Study reveals CMO priorities over the next five years

A new study exploring how businesses are approaching the challenges of a changing media landscape has revealed that marketers are focused on self-reliance and agility, as well changing the way they work with agencies and media measurement metrics.

The report, published this week by MediaSense, reveals how chief marketing officers site data analytics and insight, content development and ‘omni-channel’ planning as top priorities over the next five years.

The report’s authors suggest the priorities are a reflection of the “significant shift in marketing focus to customer centricity,” with marketers indicating the need for “much deeper and broader internal capabilities to manage customer relationships, and the corresponding data, more closely.”

Just over half of the 200 marketers surveyed (54%) said they expect to bring a number of functions previously outsourced to agencies, in-house by 2020.

The changes to organisational structures within client companies, and the desire to exert tighter control over certain capabilities, means that marketers’ requirements of agencies will change, the authors state.

58% of respondents agreed that the number of agencies they work with will likely decline over the next five years but there was “little consensus on the right agency model”.

While nine out of ten respondents are “comfortable” that media agencies will remain the go-to people for paid media, disintermediation is a “real issue” for these agencies, with 73% of marketers saying they will increasingly contract directly with media owners and technology companies by 2020.

The report goes on to suggest that creative agencies will face a different challenge. Many marketers say they feel creative agencies are “behind the curve”, particularly in relation to the creation of dynamic content.

When respondents were asked to rank their most important challenges over the next five years, there was strong agreement that measuring performance was the top priority, with 65% of marketers identifying the use of outcome-based KPIs to match media investment decisions more closely to business results as the number one priority.