Do You Want It Fast, or Right?
An interesting theme played out at last week’s 2008 CMO Leadership Forum, held in New York City on Jan. 17: He who strikes first, strikes best.
“If your competitor has an A-bomb, you’d better have one too,” said Richard Birt, senior manager, BearingPoint Inc. about the deployment of predictive analytics. “Early adopters will have a huge advantage.”
“Sometimes thinking happens after doing at Google,” Andy Berndt, managing director at that company’s Creative Lab, said separately.
(To be sure, Berndt also decreed, “Google is not starting an ad agency,” which seemed to come as a relief to his co-panelist, TBWA Worldwide president and CEO Tom Carroll. While the statement may in and of itself be true, few in-the-know folks will dispute that Google’s actively trying to do an end-run around the agencies and get clients to come to them directly. But, as you’ve doubtless realized over the past months, I digress…)
Early adopters are, of course, the same people who drove eToys.com stock to a high of $84 per share in October 1999 (before it fell to 9 cents per share 17 months later), bought Crystal Pepsi by the case, and signed the 1938 Munich Agreement.
Slow and steady wins the race, as our old friend Aesop once counseled; look before you leap, as D.B. Cooper used to say. But last week we had people advising a roomful of chief marketing officers – whose average corporate lifespans are somewhere around 24 months, we were constantly reminded – to plunge full speed ahead, torpedoes (and, presumably, impact on stock prices) be damned.
The current climate in companies everywhere reminds Carroll of 1999, “when everyone had to have a website. Today everyone is in a panic over ‘digital.’”
That panic, he indicated, has resulted in an excess of companies being…well, excessive, rolling out blogs, podcasts, videocasts, and anything they can think of that can be tagged with an “e-” prefix to demonstrate just how cutting edge and “with it” they are.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Tom Brokaw said, in the wake of a New Hampshire primary that everyone had long since awarded to Barack Obama, “You know what I think we’re going to have to go back and do? Wait for the voters to make their judgment.”
Isn’t it just possible that customers will tell companies what they want – and demonstrably are not interested in – as well?
“Grip the wheel slowly and try things on a small scale,” Berndt said, 40 minutes or so after his “doing before thinking” remark. “You need to look at keeping everyone connected.”
Somewhere, Aesop, Brokaw, and even Neville Chamberlain are nodding in agreement.
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