The Rise of The Marketing Engineer 🚀

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Today's is part of a welcome series we started last week when we introduced Marketing Machine. Today we're picking up where that one ended, with a look at the rise of The Marketing Engineer. 🚀

Complexity Emerges

"Holy crap this is complicated!"

I had just finished running T. Brian Jones, Chief Technology Officer at NetWise, through the basics of the marketing machine I was setting up, and that was his response. I was brought in to set up a marketing department at his startup which had, to that point, largely been sales driven. At the time I had already been using "marketing machine" terminology to talk about the kinds of systems I was setting up, but I hadn't yet made the leap to thinking about those who worked on the machine as engineers. The conversations that followed as we worked together were the seeds of the Marketing Engineer moniker.

Over the course of the next few months, Brian and I would have numerous conversations like this. He consistently pointed out that the system of automation, or reporting, or some sort of feedback loop that I described was so complex that he didn't think he would actually understand it were he not an engineer.

As a bonus, Brian also has an MBA in marketing, so he would occasionally point out that this wasn't the "marketing" he had learned in graduate school. His education there was all about target audiences, narratives, research, and sometimes about data and analysis. This was different. It was about the interconnected set of moving parts, tools, tactics, and data it takes to make a modern marketing machine.

So, the question we started asking ourselves was "what changed?" Why was this a new phenomenon we felt like we had stumbled upon and why was it different from the marketing for which Brian had a graduate level degree?

The answer is the emergence of digital media, and it's what gets us to the Marketing Engineer.

The One-Way Street

Before the emergence of The Internet and digital media, marketing communication was largely a one-way street. The only way to know your marketing was working was broadly and with a blurry lens. If you ran a series of ads in a particular publication and you saw a bump in sales, you could guess that this campaign was probably working. Of course, that signal was immediately impossibly blurry if you were running multiple ads or using multiple publications. If you had the money maybe you could have multiple phone numbers attached to different ads. If you were crafty maybe you could try something like the old "tell them Bob sent you for 10% off" style call-to-action.

In this world, the discipline of marketing was still very much about storytelling. This was the "Don Draper" era of narratives crafted by ad execs in boardrooms. It was about how to weave a tale to generate excitement about a product. We could target certain audiences based on which publications we knew they liked, but this was about the best we could do. Marketing was largely still a humanities-driven profession.

We tried to do better, but these efforts amounted to focus groups and demographic research. This generated some data fed into the creative choices, segmentation, and narrative direction, but nothing as actionable as the digital revolution would bring. MBAs like Brian focused largely on how to do those things with greater process or precision, but nothing exploded to the level of engineering. For all the effort to improve, marketing was largely still about broadcast, not response. Then The Internet was invented, and this one-way street became a two-way superhighway system.

Testing on The Superhighway

When ads went digital, engagement with a given asset wasn't so blurry anymore. Consumers were literally a clicking on a button somewhere on The Internet in response to a call-to-action. The platforms that deliver the ads or organic content all started to provide analytics that let you see which ads and pieces of content are working. Slowly marketing became a two-way game of call and response. You could tell which creative was working better than others. You could tell which publication (or social media platform) was working and which wasn't. On social media you could even tell, to an (anonymized) person, which demographics were more engaged than others. You could chase certain types of conversions and micro-conversions. If you had the scale, you could even use split tests to optimize.

And therein lies the key to the engineering shift. The answer to the question "what changed?" is the two-way street, but more specifically, that last thing I mentioned is real change that gets us to the Marketing Engineer: split tests.* Not split tests specifically, but broadly, the notion of testing and response. Before the two-way street the information that we got back from marketing efforts simply wasn't specific enough to enable any sort of testing at scale. The digital two-way street changes this.

The two-way street adds to the marketing game of storytelling. We still have to be storytellers, but now instead of fighting to make the best educated guess, we can narrow down the best options and test them all. Then we can react to those tests in real time, and adapt our strategies, tactics, and even our content.

Testing is the key aspect that turns marketing from an art into a science. Sure, we did our best to focus group up some science before digital media, but digital actually made it work at paradigm shifting scale. Digital media made it into a problem we could start to solve with data, statistics, and the scientific method. This extended past the foundational work of knowing the customer and crafting a story, to things previously reserved for science and engineering: hypothesis, experiment design, testing, data analysis, hypothesis adjustment, retesting, and so on.

Each new tool in the two-way ecosystem created a new node, and marketers began to interconnect them to run campaigns, to run tests, to understand more about their audience, and deploy that knowledge into campaigns in real-time. In interconnecting them we turned what used to be a fairly simple one-way street into a system of highways. Systems which needed a different kind of marketer to understand and to run.

Marketing Systems

Everything I had laid out for Brian in those initial conversations was nothing new to me or my team. Beyond that, they were nothing new to the world of marketing really. Tools, practices, reports, strategies: all very much the bread and butter of the modern digital marketer. Brian was the first to point out that when put together in what we call "the machine", these tools had reached a level of complexity and connectivity to rival that of the systems he oversaw as CTO. Systems run by teams of software engineers.

I get his point. We were deploying things like testing and reactive automations. Things that were planned ahead of time and ran without intervention. Adaptive campaigns that looked more like video games reacting to user input than marketing campaigns simply shouting our story into the world. We monitored weekly reports that allowed us to adapt our strategies and content in real-time and to track how much of the sales pipeline we had influenced in any given week. This goes beyond "campaign management" and beyond "market research". What I'm describing here are interconnected dynamic systems.

Like I said, in terms of modern marketing, this is nothing new. The new part was Brian's insistence on the "Engineer" frame. The realization that all of these different functions, and the roles overseeing them, added up to a holistic way of looking at marketing that appeared more like the mindset of an engineering department than a traditional marketing department. I'm sure it helped that I'd gotten half way there by talking about it as a machine (which we talked about last week.)

And this gets us to the rise of the Marketing Engineer as I now like to frame it. Not as a new job title, but as a realization that there's an emergent set of sub-specialties which fit under an engineering umbrella. A broader mindset mastered by many, and deployed by specialists at various places in the Machine.

The Marketing Engineers Are Already Here

We call them "Digital Strategist", or "Marketing Operations". or "Integrated Marketing", or "Marketing Developer", or any of the slew of other titles that have emerged as we've tried to outline the increasing responsibilities of the modern marketing department. These engineers currently work in roles that they gravitated to (or invented) because of their ability to think about (and design) complex systems beyond the basics of campaign creative or strategy.

When we try to figure out how all of these operatives fit from the bottom up we end up with the patchwork mess I talked about last week. This is very much cleaned up once we realize that the marketing department is now a creative engineering department. Software has eaten marketing and this means that we need to rebuild the whole department from the top down. We need to realize that each of those roles described above is now a subset specialty of the Marketing Engineer.

This gets us to the final realization that started from those conversations with Brian, and is the reason that we are here today. Once we found the Marketing Engineer frame, it changed the way we looked at the entire discipline. It changed how we looked at the composition of a marketing team and how that team interacted with other departments. In particular, it made us rethink the skills of the marketing leaders, where the generalist engineering mindset was most important.

All of this work let us build a Marketing Machine that was focused, efficient, and data-driven. Then our company was acquired which threw all of this work into stark relief as the team of marketing engineers we had assembled was dropped into a traditional marketing department and asked to replicate our success. (This is a story for another time.)

The effort that ensued made it clear to me and my team how much work there was left to do in order to get the marketing world caught up with the rise of the Marketing Engineer. So this is what we are here to do today as a community project. We have some answers, which we will continue to write about, but we also know that technology is changing rapidly, and what it means to be a Marketing Engineer is not going to be stable. This is why I'm starting so broadly. We'll get more specific, with all the tips, tricks, tutorials, and office hours you can hope for, but it's important to start with this broad exploration because this is the top down view that will help you build your machine?

Won't you join us?

🚀 Adam

Sign up to get posts like this in your inbox every week. Next week we'll be drilling down even further on the engineering design process, and how the engineering mindset applies to marketing.

*A split test is when you take incoming traffic and show half of that traffic one ad or piece of content and half of the traffic another. By watching your analytics, you can then get a sense of which ad is better for a given objective.