MIAMI – Looking at the competition between digital and television as some kind of warfare isn’t very productive, according to Paul Alfieri, CMO of Cross MediaWorks.
“TV shouldn’t be looking at Facebook or Netflix and saying they’re stealing our revenue,” says Alfieri. “TV should be saying what are Facebook and Netflix and Amazon and Google providing that the customer, the marketer, needs today and how can we also provide that.”
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Alfieri also posits that brand marketers that do not take control of their data and have in-house data science capabilities are going to lose to those that do.
Alfieri is a recent addition to Cross MediaWorks, the network composed of video specialty firm Cadent, full-service agency TCA and one2one Media. He’s returning to the TV side from technology platform company Turn and admits to a particular “bias” for marketing, of which he learned the classic version in pre-digital college.
He cites a gap between people like himself who graduated from college in the early 1990’s and recent grads who possess more data chops and affinity. That gap has posed a problem for many brand marketers that “don’t understand the importance of a data foundation or a technology foundation in their own shop.”
Going forward, marketers that lack control and ownership of their data—along with the in-house capabilities of continually gathering data to comprehend the changing needs of their audiences—will be left behind.
“You’re going to lose to those companies who can. If you’re outsourcing those activities and you don’t have those core competencies internally, you’re ultimately going to fail,” Alfieri says.
He adds that it’s incumbent upon marketers to stay on top of data and technology so that they are in a position to drive change in the industry. They can “put pressure, positively, on the marketplace to be creative and start working together.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
