REQUIRED READING POST

MarTech is a key indicator of where marketers should be focusing this year, in the CMO Council’s new report, The Marketing Vitality Index. With the CMO Council’s annual assessment of leading Marketing Performance Indicators (MPIs), there is evidence that 2025 is a defining, milestone year ahead. Most notably:

• It is time for marketing to move from its perception as a cost center to that of a command center powered by business-centric, real-time data-driven decisioning
• Essential to this is active C-suite collaboration, marketing-inspired revenue and growth strategies, improved campaign impact and economics ("GenAI Inside"), as well as customer value delivery through helpful in-the-moment marketing interactions across all channels.
• Gen AI and data utilization technologies will enable significant marketing momentum and customer engagement moments to be tracked, attributed and measured for business value.
• Iterative strategic, creative and operational decisions will be data driven. These will be enriched by generative research and real-time market feedback from pervasive social media and search engine sensing.
• A unified and fully aligned marketing supply chain will become adaptive and responsive to customer purchasing influences and chat commerce opportunities across every channel and touch point.
• Migration to digital channels and automated marketing platforms will multiply exponentially for both brand equity and performance marketing reasons and results.
• A massive, mobile, user-connected world -- where billions of buyers share breadcrumbs of personal intelligence and purchase intent daily – is creating new levels of branded content innovation and interaction worldwide.
• The Creator Economy has achieved critical mass and significance with savvy marketers seeking to crowdsource cross-cultural and localized inspiration, content invention and outsourced efficiencies from consumers and professionals alike.
• Brand protection imperatives will team CMOs and functional leaders to assure brand value, trust, integrity and reputation; this will center on new strategies, tools and methods to mitigate and recover from costly brand hijacking, impersonation, product counterfeiting, and customer data breaches.
• Trade and tariff headwinds, along with geopolitical face-offs and regulatory changes, will force CMOs and C-suite peers into contingent planning mode to synchronize supply and demand chains and adapt to shifting country-of-origin perceptions.
• Revenue science platforms will gain traction and lift as chief growth officers examine all areas of monetization, retention, conversion, expansion, extension, and yield/ price optimization.
• Marketing investments and outcomes will be more productive, predictive, accountable and measurable with spend more surgical and certain to deliver ROI.

The CMO Council has curated indicator statistics from trusted third-party sources and centers of domain knowledge to inform an analysis on marketing vitality for each of the marketing categories. In addition, the CMO Council incorporates proprietary data from its qualitative and quantitative reports.

These indicators fall into five core marketing categories:

1. Marketing Mix + Spend
2. Organizational Dynamics
3. Market Outlook + Trends
4. Customer Affinity + Attachment
5. Technology Adoption + Execution

DOWNLOAD The Marketing Vitality Index

Making High-Tech MarTech Pay Off

CMO Council has driven much of the high-caliber conversation around MarTech, providing the industry with a rich repository of marketing intelligence around the subject, polling Chief Marketing Officers regularly on digital innovation across the various regions. Key research, webinars and reports have focused on the challenges, opportunities and growth with MarTech migration – both internally within organisations, and externally, with their customers and consumers.

In a series of reports and industry roundtables across Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America, CMO Council led the conversation around the intentions and projects of marketing leaders, with its report, ‘Sparking MarTech Migration + Digital Innovation’.

Two surveys that dealt with Making High-Tech MarTech Pay Off, looked at the future of MarTech and how much of it depends on CMO-CIO relationships. As high-tech companies emerged from the pandemic, it was clear that marketing and MarTech lay at the heart of recovery. To optimize MarTech investments, marketing needs to have a very effective relationship with IT that spans strategy, selection and management. Such a working relationship drives MarTech innovation, capability maturity and higher performance. Yet fewer than one out of five high-tech marketing organizations has a very effective relationship with IT.

In a study, codeveloped with KPMG, CMO Council covered critical aspects of the marketing-IT relationship inside high-tech companies; how they’re structured and governed; what types of MarTech capabilities and outcomes they effectuate; and how marketers can take this relationship to the next level.

Our findings were based on a survey of over 100 high-tech marketing leaders across companies in IT services, data management and processing, hardware, software, semi-conductors, cloud and security services. Additionally, a survey of over 200 companies across 12 industries, such as financial services, telecom, consumer products, media/ entertainment and retail, was conducted for comparison purposes. DOWNLOAD