create highlighting our insights into the most challenging problems and opportunities facing our clients. Our vision is to customize the content that we deliver to our clients, based on roles (e.g., CFO vs., CIO), industries, organizational size, geographic footprint, and prior interactions with us.  The smarter that we can be about targeting the content that we provide, the more helpful we will be to our clients.   The architecture of our new digital platform, for example, enables us to learn from each interaction with site visitors and present what we hope will be increasingly more relevant and valuable content.

We also are looking for opportunities to deliver this content through mobile devices, including wearables. We started using responsive design when we introduced our primary content marketing site, Deloitte University Press (www.dupress.com) and an increasing number of users rely on phones, tablets, and phablets to access the site.

Our latest experiments have been podcasts. Although we tried podcasts in the past, the advanced communications and entertainment capabilities of many new vehicles have encouraged us to revisit podcasts as another platform for our content marketing efforts.

While all of these technologies will keep us busy for the time being, I suspect we will continue to look to science fiction for inspiration when it comes to the next generation of marketing technologies.

Challenges in Technology

Marketing needs to be more than a way for suppliers to push messages and offers out to customers. Customers are looking to solve problems and tackle opportunities. As a CMO, my job is to help our clients to solve these problems and help them tackle these opportunities, ideally with solutions that we can provide.

Deloitte’s big technology challenge is integrating our insights about our clients across channels. We want to understand when a client reads a piece of content, attends an event, participates in a webinar, subscribes to a podcast series, enrolls in and completes a massive open online course (MOOC), or responds to an email. The analytics associated with each channel have advanced significantly in the recent past so that we now understand more about channel-specific behaviors. My expectation for 2015 is that technology providers will offer solutions that help us understand the totality of behaviors and draw inferences about what we can do to be as targeted as possible in our outreaches to our clients based on these insights.

Understanding Modern Marketing

Having a team that understands modern marketing is critical.

But, there’s still a need for team members who understand marketing fundamentals, starting with branding.

When it comes to developing the marketing dream team, my three most important bullet points would be:

1. Recognize that today’s marketing technologies will quickly be superseded by newer and more advanced marketing technologies.   Team members who understand today’s marketing technologies are invaluable, but make sure that they also have the capacity to master emerging technologies.

2. Look for individuals with an analytical mindset, who are relentless when it comes to understanding why some approaches work and others don’t.   Encourage your team to adopt a “test and learn” approach and an iterative mindset.

3. Don’t neglect the importance of a thorough grounding in branding and positioning.  Marketing innovation, analytical rigor, and insightful approaches to branding (based on deep customer insights) are table stakes when it comes to great marketing today.  A team that’s missing any of these ingredients is unlikely to succeed in today’s complex and rapidly evolving world.