It feels as though there are increasing numbers of media titles targeting marketers right now. And I’m wondering if the extra buzz in the sector is connected to marketers spending more on technology than ever before –meaning publishers can make money selling advertising to marketing tech suppliers.
I’ve not looked at revenue or circulation numbers, but ‘newer’ UK marketing and digital marketing publications such as The Drum, Econsultancy, PeformanceIN and Mobile Marketing seem to be growing their profiles alongside established brands such as Marketing, Campaign a
nd Marketing Week. There’s also room for professional digital marketing blogs in the sector such as Fourth Source.
In the last week or so investors in UK media and marketing title, DOTRising have acquired US based, Clickz, rebranding the UK site as Clickz UK. At the same time, US titles such as Digiday, CMO.com and MediaPost seem to be building a growing UK presence.
All this activity can only be justified if publishers are able to generate enough advertising revenue. And ad spend by the buoyant marketing technology sector could be one of the drivers.
Researchers certainly point to marketers upping their spend on technology; Gartner made a much quoted prediction that by 2017 CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs – as corporate marketing departments purchase more marketing-related technology outside the control of the internal IT department.
While research group IDC is seeing CMOs influence marketing tech spending in areas outside the traditional definition of CRM and predicts that spend in ther area will increase from $20.2 billion in 2014 to $32.4 billion in 2018 .
Obviously a big part of marketing is now digital, and this lends itself to greater use of technology, both to crunch the huge amounts of data generated, and to automate processes. Coupled with this, the ability to use software hosted and maintained in the cloud means marketers can more easily buy marketing technology independently of the IT organisation.
My personal experience as someone who runs a tech PR agency is that I’m finding myself working for more and more tech clients who target marketers. Our experience includes technology for managing search marketing, SEO, social media advertising, online video ads, customer service and online surveys and customer feedback collection.
As recently as ten years ago, it was a a challenge running media relations campaigns for suppliers of marketing technology. Marketing journalists felt their readers wouldn’t be interested in reading about tech as it was way down in the list of their priorities. While IT mags rightly said their readers (who work in IT departments) had only a passing interest in marketing technology as it was not a big part of the IT budget.
My how times have changed!