#010: Reviewing the Latest CMOsurvey.org Survey Results

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:03.76 [Announcer]: Welcome everyone to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 10.

00:00:31.48 [Michael Helbling]: Tonight we’re going to try something a little bit experimental in that we have a guest on the show, but that guest is a document. And we’re going to talk about it. So we’re discussing tonight the Fuqua Business School CMO Survey that’s published twice a year in August and February. And so tonight we’re tearing apart the February 2015 results. I am always joined by my two co-hosts, Tim Wilson and Jim Cain.

00:00:58.13 [Tim Wilson]: We’re in the same room, but that does not mean we’re in the same body, but thanks for the attempt there.

00:01:07.02 [Jim Cain]: I think it was right to make me the husband in this relationship.

00:01:10.84 [Michael Helbling]: Tim and Jim Wilson.

00:01:14.32 [Tim Wilson]: We’re in the same room, but we’re not in Indiana, so we can go in this couple-week manner and freely get served.

00:01:21.41 [Michael Helbling]: In another podcast first, we’ve got Jim and Tim in the same room. Guys, how are you doing tonight?

00:01:26.98 [Tim Wilson]: Great. Fantastic. Awesome.

00:01:29.95 [Michael Helbling]: All right. So let’s dig into this thing. So this is a survey that I’ve been reading for a few years. I always love to see it come out. I feel like it helps us understand better what’s going on in the mind of a CMO. Just to give people a little bit of background, you can actually find this survey at CMOsurvey.org. And it’s run by the Duke Fuqua School of Business. Christine Moermon is the director of the CMO survey. And she’s also a professor at the Fuqua School of Business. So we’re going to talk about this. So first, let me throw it out to you guys. What really popped out in this survey to you? And maybe as we talk about it, we can break down the structure for folks as they’re listening.

00:02:10.59 [Tim Wilson]: So there were a couple of things that jumped out that were, I would probably say surprising yet depressing. Maybe the higher level one and obviously, you know, most interested in the marketing analytics piece and Part of what the survey does is it breaks down how the marketing spend and the allocation of budget to different activities is expected to change over the coming three to five years. And for the percent of marketing budgets spent on marketing analytics, the current levels overall for the surveyed companies, it’s a 6.4 percent. And it’s saying in the next three years, the mean is their expectation is that it’s going to go to 11.7 percent. Great. That’s good, right? That’s increased investment in analytics. Right, and you say that’s great, but then contrast it with a couple of slides and the results later is asking the question. You’re like, hey, you recognize you must be getting a lot of value out of analytics because you’re deciding you should do more of it. And they ask the question, to what degree does the use of marketing analytics contribute to your company’s performance? And a one was not at all, and a seven was very highly. And as of February when they did the survey, marketing only got a 3.2. So it was below the middle of the road. And that’s actually the lowest that it’s been since they do it like every six months. And that’s the lowest score that it’s ever gotten. It’s been as high as 3.9. And so that has me looking at it saying, well, you could read that as saying at a macro level, they’re thinking that we’re not getting enough value out of marketing analytics because we’re not investing enough in marketing analytics. But the one other wrinkle from the survey here was that they said that less than a third, actually they said, well, they said 29% of projects use marketing analytics that are available or requested. And trying to square those, I mean, it feels real to me. It feels like, hey, there’s more stuff to spend money on. We’ve got vendors coming with DMPs and optimization platforms and tag management systems. We’ve got ways we can spend more money. But the fact is it sounds like you’ve got stuff in place now. You’ve got data available now that you’re not using. I’m skeptical of other people saying, oh, We’re going to nearly double our staff so we’ve got capacity. It seems like it’s kind of representing what I would think is kind of a skewed perception of what it takes. We’re not getting a lot of value out of marketing analytics. We’re not trying to a third of the time or two thirds of the time. We’re not even trying to use the data that’s available. And yet we’re thinking that we’re going to grow our investment and somehow magically we’re now going to get more value. So it’s kind of depressing.

00:05:05.06 [Jim Cain]: What I think is an interesting counterpoint is at the beginning of the deck, when it talks about the economy at the beginning and most CMOs feel bullish about the economy for the first time since the beginning of the recession. And then you see that they’re not measuring anything. I almost wonder if that’s like senior marketing decision makers are going, there’s less accountability, there’s more budget, the market is better. We don’t need to measure everything as rigorously as maybe we need to.

00:05:33.22 [Michael Helbling]: I guess there’s a certain portion, part of me that could agree with that assessment. Certainly when we went into the recession, one of the things I certainly noticed was companies were looking for ways to get more value out of current investments and will trying to leverage analytics and meaningful ways to do that kind of stuff. But yeah, it fights me a little bit though. The fact that as they do this survey, We’re going to make this big growth in investment and yet we’re trending downward in terms of where we’re using it and how effective we think it is. I look at this survey and I view it what I’m seeing there and Tim maybe you do too and I love Jim the contrast you’re putting on it too because I want us to think about it from every angle. But it’s almost like we’re seeing an existential threat to what we do as analysts. We’ve got an opportunity to become pivotal to what business is and what marketing is, especially in the context of digital. And are we missing our opportunity to actually engage and become strategically connected?

00:06:42.72 [Jim Cain]: Sounds great because I’m from a consulting company. But the thing that I found was interesting also is that I say interesting a lot. I find that fascinating.

00:06:51.61 [Michael Helbling]: I literally find that interesting.

00:06:54.31 [Jim Cain]: They’re spending more money on measurement. They just find it less valuable and they’re using it less.

00:06:59.90 [Tim Wilson]: I’m trying to understand how the existential threat maybe is just too fancy of a word.

00:07:05.65 [Michael Helbling]: What I mean by that is that eventually they’ll start realizing, why are we spending money on something we don’t use?

00:07:12.06 [Tim Wilson]: But it seems like it is inconceivable that the use of analytics will decrease, right? Like there’s no, I can’t envision a future where we just punch the button and go back to the Mad Men era and it’s all on gut. I think maybe the threat is that the analyst becomes the next CMO. Well, that was actually, I didn’t have this in my notes, but I think it actually had like the average tenure of marketing leadership was much longer than the 27 months that usually gets tossed around. But is it possible, like we’ve talked in the past about how the analysts have a very short tenure because another opportunity comes along. There’s something else they can jump on and it’s up to the analysts to by choice leave and move on to something else. Because there’s a demand gap is it possible that what will hit is that there will be this churn of frustration with the analytics leadership that the CMO and the CEO and the CIO will be looking at what’s being delivered and they’ll say. We’re not getting value. We’re spending a crap ton of money, and the revolving door will shift from the CMO to an elevated analytics position. That is not a well-baked thought at all that occurred to me while we were discussing this. But I think it was interesting.

00:08:28.05 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it was interesting. And, you know, to a certain extent, I’m very displeased that neither of you are buying into my chicken little theory here. You know, why can’t we have an existential threat once in a while?

00:08:39.15 [Tim Wilson]: But what’s the, what’s the, what’s the envisioned future where that’s.

00:08:43.20 [Michael Helbling]: So, no, I agree with you that it’s not that analytics will go away and we’ll all start drinking in the office and being sexist again.

00:08:52.13 [Tim Wilson]: That was a madman reference.

00:08:53.67 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that was a madman reference.

00:08:55.35 [Tim Wilson]: It’s not always how you do business in Atlanta. Yeah. Well, I mean, here in the South, well, but, or is it possible, is it possible that analytics instead could go down the path of being I mean, now this will be the pot shot at banner ads and display media that limited evidence that it’s super effective, but people got so used into carving off a big chunk of their budget for it that they just keep doing it. And they’re like, we have to be turning out reports.

00:09:21.01 [Michael Helbling]: Don’t you feel like display is getting a rebirth because of the advent of really great retargeting and DMP usage?

00:09:28.48 [Tim Wilson]: That is another topic.

00:09:34.59 [Michael Helbling]: I won’t qualify the usage. Just say it could be used effectively. I don’t know. I feel like there’s renewed interest in display. Anyways, that is a totally other topic.

00:09:45.42 [Jim Cain]: I think so too, but there’s probably also renewed interest in phrenology, and I know people who wear magnets on their wrists to help with arthritis and shit.

00:09:57.11 [Michael Helbling]: You do have a weird shape skull, Jim.

00:10:03.63 [Jim Cain]: I want to go back to the, we’re going to spend more, we’re using it less. Let’s be clear.

00:10:09.64 [Michael Helbling]: They plan to spend more than they’re spending today, but the reality on the ground is they use it less in key decision making. The point being though is that it’s not growing at the same pace that we plan to grow spending.

00:10:25.14 [Tim Wilson]: Right.

00:10:25.91 [Michael Helbling]: There’s no indication that we’re finding it more valuable so we’re investing more. And actually we’re only looking at the top line report here, but there is a breakout by industry. And you can see in a somewhat kind of like this makes a lot of sense kind of way business to consumer product companies are at 46.9%. Whereas at B2B product companies or B2B service companies are at 23.3, which makes a ton of sense.

00:10:52.87 [Tim Wilson]: With those percentages to clarify, you’re saying that’s the percentage of projects used to be available or requested by the analytics.

00:10:59.44 [Michael Helbling]: So I had the same B2C product, it lends itself to, I’m in retail, I use marketing analytics and digital analytics to help me understand customer behavior.

00:11:10.67 [Jim Cain]: We talked before Was it the last episode we did where we were like in defense of the hippo? With that in mind, is that disconnect showing up in this data? Like CMOs are like, I’m spending money on it. I don’t think we’re doing anything with it. I don’t have access to the analysts.

00:11:28.45 [Tim Wilson]: But that actually might nail it. Like that may be the persona. If you were going to put a slide up and say that, that’s what it is. All I can do is spend money on it. That’s the easiest thing, not that it’s easy to carve out money from somewhere else. I’m committing to spending more, yet I’m doing that partly because I’m frustrated that we’re not getting more use out of it. But I don’t know that CMOs are recognizing that disconnect.

00:11:53.59 [Michael Helbling]: What do they know?

00:11:57.32 [Jim Cain]: Well, nothing from their analysts, apparently.

00:11:59.24 [Michael Helbling]: That’s kind of what I mean. I want to talk to the CMO, right? If I’m an analyst in a company, the CMO and I should be friends. We should be working together. And if I’m not talking the CMO’s language, he and I or she and I are not going to, we’re not going to hang out, right? So we don’t stay the same things or think the same things. Well, let’s jump to another section. So what else did you guys see? What else was interesting that we can talk about?

00:12:28.88 [Tim Wilson]: That one was kind of a, wow, if you look at these and you compare them, you kind of scratch your head and say, this doesn’t, this doesn’t feel good. The one that is probably more mind blowing is that 13.2% was the percent of the respondents have been able to quantify the impact of social media. No big surprise. It’s tough. it’s tough to quantify the impact of social media. Now 42%, 41.8% said that they have a qualitative sense that it’s working for them. So they’re looking around, they’ve got anecdotal evidence, that’s how I’m interpreting that, that yeah, we think this social is a good thing. But 45% haven’t yet been able to show the impact of social media at all. So, okay, yet the expected, the plan, the expectation is that the growth in spend on social is expected to go from 9.9% of their budgets to 22.4% of their budgets over the next five years. So they’re saying half of the respondents are saying we can’t actually quantify the impact of what we’re doing on social, we can’t measure it effectively, and yet we’re going to more than double how much we’re spending on it. That kind of has me scratch my head, whether that is because they assume the measurement will catch up, measurements always lagging the actual channel, history has shown. Or is it that they’re just saying, they’ve kind of thrown their hands up and said, that’s where my consumers are, I’ve got to do it and I’m okay flying blind, I’m okay making this the equivalent of television in the 1970s.

00:14:07.58 [Jim Cain]: But I went through that whole section of slides and in my head I just picture like a chapter title called bullshit. It’s delicious. What does social media do? I don’t know, but we need to use an agency and we need to triple our budget.

00:14:23.22 [Tim Wilson]: Do you want to be where your consumers are? Yes. Do we have data that says consumers are in social? Yes. Okay. that means you need to be in social. Like there’s kind of a if, x, then y. The challenge is that you have no ability to tune that in any way and you can waste a ton of money on social if you don’t have any way to compare different efforts, different activities. And I question whether there is any sense of yes, we have a plan to do that. We have a plan to move those percentages.

00:14:58.33 [Michael Helbling]: What I’d like to know is, who are these 13% of companies who have quantitatively proven the impact of social? I’m fascinated by that. There’s a lot we could learn from those companies. How do we grow that? Or are those just the disillusioned CMOs who think they’re doing that, and they should be over in the 45% who haven’t been able to show the impact yet?

00:15:22.19 [Tim Wilson]: Or maybe the breakout. by industry or detail would show, or are they just uniquely in an area where it’s easier? There is a rationale for having a direct response social call, and therefore it’s a simpler world of saying, yes, we can quantify that we generated X dollars of revenue as direct click-throughs from social. We built a product that lives inside of Facebook or something. our entire, I don’t know, and there’s that extreme, there’s also ones that say, yeah, we’re a low-cost seller of something and people just follow us for deals. But yeah, that’s a good point. It would be great to try to understand.

00:16:04.78 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and I always see, in my mind, when I see kind of the lay of this, I always think about the Gardener hype cycle. We’re now at this peak of whatever that peak is called. You guys know what I’m talking about? The what? The Gardener what? hype cycle. Oh, yeah, yeah, the Gartner hype cycle, yeah. And so in a certain sense, we were talking about analytics before, maybe we’re in the trough of disillusionment around that. And right now, social is really at this really high expectation. I believe in this, and we just think it’s going to create so much value for us as a company. We’re going to put a ton more money into it. even though we haven’t been able to prove out quantitatively what it’s doing for us as a business.

00:17:01.71 [Tim Wilson]: So that’s, you know, I was actually talking to somebody today because a few years ago I sort of had a minor epiphany and I called it the frustration gap, but now I kind of want to don’t want to map it to the to the Gartner hype cycle where we know that there is much, much more data out there. And so our expectation is now that we haven’t been able to tie our spend on these marketing channels directly to the end result. We now have massive more amounts of data. Our assumption is that with more data, we now have the ability to tie from a tweet all the way to a purchase or from a TV view or from an ad view or from a banner ad. And so more data becomes available, we actually can measure more and get more visibility, much more than we could 10 years ago, but the expectation has kind of shot past that. And so when you’re asking a question of, you know, are you measuring this effectively, you’re getting low measured, low scores because the expectation is inflated rather than because you’re truly under delivering. If the expectations come down, then on a seven point scale, you’re going to get a higher rating. Is that possible?

00:18:16.84 [Jim Cain]: I just rolled a die 20 and killed you with my trough of disillusionment.

00:18:21.47 [Michael Helbling]: But I just had the plateau of enlightenment and had a saving throw.

00:18:27.52 [Jim Cain]: Wow. Consultants are awesome.

00:18:31.45 [Michael Helbling]: especially the analytics kind. So here’s another thing I thought was really interesting to me.

00:18:37.05 [Tim Wilson]: If you look over on slide 43 of the document, it’s talking about using… For the listeners who are following along while driving in the car, we do not recommend that you look at slide 43 right now.

00:18:50.03 [Michael Helbling]: People read in the car all the time. It’s just a fact of life now.

00:18:53.39 [Tim Wilson]: I’m in the car right now.

00:18:55.47 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. No, but it’s talking about using online customer behavioral data. and how you expect to use it in the future and things like that. And it’s really interesting because everybody thinks they’re going to use more of that. And so this just validates kind of what we’re already seeing, which is right now is a great time to be a DMP, right? Moeving data from a behavioral collection platform over to places where I can use it for marketing purposes, whether that be site-side optimization or media segmentation or anything like that, There’s a big future in that. So that’s, you’re looking for new business ideas.

00:19:34.20 [Tim Wilson]: You’re an investment. So I will, so two things. One, Jim and I are in the same room because we’re at the same conference. So I wound up having dinner last night with a, they’re not a DMP, but they are kind of a customer behavioral cross channel data collection platform. And it was interesting watching one of their customers ask them, start throwing out other companies that were kind of in a similar space and the vendor, had not heard of like half of them. So I think that maybe it’s another area, you know, we’ve talked about the Martech, you know, technology landscape before that there’s just this explosion of companies and there is an explosion of investment and it’s slides like these that say, or it’s results like these that say 92.3% of CMOs are going to increase their use of customer behavior data, well, guess what? You see a number like that, and you say, I’m going to start a company like that, or if I’m a VC, I’m going to invest in a company like that. Whether or not that actually bears out remains to be seen. But you contrast that with the question about concerns about privacy, and they’re like, eh, not really.

00:20:46.02 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, nobody is concerned about privacy as much as you would think. Yeah, that was interesting.

00:20:52.91 [Jim Cain]: The thing that I wonder about these, I mean, I always think of the X plus one right up in Wall Street Journal that made everybody freak out a few years ago.

00:21:00.78 [Tim Wilson]: Can you give the Coles notes on the X plus one?

00:21:04.34 [Jim Cain]: Hey, can they reference?

00:21:05.86 [Tim Wilson]: We’re in the same room. I’m trying to be civil.

00:21:07.78 [Jim Cain]: Michael, do you remember this one? It was like a Wall Street Journal article from three years ago or something. Hold on.

00:21:13.07 [Michael Helbling]: I’m accessing my deep brain.

00:21:16.07 [Jim Cain]: You mean you’re Googling it? No. I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was a big credit card one and they used X plus one where they tied together your web data, offline data, cooperative data, and they would show you a credit card product designed specifically for who they think you are and their accuracy level was like through the roof. Okay. And so then the rest of the article was like a detailed breakdown on why aren’t there checks and balances? Do you realize these kinds of things are possible? And it blew my mind. I didn’t, because we don’t do stuff like that. I don’t know if CMOs are buying technology that necessarily does this, but they’re being sold it. I think if you asked this same question and you said, in ways like this, your average CMO would come back and be like, hell no, that’s creepy, but we’re doing this part. Like we’re doing a small subset of what that means.

00:22:14.41 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but I mean, the question, and this was slide 44 in that highlights and insights deck, was how worried are you that the use of online customer data could raise questions about privacy? So it’s just the use of it could raise questions, right? Not even like you’ll get burned or it’s an ethical issue or it could damage your business. It’s just like that it could raise questions. And it was again a seventh point scale, seven being very worried, one being not at all worried. If you do the math, it’s something well over 50%. Close to 60% were three or below.

00:22:53.33 [Jim Cain]: Online customer data to most people and to most practitioners is visits, traffic source. You don’t think you can do anything creepy with it. until you realize that what this question actually means is we can mash it up with your customer file. We can mash it up with one of these data cooperatives. You can do unbelievably 1984 stuff. And I think, again, when you ask this question with the word online in it, a CMO is going to go, no, what do I care?

00:23:26.51 [Tim Wilson]: Because they’re thinking aggregate web analytics, and we’re going to use that as opposed to The slippery slope from there to retargeting, to really building out a cross channel, cross customer record is a slippery one. I remember seeing some of the academic exercises where they said, we’ve gone to see how much stuff can we find out about. It’s a way that doesn’t scale, but they can say, hey, it’s crazy how much we can. I do think that’s, again, a whole other episode. This is just generating potential future episodes. But the privacy concerns, one, there’s the delta between when one company proves out something as theoretically possible and that can get spun as, oh my god, companies can do this tomorrow, whereas the reality is companies have trouble getting their base web analytics page tag consistently deployed on all pages on their site. So it’s a theoretical, but not as real risk.

00:24:28.36 [Michael Helbling]: But still, you have to say that it’s probably an existential threat to… I mean, privacy probably is a whole other… Well, right, because what would this chart look like if we asked CMOs in the EU, right? I bet it would have a whole other complexion. But it’s one of those things that, again, it’s a combination of most companies don’t have some sort of evil plan to get at you with all this data. They’re just not that competent, to be frank. But on the flip side, that lack of foresight of how are we going to use this data can quickly take a company in a direction that they could come to regret. Just because they did it blindly and then suddenly end up with an outcome of, hey, we’ve got a really useful thing that also is just doing something with our customer’s information that is awkward and potentially not a good thing.

00:25:28.13 [Tim Wilson]: Right. So that’s the sort of the cognitive dissonance of, and Jim, I think you kind of hit it earlier where If you say, I’m thinking of it as a marketer and this mass of a pool of people that we can collect stuff and market to more effectively, and then if you actually pivot it and say, okay, that means, here’s what, if you were one of our consumers, we would be doing X, Y, and Z, and they’re like, oh, wait a minute, or not you for your 13-year-old daughter, you know, this is what that means. And then, like, all of a sudden, they’re creeped out, and I don’t know that that is being, you know, we’re hungry for saying, we want to know, we want to segment down, we want to personalize, we want to make things relevant, It’s like, well, to really make stuff relevant, you really have to have a lot of information, which means you’re going to have that information. And if that was you, would you be creeped out?

00:26:15.31 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. So there’s one more slide I want to jump to really quick. And then I think we should probably start to wrap things up here. But there was another slide that I thought was interesting in the analytics section. It’s slide 65. And it’s talking about, does your company formally evaluate the quality of your marketing analytics? I thought that was really interesting from a data governance perspective. And of course, the vast majority don’t do anything to evaluate how good of a quality is the analytics data or analytics that we’re doing. And I thought that was really interesting too. Any quick comments on that?

00:26:51.40 [Jim Cain]: I think it’s interesting that it says marketing analytics and not digital analytics.

00:26:55.94 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, probably because it’s all encompassing. The numbers would be way lower. You think there’d be a smaller percentage. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s funny when I read that and this is, I am not a survey writer, I’m not a methodology person because I read it almost as the value delivered, but I think you’re right. That’s actually more data quality question and it does go to probably the reality. And to Jim’s point, if marketing analytics includes my customer database, that’s probably have a little more of a runway to get customer data. It had been in place and web analytics because so much of the data is not tied to a specific customer record is kind of the, just like organizationally, it’s often still sort of living off in a silo. That kind of says if you don’t, then you must not have a formal data governance plan because isn’t that one of the tenants of governance is actually ongoing evaluation of data quality?

00:27:49.69 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, or at least maintenance of that quality, which means you’re evaluating it on some capacity. Anyway, I think that’s really interesting. I would love a follow-up question to this about, do you intend to formally evaluate if you answered no? Because that would be an interesting thing to see if it was an emerging area of concern. So, you know, if anyone from, you know, the CMO survey, if you go to school of business is listening, you know, that’s a freebie. from helbling to you. We should be so fortunate. Anyway, let me throw it back out. Let’s wrap up. What are some of the big picture takeaways for you guys out of this?

00:28:29.48 [Tim Wilson]: To me, I think it’s pretty brief. I think there is some kind of dissonance going on. I read these and say these don’t almost everything that we hit on, that we’re going to invest more in social, yet we’re not measuring it effectively. We’re going to invest more in marketing analytics, yet we’re not using it what’s available to us now and we’re not seeing it as super valuable. If I were a CMO reviewing this and I noted those, I’d be looking in the mirror saying, wait a minute, What is my plan? Because my guess is they’re answering a lot of these questions without really thinking through what is their roadmap to get to a point where those answers make sense. That they should be looking at that and saying, I better come up with a plan to square this. I’m going to be investing more in social. I better figure out What I’m going to do, I have to either set my expectations and be really clear, you know, come up with some sort of plan where I can kind of rationalize why I’m doing this and my instincts are that that’s not actually happening, that it’s just kind of a little bit more of a wish and a prayer than this is a formal roadmap that I can rationalize. That’s it. That was as short as I get.

00:29:45.39 [Jim Cain]: You’re like, I’m going to be brief and then I fell asleep. I agree with most of the things that you said, Tim, except that, you know, the real standout to me is, again, this disconnect in terms of I’m willing to spend a lot more and not just on social, but on people who don’t work for me to do our social. And I’m spending a little bit more on measurement, but I’m not really deriving value or really taking advantage of it. I think social is like a thing. It’s like a pair of shoes and measurement is like your heartbeat. It’s like your vital signs. It’s not something that people can easily bring in from outside. It definitely highlights that CMOs aren’t winning or what’s the Tom Davenport book competing on analytics. Moest CMOs are not competing on analytics. Because I wonder if they had answered all the measurement questions oppositely, if all of the social media questions would have been down in the other direction.

00:30:49.57 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, interesting.

00:30:50.31 [Jim Cain]: If they said we’re measuring the heck out of it and we’re going to be reducing our investment, yeah. Yeah, so they’re like, everything we do, we measure it and I understand those numbers. And by the way, I eat a lot of bullshit. We’re not going to buy any more social media.

00:31:04.79 [Michael Helbling]: How was the last time you heard Groupon mentioned as a darling, right?

00:31:08.92 [Jim Cain]: Fastest company to a billion dollars.

00:31:11.42 [Michael Helbling]: No, a lot of cool things, but they’re not where they used to be. And it’s because people were using data to realize, hey, we’re not getting a lot out of this investment.

00:31:20.13 [Tim Wilson]: What about your takeaways there?

00:31:22.65 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I mean, part of the reason why I’m such a big fan of this survey is it gives this great perspective from a totally different angle on the stuff that we do as digital analytics people and marketing analytics people. And it’s great to see someone else’s point of view and try to interpret kind of what that means to us and how we should do something differently or not differently based on that. And it’s fascinating. And as much as maybe I want it to be, an alarmist or existential threat or whatever. My key takeaway is that probably it’s not as huge a threat as I might have come in thinking, but it’s really profound. I love looking at it every six months and just sort of… So Jim Cain is an existential threat? Yeah, well, he’s from Canada.

00:32:11.61 [Jim Cain]: That’s the name I used to wrestle under.

00:32:16.75 [Michael Helbling]: So that’s my big takeaway is this is a great way to see another point of view or another facet of our awesome industry. So hey, if you’re a CMO and are participating in this survey, we’d love to hear from you. Or if you want to be a CMO someday, we’d love to hear your opinion as well. We highly recommend you download this report and take a look at it. I think there’s some really great information for you and your organization.

00:32:43.47 [Tim Wilson]: To be fair, if you’re an analyst and actually have different takeaways, which is a lot more realistic, we’d love to hear from you too.

00:32:51.02 [Michael Helbling]: Couldn’t an analyst aspire to be a CMO?

00:32:53.74 [Jim Cain]: When you tweeted about the podcast, use hash mark existential threat. Hashtag. Yeah.

00:33:02.79 [Michael Helbling]: That will be fun to track. Oh, we don’t track social. We don’t have any quantitative impact of social going on here. Who’s our CMO? Anyway, so again, hey, thanks for listening. We love the opportunity to hear from you. Of course, there’s a couple of ways you can do that on our Facebook page at facebook.com slash analytics hour and on Twitter at analytics hour. And of course, you can find us on the Measure Slack group. So check that out if you haven’t. Again, for Tim and Jim Wilson, no.

00:33:42.28 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, now. OK, fine. We actually, we’ve been betrothed during the course of this. I think we should alternate. Yeah. I was going to tell our wife.

00:33:49.77 [Michael Helbling]: Wilson Cain. No. For Tim Wilson. And Jim. Cain Wilson sounds like something to like to do. I would vote for that ticket in 2016. That’s all I’m saying. Of course, I think Tim, you would have to be president given that Jim is not an American.

00:34:06.17 [Tim Wilson]: He’d be kind of the joy when we drive this kind of e-brake. Yeah, my people have the right to arm bears and bear onsite.

00:34:15.72 [Michael Helbling]: All right, so thanks for listening. We love to hear from you. Thanks again. See you next time. Later. Cheers.

00:34:24.73 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. facebook.com/analyticshour or @analyticshour on Twitter.

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