics experts within the next 12 months to rectify that reliance.

2. The role of artificial intelligence in Marketing is a point of disagreement.

Over 65% of the marketing and IT leaders plan to integrate AI into their Marketing process. However, many don’t have a clear agreement on what role AI will play in the future of Marketing.

Despite the myriad use cases for AI and the inroads it has made in marketing since 2018, more than a few Marketers and IT leaders surveyed remain hesitant in deciding the best use of AI:

• 65% of the Marketers surveyed agree that AI will do the majority of the drudgery work in targeting ads, but 17% believe that AI will do everything without human input.
• 47% agreed that AI will take care of a large portion of ad targeting “with little human input.” However, only 17% of the Marketers believe that humans will continue to have leading roles in customer segmentation in the future.

IT leaders and Marketers ranked the roles of marketing tasks that can best be done through AI as follows: (The first percentages shown are the combined IT and Marketers’ survey results. In parentheses are the individual results from IT and Marketers surveyed).

• Automation of marketing tasks: Overall 45% (39% IT vs. 50% Marketers)
• Increasing efficiency of money spent on advertising: 40% (42% vs. 39%)
• Eliminating mistakes in segmentation (assumptions/biases): 35% (30% vs. 41%)
• Delivering personalized ads to customers: 35% (43% vs. 28%)
• Informing messaging in marketing ads: 29% (24% vs. 35%)

The difference of opinion is this: 50% of marketing decision makers view automation of marketing as the main advantage of AI. IT decision makers believe ad personalization is the primary benefit of AI.

3. IT is exerting a growing influence on Marketing

Sapio found that 50% of Marketing leaders considered their relationship with the IT side of their operation to be “good.” However, other indicators were that Marketers would like to control more of the IT technology involved in their processes.

Here’s the disconnect:

• 37% of the IT leaders surveyed described their operation and services for marketing as a “well-oiled machine.” However, only 16% of marketers agreed with that observation.
• More troubling was that 30% of the marketers surveyed characterized their relationship with the IT crew as strained or abysmal. Only 10% of the IT leaders agreed with those harsh assessments.

What Marketers are doing—and as previously discussed in our first topic—is planning to recruit talent with data analytics expertise along with Marketing experience. Forty-six percent plan to recruit an applications architect, and 45% plan to hire a software engineer.

There is nearly unanimous agreement among Marketers that better alignment between IT and Marketing teams is what is needed for their customer-centric marketing. And most Marketers and IT leaders surveyed recognize that during the past two years, the tech team has been exerting increasing influence in marketing ROI. That growing influence brings with it the consensus that IT teams should be held accountable for marketing ROI — and that a strategic partnership between departments is crucial to organizations’ success.