IAB Leadership Meeting: CMOs Discuss Internal Impact of ‘Digital First’

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Digital change comes as much from inside the marketing organization as from end users, noted two leading CMOs, who were interviewed at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting today in Palm Desert. The CMOs were Wells Fargo‘s Jamie Moldafsky and Adobe‘s Ann Lewnes.

Moldafsky said that the key to digitizing the staid Well Fargo culture and the company’s 370,000 employees is “to ground everyone in customer insight.” With six billion transactions a year, Wells Fargo has really had to focus on the most important aspect of the digital era: “how real time we need to be thinking,” says Moldafsky. “The hardest part for us is that notion of speed.” The emergence of digital — especially omnichannel — has enabled marketing to “take some risks in the spirit of learning,” she added.

Lewnes said that Adobe made the decision five or six years ago to move as much of our money as possible to digital. “We now spend seventy-four percent of our marketing on digital,” she noted. “Every marketing employee has a ‘digital first’ mentality with no excuses.”

The change over has coincided with the company’s move to an all digital, subscription-based business model. But “the biggest need was the amount of change needed inside the organization,” she said. The data constitutes “a think tank of Web analysis” — and is “the “single point of truth” for the whole company. It has lead to making more changes in the last two year as than the prior 50 years combined. “The only thing I can convince people is that the quantifiable side of marketing is what people want to see.”