A New Addition to the C-Suite: The CMTO

As ever more data is available and new channels continuously open up to reach customers, marketing and technology are becoming increasingly inseparable. The growing relationship between the two has lead Cory Treffiletti, BlueKai’s SVP of marketing, to predict that the next year and a half will see many companies hiring a CMTO, or Chief Marketing Technology Officer.

The position Treffiletti envisions essentially combines the marketing experience of a CMO with the technical know-how of the chief data officer or data scientist. As data and technology continue to inform marketing efforts and digital channels offer increasing amounts of actionable information, IT responsibilities will begin to shift to marketers as well. As marketing and IT begin to work together more closely, the CMTO will be a combined leader for the two departments.

No matter the title of future executives, we completely agree with Treffiletti on the relationship between marketing and technology. The modern agency must have expertise both in knowing how to speak to customers and in measuring how effective strategy is in hard numbers, and that takes both marketing and technical experience. Without combining the two fields, you’re left with a divide between marketing and IT that results in confusion and soft metrics. It’s crucial for the modern agency to prove value in the only metric that matters—sales—and that means a streamlined team effort across departments.

How are you combining IT and marketing functions?