i3 - January/February 2016 - 93

CM s

OF THE FUTURE

ASHU GARG

general partner, Foundation Capital

rankly," admits

and they will get to own the customer journey in the broadest
definition of that word."
But what does that mean for creatives who don't necessarily think of themselves as technical? "The role of creative isn't
going away," explains Garg. "There is and always will be a role
for creative storytellers in marketing."
However, Garg believes creatives need to navigate two
major changes. One, "the creative within a company is a part
of the storytelling, not the only storyteller. They are one of
many storytellers, and they're vastly outnumbered by the
storytellers out in the marketplace." Consumers, he says "have
a big megaphone today."
Two, "with the advent of so much data and technology, the
feedback loop to the creative process is much tighter and
much faster," he says. "I think folks who recognize both
of these changes will flourish and those who don't,
well...there's always dinosaurs in every industry."

Ashu Garg,
"eight times out
of ten we didn't

actually know if our creative storytelling worked
25 years ago."
A general partner at
Foundation Capital, Garg's
career has included roles in
consumer marketing, product
marketing, field marketing,
corporate marketing and market research.
Trained as an engineer, Garg's first job out of
college was with Unilever in the early 1990s
working with Dove. He says the brand was
a leader in beauty product storytelling
but their insights were limited. "We told
a story, we blasted it out and we spent so
much money on it. We had a megaphone
that was so big that, if nothing else, everyone knew the brand," says Garg. "But was it
really the best story to tell? Was it really the
best creative execution? Those questions were
answered less satisfactorily than I would like."

An alternate title
for 'CMO' in the future:
Chief Experience
Officer

TECHNICAL MARKETING
Not so today. Major changes in consumer behavior have
led Garg to a deceptively simple insight: marketing is now
a technical discipline. In his white paper, MarTech and
the Decade of the CMO, he writes that technology enables
"buying media programmatically, optimizing creative,
placement and audience, re-targeting likely customers, and
measuring results in near-real time."
This technical notion of marketing, Garg admits, is
fairly obvious for Silicon Valley types with engineering
backgrounds. However, he says, "when I talk to marketers,
the fact that we should think of marketing as a technical
discipline is a fundamentally new idea for them."
These changes, says Garg, give CMOs "the opportunity
to be the most important executive in the C-Suite. CMOs
who are successful will become chief experience officers,
C TA . t e c h / i 3

BRAND ARCHITECTS

In his white paper, Garg writes that brands risk
irrelevance if they don't become publishers of
"useful and authentic content at a scale that is
several orders of magnitude beyond what they
would have created for traditional advertising."
Garg says because of this imperative marketers should "re-architect" their organizations. "The
center of every marketing department is going to be a
newsroom," he says and will increasingly rely on technology for distribution.
The word newsroom highlights the increasingly blurry line
between "traditional" content creators and marketers. And
brands need to create more content as the control over their
message is diminished by the rise of other voices on social
media. Garg calls this a shift "from dictation to conversation."
Despite this loss of control and in the midst of tectonic
shifts, Garg believes technically minded CMOs can thrive. His
white paper's title calls this "the Decade of the CMO," after all.
If this is a great decade for marketing, it must also be the
decade of great stories. To Garg, the two go hand-in-hand.
"Marketing is the ultimate form of storytelling," he says. "In
my opinion, the best ads are better than the best movies,
they're better than the best documentaries because they tell an
amazing story that informs, entertains and sells."
Garg will be speaking about his white paper, MarTech and the
Decade of the CMO, at C Space at 2 PM on January 6.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

https://foundationcapital.com/ https://www.foundationcapital.com/decadeofthecmo https://www.foundationcapital.com/decadeofthecmo http://CTA.tech/i3

i3 - January/February 2016

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