Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?
8 min read
Catching up on my backlog of data and subjects from right before #MartechDay earlier this thirty day period — which featured the 2022 promoting technological know-how landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the top of my checklist is the newest Point out of Agile Internet marketing report from AgileSherpas.
As often, this is a great, detailed report on how and why agile methodologies are remaining used in marketing. You can see from the chart earlier mentioned that agile has uncovered its way into a vast variety of marketing actions: promoting operations, imaginative products and services, web site operations, social media, promotion, and so forth.
It’s even staying used (30%) in activities marketing, which has prolonged been the go-to example for skeptics: “Oh, agile could never ever do the job for occasions.” (To be reasonable, in a virtual/hybrid function world, the pacing and adaptability of gatherings advertising and marketing has enhanced noticeably.)
But not like past yr, when 51% of members noted applying agile internet marketing, this time only 43% did. That is close to the 42% from 2020. Is agile advertising and marketing backsliding?
Of program, the most evident disclaimer is the study sample. Even with 513 entrepreneurs participating in this latest survey, it’s nonetheless a pretty tiny subset of the varied marketing and advertising universe and no doubt topic to the ebbs and flows of choice bias.
But however. After virtually 15 yrs of advocacy for agile advertising, the momentum of this movement seems… stalled?
Agile advertising and marketing principles, tactics & labels
The rules of agile promoting, nonetheless, feel to be universally recognized as gospel reality these days. I cannot imagine of a single marketer I have met in the earlier various many years who hasn’t embraced the values of adaptability, understanding from experimentation, iterative advancement, cross-workforce collaboration, higher visibility into do the job-in-flight, workforce empowerment, and so forth.
Internet marketing has grow to be an agile job. Full halt.
Vintage agile practices — these as sprints, day-to-day standups, kanban boards, and many others. — also feel to have proliferated widely. Whilst in numerous scenarios, they’ve morphed from their primary form. We’ll arrive back to that in a minute, as I imagine it is the twist of article-agile.
But the labels? Not so much. I very not often hear the conditions dash, standup, or kanban in advertising and marketing discussions. Even “agile marketing” as a time period arises considerably less frequently than it seemed a few of yrs in the past.
Agile marketing vs. agile progress developments
A few of charts from Google Tendencies support illustrate what is occurring below. Initial, let us just appear at the expansion of the look for phrase “agile marketing”:
The chart exhibits relative look for volume for this term in excess of the earlier 18 years. You can see that it peaked around 2017. (A calendar year soon after the launch of Hacking Marketing and advertising. Coincidence?) Given that then, it is experienced fluctations up and down. But it mainly hit a ceiling.
To get a much better sense of how a lot absolute research volume there is for agile internet marketing, you need to have to review it versus a different pattern. So let us review it towards its progenitor, “agile development”:
Two factors pop proper out. Initially, agile advertising has obtained only a small fraction of the mindshare that agile development ever did. Next, fascination in agile advancement has steadily declined since 2010. It is around 1/4 of the quantity it was at its peak.
What happened in 2010? The increase of DevOps.
Without a doubt, DevOps became the huge that stood on the shoulders of agile development. Its attractiveness has dwarfed agile improvement, even from its heyday. And in comparison to those two, agile advertising would hardly even sign-up on the scale.
But it is vital to note that DevOps arose from Agile. To estimate its Wikipedia article:
“Agile advancement teams… couldn’t ‘satisfy the client via early and continual shipping of useful software’ unless of course they subsumed the operations / infrastructure duties associated with their programs, several of which they automatic.”
DevOps “aims to shorten the systems advancement lifecycle and offer constant supply with superior software program high quality.” What is continual integration/steady deployment (CI/CD) if not the final mechanism for offering iterative software package advancement?
As Forrest Gump may well say, “Agile is as agile does.”
The plummeting costs of “shipping” in the cloud
To be obvious, DevOps is not an agile administration methodology. It is not even an “ops” workforce (in most circumstances) like other ops capabilities, these as advertising ops. Instead, it’s a set of tactics, procedures, and technology that developers use to ship application speedily, iteratively, and properly. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.
DevOps optimizes making and deploying software program, but determining what to create and when nevertheless requires to materialize at a level above that. In principle, agile development methodologies such as Scrum can offer the framework for individuals choices. But most dev groups I know really don’t explicitly use those people methodologies any longer. Most have invented their personal procedure, pulling ideas from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev task administration resources this kind of as Jira.
My acquire: DevOps — and far more broadly, the cloud — has dramatically lessened the expenditures of iteratively acquiring application. Back again in the times when agile methodologies these types of as Scrum were being made, the charges and complexities of shipping ended up significantly greater. The rigid framework of Scrum was an powerful and vital way to handle that. Now in a excellent DevOps natural environment? Not as essential?
Which is not to say that tactic, preparing, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration required about them are not essential. They are as critical to accomplishment as ever. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative launch cycles? Not as required?
(Permit the flames from ardent agile advocates begin.)
Is there a DevOps equivalent in marketing and advertising?
Advertising ops is a different type of creature that DevOps. For a person, it is a job/staff inside the advertising and marketing org, somewhat than a follow/procedure that all marketers use.
But there is some shared DNA. In numerous techniques, internet marketing ops groups perform as a DevOps-like enabler for marketers to be equipped to “ship” promoting rapidly, iteratively, and safely and securely. Advertising ops manages the tech stack and procedures to enable that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.
Nonetheless with the rise of far more and additional no-code capabilities across martech, marketing and advertising ops is also empowering marketers with far more and far more self-services abilities. Just as software package deployment ops got “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into extra developers’ fingers with DevOps, additional capabilities to execute marketing — both of those internal and exterior advertising and marketing “deployments” — are becoming shifted into the hands of normal marketers.
I never know that there is a name for this phenomenon. It’s a sort of democratization of selected aspects of advertising and marketing ops. (Ideally underneath the advice, governance, and guardrails of the skilled advertising ops crew.) But it is ever more analogous to DevOps. Much more individuals can ship additional marketing, speedily, conveniently, and properly.
Just as with computer software, strategy, preparing, roadmaps, prioritization, group coordination and collaboration are vital to properly harness this distributed power of generation. But just as equally, the prices in deploying most types of internet marketing have dropped radically in excess of the previous ten years. This has created much more slack in the advertising production course of action, which has designed rigid agile advertising and marketing methodologies… not as required?
(Actually posed as a query, not a declaration.)
New agile procedures: Pods, DARCIs, Slack, “Work OS”
Talking of slack, or, um, Slack, the previous 10 years has also brought an explosion of innovation in work communications and collaboration solutions. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Teams have turn out to be ubiquitous — along with a entire ecosystem of apps that lengthen and combine with them. A new era of work management platforms, these as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for marketers) Workfront, provide increased construction and visibility into complicated, fast-transferring priorities, assignments, and workflows.
In truth, the Administration classification of the martech landscape had the most significant share expansion from 2020 to 2022.
These applications have had a considerable affect on how get the job done gets performed. Numerous of them embed or allow agile (lowercase “a”) procedures. Pretty much none of them use the terminology of agile marketing methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, perform-in-development management, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.
In the meantime, I’d say that Slack and Groups — accelerated by the Terrific Migration to Distant Function — have efficiently killed changed the day by day stand-up for most groups.
But it is not that the fundamental theory of stand-ups has long gone away. On the opposite, these team communications platforms typically make it less difficult for groups to continue to be linked through the day in a somewhat reduced-impact manner. Issues that crop up can be addressed more rapidly than waiting around for the upcoming stand-up in a mounted time window that progressively fails to align with the schedules of dispersed group customers.
Hey, I’m nevertheless a huge enthusiast of in-individual collaboration, and I agree anything is shed without the need of it. But other issues are acquired. And for much better and worse, remote and hybrid groups are the new usual. In this courageous new earth, Slack and Groups are a far better in good shape than day-to-day stand-ups for many.
And it is not just technology. Management solutions that I consider of as “point solutions” for particular requires — in distinction to a complete suite of tactics, as with official agile advertising — have been popularized for greater cross-purposeful collaboration (e.g., pods outside the house the context of formal agile) and multi-celebration conclusion-earning (e.g., DARCI versions).
The web result? Advertising groups are turning into far more and more agile.
They just don’t always think of their methods as official “agile advertising.”
From agile marketing and advertising to… marketing and advertising?
Whatever occurred to electronic advertising and marketing? It grew to become advertising and marketing.
Not due to the fact marketing turned a lot less electronic. Very the opposite. Digital turned so embedded in every thing marketers ended up accomplishing that the label of the profession reverted to the suggest: advertising. I’d call that a victory for the electronic promoting movement, not defeat.
Similarly, is agile marketing and advertising simply just becoming… internet marketing?
Perhaps “agile marketing” will restart its expansion as an express movement. Or possibly it will be replaced by some newly named methodology that is closer to what DevOps has turn into in the software program enhancement occupation. Or probably is just results in being implicit in how fashionable marketing and advertising groups operate.
Agile is as agile does.
Irrespective, I continue to think there is a huge opportunity for instructing marketing groups how to best harness all these platforms, methods, and processes. There’s by no means been additional demand for helping internet marketing teams reach peak performance by means of fantastic coaching, enablement, consulting, and advisory solutions in today’s natural environment.
Does the identify we simply call it seriously make a difference?
