Marketers need to be IT Savvy
When you talk to as many businesses and media companies as I do you quickly realise there is a real issue with Information Technology in business, especially in the medium enterprise space. The issue is sure to hit more big businesses too as corporates follow the trend of contracting out non-core business functions. Having an IT provider on call instead of having an in-house IT person may have some real cost benefits however using that same company to provide IT strategy, services, support and equipment procurement is not.
So often I see companies out sourcing their IT thinking to service providers who have billing and profit rather than the company's future requirements as a priority.
Why is JWGecko interested in this area?
Quite simply as well as a media and advertising geek I am a business model voyeur, as the preamble to my blog notes. I believe that since advertising now relies so much on IT infrastructure, agencies and marketing companies will have to venture into this space for their client's long term good. If the company's web site is unreliable, what is the point of building traffic to it? If the customer management system is out of date or hard to use, is that not a road block in customer retention? Since so much or what we do is so heavily benchmarked on results and return on investment how can we avoid at least dipping out toes in this area?
As the grey area between advertising and marketing grows so too does the need for cross over between the two if real success in on and offline direct marketing is to be achieved.
