The annual ritual of advertising awards judging, in which industry professionals gather to bestow honors upon their peers while consuming modest quantities of catered food, has long served as a kind of barometric reading for the state of the business. This year's session at The Drum Awards for Marketing Americas suggested a notable change in pressure.
The judges, according to those who were in the room, found themselves talking less about the work itself and more about where the work came from — specifically, whether it originated in a marketing department that still operates as a discrete function or one that has managed to insinuate itself into the broader machinery of corporate decision-making.
"If you're not seeing it all the way through — creating brand purpose and demonstrating that through the demand you're creating — then you've got a problem," said one judge, a certain Mr. Rodness, whose remarks were echoed by several of his fellow panelists.
The observation is not entirely new. Chief marketing officers have been attempting to upgrade their organizational status for the better part of two decades, with mixed results. (The tenure of the average CMO remains notably shorter than that of other C-suite occupants, suggesting that the grab for power does not always find a secure grip.)
What appears to have shifted, at least according to the judges, is the expectation that marketing should now function as what several of them called "connective tissue" — linking customer understanding to product development, operational strategy and the other concerns that occupy corner offices.
Mr. Mohnshine of the Hershey Company offered his employer as an example. "Hershey has always put the consumer at the center of everything," he said. "Not just within marketing, but across all functions."
Whether this represents a genuine transformation or merely the latest vocabulary for describing ambitions that remain largely unrealized is, of course, the sort of question that awards juries are not typically convened to answer.
Original story published in The Drum: "Inside the Jury Room: Marketing’s power grab reaches the C-suite | The Drum"