Cesar Brea: Why Orchestration Is the Key to Great Marketing

Marketing analytics attempts can often miss their marks. Cesar Brea, a partner with Bain's Advanced Analytics practice, discusses how companies can achieve positive results with orchestration, integrating their marketing analytics efforts across many departments.

Read the Bain Brief: How CMOs Can Get—and Keep—Their Marketing Mix Right

Read the transcript below.

CESAR BREA: Most people think that the way that you address the opportunity to actually improve your marketing results is through increased sophistication. And we've moved through several different generations, for example, in analytics, marketing analytics of this kind of sophistication. We started with top-down, black box media mix models in the late '80s/early '90s. In the early part of this century, we've actually seen bottom-up marketing attribution solutions, and now everybody's talking about how AI will actually help us target things more effectively.

The thing that we think that this misses—and that's sort of the conventional view—the thing that we think that misses is actually the opportunity for orchestration. If you really want to make this work, you've got to be focused on the right issue at the right time; you've got to actually have the data to power any solution you put into place. Making sure that you've got a balanced approach to insight development that isn't just about looking at past data, but that also really crucially includes testing and even research together in a harmonious way to get the right insight, making sure that the operational capability is as well-developed as the analytic capability.

A lot of organizations take a relatively siloed approach to how they generate insights. You have a research department, you have an analytics team, you have a group that may be doing some testing. In the highest-performing organizations, you actually bring those capabilities together and use the right tool for the job.

And then it's really no good to actually have all this wonderful insight development capability if you can't put it to work—if your operating platforms aren't automated, aren't integrated. If you can't make it happen, then you're really not able to put these ideas to work effectively.

And so what we find is that orchestration rather than sophistication is actually the right way to think about how you make progress.

Read the Brief

How CMOs Can Get—and Keep—Their Marketing Mix Right

All CMOs have access to the same tools, but the leaders focus on the full range of conditions necessary for results.

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