Working at the Intersection of IT and Marketing

Do you work at a company where information technology and marketing are two mutually exclusive departments that rarely interact with one another? Well, things are changing. If you’ve been paying attention to marketing or tech news in the past few years you know what a dramatic shift marketing has taken. It is becoming a mash-up industry where marketing relies heavily upon information technology to stay relevant with customers and audiences. Essentially, as of 2014, you can’t have one without the other.

In the past, marketers completed the majority of their work without needing help from an IT department. They created print pieces, used their designers for websites and created email campaigns without relying on other departments. For example, retailers have had to adapt to the digital enterprise and marketers involved with e-commerce platforms must utilize IT for security and tech purposes.

The rapidly growing amount of data cannot be controlled or organized by a single marketing department, IT and marketing must work together to stay relevant and secure from cyber attacks. The lines have essentially been blurred between these two departments. Their strategies and ideas must be aligned with one another, especially at a large organization, in order to stay relevant.

One article that explains this trend well is a recent post by Isaac Cheifetz, in which he states:

“Marketing is taking over the business. In a hyper-connected digital world, everything that a business does — the entire customer experience that it delivers, from the very first touch point onward— is now the scope of marketing.” In other words, marketing is no longer about creating communications to project at a customer, but creating a digital experience for them to immerse themselves in.

“Technology is taking over marketing. Marketing has more software entwined in its mission today than any other profession in the history of computing. Leveraging these capabilities requires new approaches to marketing strategy and management — as well as new kinds of talents within the marketing team.’’

As a staffing firm, we have certainly seen this shift in the past few years with some Chief Technology Officers reporting to Chief Marketing Officers. Years ago we received requests for standard marketing skills like a graphic designer or copywriter but within the past 2-3 years we were asked to help with searches for .NET professionals and information architects and the lines started to blur.

We started to wonder what roles were actually marketing positions? Well, all of them. The ‘IT’ job orders we work on are heavily integrated within marketing teams. Which is why we’ve also adapted and added information technology as an official focus of Celarity. In the coming years it will be fascinating to see how this trend evolves and how companies will manage to adapt or fall behind.