Marketers beware, “your Uber is coming to whatever industry you are in”, says ex-Xero and Commonwealth Bank marketer Andy Lark.
In addition to saying the tech adoption lifecycle is bollocks and most marketing is a trainwreck, when speaking at Ashton Media’s Marketing Tech Symposium on ‘The end of automation. The beginning of something bigger’, Lark also spoke about the rapid-fire changes across marketing, technology and skillsets.
Of the one trillion dollars spent on marketing globally, he said about 50% goes to ad spend and about 50% goes into a whole mixed bucket of things, with just 1% going on technology.
On looking at where the marketing dollars are going, he said the clever CMOs, "of which there aren’t many”, are spending far more, some 20-30%, on technology.
This, Lark says, is because that’s where you drive the productivity and the efficiency step-change environment to orchestrate a better customer experience.
“The really smart CMOs are looking at how they can make their sales force obsolete,” Lark said.
He went on to ask attendees if anyone had spoken to an Uber salesperson lately, or if anybody had called Airbnb to chat to their sales team about their next booking.
“The answer is no, because these companies use technology to entirely eliminate the value of a salesperson. Look at the way they are spending their marketing dollars - it’s huge, huge dollars pouring into technology,” he said.
“They have chosen technology over anything as the key change step point in their business.”
Andy Lark
Lark served up a stark reminder that it's all well and good saying you have plans to dabble in new technology, but you have to know how to get the best from it.
“Doing what we’ve done for the last 10 years on really sophisticated technology is a bit like using robots to mow the lawn – it’s not going to solve anything significant for us,” he added.
Lark's parting line called out to marketers to spend time really looking at what they are doing and what they need to be doing to get ahead.
“What I really encourage you to do is to think about the time you have left as your Uber is coming to whatever industry you are in,” he said.
Like Lark's stance? Check out The tech adoption lifecycle is bollocks and most marketing is a trainwreck
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