The Marketing Seven

Ten years ago, you wouldn't find a CMO in most companies.

That individual has only recently escaped orbit around the COO.

As "the new kid on the block," the CMO often finds it hard to fit in and measure up to the C-suite's old-timers.

According to venture capitalist Tim Kopp, while CMOs are true mavericks, they all boil down to seven types—and no one type has all the skills needed to lead most brands today.

The seven types are:

The Thought Leader. This CMO can create a product category and evangelize for it. They're storytellers, speakers, and visionaries.

The Growth Hacker. This CMO "goes deep into Excel spreadsheets to drive bottom-up demand-gen programs," Kopp says. They often come from marketing ops or finance.

The Product Marketer. This CMO is fluent in tech-speak and adroit in pricing, packaging, messaging, and analyst relations.

The Brand Marketer. This CMO understands how to develop a brand's look and feel. They often come from B2C companies.

The Strategist. This CMO is "great at understanding where the company’s solution fits in the market, what key strategic moves to make, and how to approach important decisions." They're especially good at driving strategic partnerships.

The Culture Builder. This CMO knows how to engage employees in the mission of the business and rally teams to achieve departmental goals.

The All-Around Athlete. This CMO is the ideal type, "but good luck finding one," Kopp warns. They know enough to be dangerous in every area of marketing, but can only make things happen when they hire people who compensate for their weaknesses.

CEOs who want results from their CMOs must be careful to match company needs to the candidates' skills, and be willing to sacrifice some imperatives, Kopp says.

Getting Inside Attendees' Heads

B2B CMOs have struggled to measure events with the same precision they measure digital.

Mobile apps could change that.

Not only do they let exhibit marketers engage attendees and personalize events for them, many mobile apps can be used to track face-to-face engagement, and further nurture customers and prospects.

One example: Showcase XD.

This simple iPad app lets tradeshow attendees explore an exhibiting company's products—through videos, demos, photos, drawings, and other content—while visiting the company's booth.

Meantime, the app is gathering and sending the company "digital brain scans" of the attendee that reveal his or her actual interest in the products.

The company can use the analytics after the show to decide, among other things, what marketing automation score to assign the attendee.

One company isn't waiting for the show to end.

IBM uses mobile apps to track attendees' interests and harnesses Watson to make product and activity recommendations—such as downloading a trial code—on the spot, by comparing attendees' pre-show interests with the products they engage with at the exhibit.

While no one can guarantee a CMO ROI before an event, keeping tabs on attendees' interactions though a mobile app—and using the analytics to feed the company's marketing automation or CRM system—can produce real results.

Patriotism is the Refuge of Stooges

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.

― Carl Sagan

Hundreds of gun-toting "patriots" arrived this weekend at Gettysburg, to protect the national military park's Confederate monuments from desecration by leftists.

Although the leftists never materialized, blood was shed. One patriot accidentally shot himself in the foot.

The perfect metaphor, if there ever were one.

Patriotism is the refuge of stooges.

My plea to patriots this July 4th: read a freakin' history book (preferably not one published in Texas).

You might try Apostles of Disunion.

Illustrating the "real history" of the Civil War, the book recounts how a group of state-appointed commissioners from the Deep South traveled the upper Confederacy in 1860 spreading the secessionists' message: Lincoln, they said, would emancipate the slaves, and plunge the South into a racial nightmare.

During the next five years, 620,000 Americans would die, to settle the emancipation question.

The "fake history" took root after Appomattox, when disgruntled Confederate veterans began retailing the myth of the "Lost Cause" at their yearly reunions.

The war, they said, was never about slavery: it was waged only to defend the antebellum South, a moonlit magnolia paradise peopled by happy hoedowning slaves and their affectionate white masters.

These same propagandists made sure to regulate the history textbooks used in every school, while their dutiful daughters would later make sure to hype movies like D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” David O. Selznick's “Gone with the Wind'” and Walt Disney’s “Song of the South.”

Either It Looks Like a Miracle or It's Stupid

My ad agency years taught me never to show clients work that, for all purposes, couldn't be released as is.

Showing anything less than finished work gives clients little to evaluate. And showing anything less destroys the magic.

So I was gratified to hear an actual magician, Teller, express this principle to the host of NPR's This American Life.

Teller describes how he labored for months to incorporate the legendary "floating ball routine" into Penn & Teller's show.

Teller worked alone at night on an empty stage in a darkened theater, week after week, testing move after move after move, to make the trick fresh. He tested different props; built a stage set; abandoned it, and built another.

Only when he'd perfected the routine did Teller show it to his partner.

"Why didn't you just show Penn something rough?" the host asks Teller. "Just something with the moves you'd been inventing?"

"No, no, no!" Teller insists. "That's the thing about magic. You can't look at a half-finished piece of magic and know whether it's good or not. It has to be perfect before you can evaluate whether it's good.

"Magic is a fantastically meticulous form. Magic is an on/off switch. Either it looks like a miracle or it's stupid."

Blaming the Weather

You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

— Abraham Lincoln

Fyre Festival fooled a lot of people.

So do a lot of events.

But you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Serial scammer Billy McFarland, who The New York Times called, "Gatsby run through an Instagram filter," when confronted with accusations of fraud, blamed Fyre Festival's epic failure on the weather.

“I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal," he said in a statement in May.

How hauntingly similar that sounds to the statements made by many association-show producers after their events fail to attract buyers.

"We're disappointed by the attendance, but the industry's facing a cyclical downturn."

"Yes, we're disappointed by the attendance, but terrorism has deterred many travelers."

"Sure, we're disappointed by the attendance, but everyone knows the US economy's soft."

"We're deeply disappointed by the attendance. The weather is to blame."

Truth be told, you may never be able to draw enough buyers to satisfy exhibitors.

But are you even trying?

• Do you assume (pray) attendees will just come?
• Do you depend on email to promote your event?
• Do you neglect to issue newsworthy product announcements before your event?
• Do you believe your primary job is to sell booths?
• Do you think of exhibitors as the "wallets" who underwrite your conference?

Too many association-show producers "working hard" with "producing results."

Producing results today means innovating. Do you:

• Add novelty and value to every aspect of your show, year after year?
• Respect the fact exhibitors need results—and help them?
• Organize your event to maximize exhibitors' face-time with prospects?
• Lead your industry by applying new marketing tactics and technologies?
• Copy concepts from industry-leading shows like CES and NAB Show?
• Know more than your attendees and exhibitors about your industry's path forward

Or, when attendance flags, do you—like the organizer of Fyre Festival—keep calm and blame the weather?

NOTE: Billy McFarland was arrested yesterday and charged with wire fraud.