Deirdre Alby and Tim Kashani discuss how marketing directors now need data and analytics skills alongside creativity. Tim reads Advertising Age and studies how big corporations use new media, then blends traditional press with social media into one coordinated strategy across multiple agencies.
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The role of a marketing director has morphed, especially in the last 5 years, to where you've alluded to this, but it used to be more on the right-brain side, the creative. Yeah. But with analytics and data that we have today, there is A/B testing or whatever it is that you're doing. There's so many choices. How have you found yourself going down that line?
Well, I'm constantly— I mean, it's almost impossible to stay up to date with all the different changes that are going on. But, you know, I'm constantly reading and studying not only what people in the arts are doing, but people outside the arts. So, you know, I think Advertising Age is probably my favorite go-to publication because there's nothing in it about the arts. It's usually large-scale corporations and how they're using new media to get their message out. The team around— it's really important to have a strong team around me. Before, I think there was a time that You could, you know, a producer could just go to an agency and probably get everything that they need, one agency, you know. But now because press and social media have kind of melded together, traditional media is still very important, but then you've got the social media. All of these pieces of the marketing strategy need to come together as one, and without a strong marketing director in the center, they're never gonna talk to each other. And, you know, so this— I think, you know, while I absolutely love all the agencies, they're probably some of my favorite people in this business, but I find it important to sort of listen to all of them and then put the ideas together as one.
