CMOs will add more than $100 billion to their decision-making accountabilities before 2030 as marketing's influence grows, says Infosys SVP

News Plus 19 Aug 2024 - 4 min read

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Tags: Infosys Marketing technology

With CMOs increasingly at home in the global corporate c-suite, marketing can expect to have much more influence and accountability, says a key Infosys executive. Part of the reason is AI, which means it's time to cozy up even more closely to the CIO. But as marketing leaders make hard technology choices that balance the power of centralised stacks with the growing flexibility of composable technology architectures (basically plug and play) Infosys believes there is a big opportunity to develop a marketing orchestration layer sitting inbetween powerful, easy-to-use desktop martech, and the complexity of the data analytics layer.

Gone are the days where you can think of a marketing organisation as purely a brand and creative organisation. Technology has become central to the marketing function.

— Balaji Sampath, Senior Vice President and Segment Head for Marketing, Infosys

The influence of the CMO organisation is growing significantly, and over the next three years marketing leaders will add $100 billion in increment spend to their areas of responsibility, a senior Infosys executive forecasts.

According to Balaji Sampath, Senior Vice President and Segment Head for Marketing at Infosys, the areas of organisations where CMOs have responsibility or influence will increase from 59 per cent to 75 per cent over the next three years.

“That’s about $100 billion in incremental spend over the next that the CMOs will be responsible for. This is based on various industry analyst analysis as well as our own research," he tells Mi3. "The overall market space we are in is projected to grow to about $350 billion [in that time] and I think right now it's about $220+billion dollars."

One of the biggest drivers of this growth is artificial intelligence (AI). “AI is playing a very integral role. That also means that CMO and CIO partnerships will become even more critical," Sampath suggests.

That’s a particular strength for Infosys, which comes from a technology systems integration heritage but is now building out consulting capabilities. Probably the closest comparison in this market is Accenture Song, with whom Infosys competes.

Wider remit

The extension of CMO responsibilities is not simply a matter of pushing the marketing boundaries wider. Instead, according to Sampath, it's a function of CMOs being treated as peers by other c-suite executives.

“Gone are the days when you can think of a marketing organisation as purely a brand and creative organisation. Technology has become central to the marketing function," he continues.

As Mi3 reported earlier this year, Infosys has launched Infosys AsterTM, a suite of AI-amplified marketing services, solutions and platforms. The new offering aims to deliver engaging brand experiences, enhance marketing efficiency, and accelerate business growth.

The company describes Infosys AsterTM as providing an integrated, real-time view across customers, brands, channels, and trends that enables its clients to increase ROI from marketing by providing a comprehensive view of their marketing landscape.

Martech tensions

Sampath also spies tension around marketing technology decisions as CMOs choose between function-rich marketing clouds and more composable approaches. This is particularly so when the pressure to rationalise market spend remains high.

“In fact, we are also having this conversation inside Infosys. We see two areas of focus in the martech stack. One is your platform play, whether it is with likes of a Google or an Adobe and so on. But we are actually seeing a good surge of boutique capabilities, [for instance where] someone is just focusing on delivering the retargeting and so on and so forth," he explains.

It's this gap Infosys has identified as a huge potential opportunity.

“We believe this is an opportunity that no product company can try [to meet]. It's probably something which will be unique to an SI [systems integrator] like Infosys," Sampath claims. "Can we create an entire marketing orchestration platform for martech? How can we enable enterprises to adopt great desktop martech technologies without having to worry about the data and the insights? And how can you create that platform layer, where your data and insights will always be central, but where you are able to plug and play the desktop martech technology?”

With the emergence of AI and its continuing evolution, Sampath expects a lot of new capabilities to come online. “We should provide our customers the ability to embrace desktop technology. And that is is our philosophy, and what we are actually working on.

“As we look at the marketing stack itself, we need to rationalise and identify which of them are delivering value, which of them are not delivering value.”

It important to recognise the areas not delivering value may not be the technology either.

“It might be about the marketing or the organisation not embracing it and learning from it. Marketers for the next three years to five years, need to have a passion to understand the impact that technology can deliver to amplify their marketing capabilities," Sampath adds. “If they do not embrace technology holistically, I feel they will become a legacy in the marketing domain.”