By Tim Mead

A recent client-sponsored walk down Madison Avenue  in search of global marketing talent that had migrated to the dark side—working for clients—of brand and corporate communications gave Gustin Partners a fresh, though hardly scientifically valid perspective on the domain.

Here are some observations:

• Digital and social media are a sucker’s bet in a few cases. Using them over traditional media appeals more to CFOs—individuals genetically incapable of reserving judgment on CMO budget requests but ever-so-silent on frivolous spending habits of their companies’ revenue producers—than anyone else in the C-suite. Some advice: Use such media with a purpose, not because of a tight purse string.
• Those same new media truly are reshaping how companies go to market, with BtoC players far more adept than their BtoB brethren. The folks selling consumer products and services have legions of brand managers and teams comfortable with making noise, building communities and engaging with channels and customers. Those pushing capital goods and services, including TMT, are still coming up the learning curve. Save for a handful of savvy tech companies, they’re   challenged to figure out how to interact with audiences—largely because corporate, geographic and product marketing groups haven’t built sufficient personal relationships with the content generators in the critical areas of the business.
• High-performance multi-decade leadership development programs, an admittedly dying breed among short-sighted Global 2000 companies, appear to have hung out a shingle: MARKETING NEED NOT APPLY.  Where one would expect to find marketers purposely posted in new geographies in new challenges over the span of ten or twenty years with a company, one finds instead that most marketers with global resumes have had to jump from employer to employer to gain experience.
• Rare is the bird confident and smart enough to converse on a range of subjects,  beyond familiarity with the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review or the latest TED talk or the day’s online news feeds. Any number of marketers grow uncomfortable if a conversations strays beyond  predictable boundaries, e.g.,  the consequences for the world economy if Greece defaults, if Scotland secedes, etc.  Aren’t people curious anymore? Are their brains so chained  to work email that there is little time to think beyond the enterprise? Did they leave their senses of humor behind when they left their ad agencies to join client companies?
• Some CMOs really aren’t doing much marketing these days. They’re too busy tag-teaming with their CIO/CTO counterparts to digitally rewire their companies’ business models—a multiyear journey that’s just beginning. The upshot? The No. 2 and 3 individuals in marketing organizations are being delegated major brand responsibilities—not a bad thing necessarily.
• Award-winning communications campaigns—PR, advertising, social media, etc.—tend to be produced by teams of individuals whose business-unit bosses and/or CEOs genuinely value their contributions, paying them handsomely and rewarding them with considerable freedom to advance their enterprises.

The above are just odds and ends, so to speak. There’s no larger lesson to be learned here. For Gustin Partners, it’s on to the streets of Austin, Calgary, London, DC, Atlanta and other client locales.

Tim Mead is a managing director of Gustin Partners. He is responsible for major client relationships and engagements across the spectrum of the firm's services, with a concentration on client companies in the professional services, media, communications services and advanced information technologies sectors.