According to Business Week, a CMO’s average tenure is only 28 months. Only 14 percent of CMOs for the worlds top brands have been in their jobs more than three years.

That’s dramatically different from their C-level peers:

• CEOs overall have an average tenure of 95 months (ITBusiness Edge)
• Fortune 1000 CEOs on average last 73 months. (Forbes.com)
• CFO average tenure is 52 months (CFO.com)
• CIO Tenure is 76 months. (ITBusiness Edge)

Change in Marketing Isn’t Always Good
High leadership turnover disrupts innovation and breeds chaos. New leaders often turn to their firm’s creative efforts to show fast, tangible change. This almost always distracts from thornier interdepartmental issues, which is where market strategy meets the firm.  This muddies the firm’s identity in the marketplace, and internally makes the new CMO seem fixated on advertising or MarCom rather than strategy and revenue growth.

There’s also a temptation for CMOs to bring in their own team, which can tank productivity while the new arrivals figure out the business and the remaining crop of young marketers politically showcase their worthiness.  Introducing a “hired gun” CMO raises fair questions about the career path for the company’s emerging marketing talent, many of whom will take the lesson that the path to promotion is an external one.

Marketing’s horse power has increased, it now has mechanisms to deliver 1:1 personalized mass marketing, using optimization, social CRM, and elaborate analytics. It is gaining a crew of experts in these disciplines, and more than ever CEO’s look to marketing to lead revenue growth. It no time for marketing’s leadership to be driving under a yellow flag.

Here are my thoughts on what we need to change in marketing — and by “we” I mean all of us: everyone in business.

Truth #1: Nobody Knows What the Hell Marketing is Doing
Why do Chief Marketers last one-third the time of their executive peers? The short answer: nobody knows what marketing is doing, and it’s easy for outsiders to imagine they can run the “make-it-pretty department”  better. That’s what phrases like “misaligned performance expectations” boil down to.

Fact #2: Marketing Needs to Get Its Professional House in Order
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Richard Barker described a profession as a “generally accepted and relatively permanent knowledge asymmetry.” It’s when people recognize that practitioners of a discipline generally know more about a certain topic than than they do, and so trust their advice.

The body of knowledge required of physicians, lawyers, and even project managers is highly codified. In my current department, my first priority was setting a base of analytics and design doctrine so my digital managers could have a shared approach to the basics of our work.

Ask 40 marketers what a brand is: you’ll get 40 often very different answers. Until we have a common language and consistency, it’s no wonder that marketing seems to be “everywhere and nowhere at once.”

Fact #3: Uniform Reporting Drives Accountability, Credibility, and Visibility
Why is it that the collaboration of Marketing and Finance so often starts at the most rudimentary level?  The CEO has the general structure of a balance sheet whose key metrics are used to compare the financial performance of companies across industries. Profit and Loss Statements are standardized via Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), trued through an audit, and used as reliable corporate measures from Kansas to Kuala Lumpur.

But the Association of National Advertisers’ Marketing Accountability Conference found that most  financial executives don’t accept Marketing’s forecasts or ROI calculations.

• Nine out of 10 said they don’t use ROI metrics to set marketing budgets in the annual budgeting cycle.
• Seven out of 10 said their companies don’t use marketing inputs and forecasts in financial guidance to Wall Street or public disclosures.
• Four out of 10 said marketing forecasts made inside their company can’t pass the muster of a standard corporate audit.

CFOs and CMOs need to work together to build a shared business model, grounded in a set of key performance metrics that connect it to revenue and value creation.

Fact #4: GAAP Should Recognize Corporate Fortunes Are Tied to Brand Equity

The accounting profession’s conventions have been slow to recognize the growth of brand value as a corporate asset. Perhaps more than any other factor, this blind spot allows marketing to remain a dark art.

GAAP standards don’t account for the value of brands until a company is bought or sold. This creates a disconnect between marketing and the rest of the firm that orients its actions to the corporate balance sheet. I believe the creation of consistent and reliable standards for marketing measurement is the single most important business issue of this decade.

Jonathan Knowles and Wolff Olins blogged for Emory Universities Brand Institute:

To qualify as an “asset” in financial terms, a brand needs to be measured in terms of its ability to generate future cash flow… Changes in customer attitudes are nice, but in and of themselves they do not generate cash flow.

Their post goes on to recount a half-dozen models for estimating brand health and value. Fifteen years ago, the doctoral students teaching my finance classes were working on ways to get brand equity on the books.

While there’s plenty marketers can do to standardize their practices and work across departments, assigning a book value to the health of brands will both give a better view of corporate value to owners — and bring one of marketing’s primary fixations on to the corporate ledger.

Art takes thought.
What is art without thought? Don’t know, but kids are great at it.  Maybe joy, or play.

Remember play?
Play is the work of childhood.  So is art the work of life?
Perhaps on our best days.

Craft embodies art. But art is more than craft.

Art is how you use craft to bravely move an audience.

So, to review:
Must have craft. | Must apply it with intent. | Must have audience. | Audience must move.

Like romance, no?

When my mom died, I got her address book.  Every friend’s birthday, the names of their spouse and kids, even when they graduated was written there.  It was a record of her memory and some of her values.

I don’t keep an address book, not even really in Outlook.  Most of that lives in social media.  If I wanted to find Chuck, I’d zap him a note through LinkedIn, and regardless of where he was working, or riding his bike, the message would get through.

So this raises a question: How do we pass on those contacts and values to our survivors?  A recent  SXSW panel asked the practical question “Who Will Check My Email When I Die?”  The social media equivalent may be “Who Will Update My Status When I Die?”

Your Digital Legacy
My lawyer friends and I have always wondered about digital inheritance, and if businesses would rise up to provide escrow services for endowing our digital selves.  Who will be your digital executor?

Back in the 90’s before there were blogs, I researched thousands of history dates associated with Boston, and with the help of a friend made a self-updating history website that had something to say about each day of the year.  This was a work of love, and I realized that someday my kids might enjoy my thoughts or even add to them after my demise.  So why not endow the website to keep running as an echo of a desire to share these stories?

Do You Think About Your Digital Life Exceeding Your Natural One?
Do you think about this stuff?  Do you visit the pages of departed friends, or think about what passwords you’d pass on? And if you think about extending your online life beyond your actual life, how do you imagine that happening?

I’ll post some resources in the comments, and hope you will too.  And I’d be delighted to talk a little about managing our digital afterlives.

Cereal companies lie about their products’ ability to bolster immunity during an epidemic, cars accelerate for no apparent reason, and pharma companies market birth-control drugs to improve mood and complexion.

The need for corporate liability — not to mention the hypocrisy of “caps” — has never been clearer.

Businesses want the courts all to themselves
Corporations want tort reform to keep people from suing them. And, hypocritically, they want to be free to sue you.

A single track of music can be a $15,000 copyright award.  Playing a song in a gym or barber shop can draw fines for public performance.  Jail-breaking your iPhone or providing false information when signing up for a social network can be prosecuted as serious offenses.

Businesses also want to sue each other. Our friends at The Pop Tort recently found a great example of this hypocrisy:

We are thrilled to report that Wright Medical Group Inc and Howmedica Osteonics Corp., a subsidiary of Stryker Corp., have resolved their copyright infringement lawsuit!  “The lawsuit, which was filed in 2000, alleged that Wright Medical’s Advance knee implant product violated a patent held by Howmedica, which sought an order of infringement and unspecified damages.” We thought this one was particularly ironic given that right now, medical device companies are completely immune for any liability for implanting defective devices into people. How nice that their copyright complaints haven’t been touched.

So, let’s see:  BP wants to cap claims of liability, as does Massey Energy, Toyota, and Bayer. But if you spoof their logos, they are quite free to file a meritless SLAPP lawsuit (“strategic lawsuit against public participation”) or takedown demand. The same corporations that claim political speech rights, seek to limit the access of real people to the courts.

Corporations are working to have it both ways for themselves. But the events of day are making that pretty hard.

In 2010, civil justice is broadly relevant in a way it hasn’t been for decades.
And, if this causes defensive medicine, more product testing, and redundancy to prevent environmental catastrophes … but, maybe it’s about time. This may be the decade when the laissez-faire “market knows best” ethic of the 80’s shifts to a market directed toward civic good, or at least the avoidance of creating new civic ills.  And those ills, so far, seem to define this new decade more than any other zeitgeist.

I recently came across this Godin collection of single slides by 70 experts from various disciplines to share their views of the future in a single page. It’s provocative Sunday reading.  Download it as a PDF here.

Take a look, and if you like, please post a comment to share what you think.

They Are Buying Technology
Did you know that 11% of households run by people over 65 have gaming units?  Yes, they bowl on Wii – unlike kids today, seniors know how to bowl. NPR’s On the Media did a great segment on accessibility design in gaming, which mentions the needs of seniors.

Back in 1997 seniors were the fastest-growing demographic on the Internet.  Just as our kids are comfortable with technology, so now are our elders.  They have resources, shop online, and participate in social networks (here are 50 social networks for seniors.)  And, they are a growing segment.

So, are you designing your marketing experience for seniors?

This Market Has Special Product Needs
Consider the Go Computer, designed for grandparents.  It has accessibility factors, such as larger keys with some color coding on them.  It has easy magnification on a large, bright screen.

Since the data is stored on the Net, it’s always backed up. And for a small fee the firm provides system upgrades, virus protection, and all the things that make computers seem more like pets to be fed than everyday tools.

What other services or items are ripe for senior marketing?  Music?  Beauty products?  In my case, I hope to retire and spin and DJ in the London underground.  Providing I can find a mix console with really big buttons on it.

But in games, people apply themselves to overcome obstacles and often create alternative better selves.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and she has a goal to increase game play to 21 billion hours per week — and to make better games.

There’s no unemployment in World of Warcraft. There is, in fact, more industry than in real life.  And good, clear incentives and feedback.  Young people who game normally will log 10,000 hours of games by age 21. That’s the same number of hours of school from 5th to 12th grade. That’s enough to be virtuoso gamers.

And here’s what the 1.5 billion gamers are virtuosos at, and why society (and your business) needs them:

!) Urgent Optimism: they want to act immediately, and believe they can win.
!!) Social Fabric: they connect and say in the game.
!!!) Blissful Productivity: they’re happier working hard and being engaged.
!!!!) Epic Meaning: they love to be part of the epic story.

In this preso from the TED conference, McGonigal debuts EVOKE, a game-based crash course in changing the world. It’s connected with African universities and the World Bank, which will recognize gamers who complete it. Her story from Herodotus about the Lydians, which was possibly a gaming culture, is worth the watch alone.

Who knows: perhaps next we’ll hear that Farmville is really all about training people for sustainable agriculture.

In talking with people about the post The Siteless Web and the End of Brand Website Rule: Web 3.0, I found myself suggesting that online visitors will encounter us through three types of experiences:

1. Sites we control: traditional, publishing-based information distribution.
2. Sites others control: content and social networks that put our message under others’ control.
3. Applications: either as interface, such as Tweetdeck, or as aggregation point, such as Salesforce.

Of course, sites others control are quite likely driven by applications.  Facebook is an application; so is Google search. But they typically appear to users as websites.

The move away from a page-based user-experience to an application metaphor has been slowly approaching for years. The “portal” was said to break that metaphor.  Same with the idea of the application put on online and sold as a service. This has been a slow shift.  Video, AJAX, and data-driven services all exceed the page metaphor. It’s been hanging by a thread for some time.

However, there is a huge change happening in how people access the web. The move from “screen” to “hand-held” is the continental divide that will shift development away from the page metaphor.

• 75% of Twitter access doesn’t come through its web page at all. It’s through API-integrated applications, which provide a richer, easier-to-use application-type experience, particularly via mobile devices.
• Consider the proliferation of mobile applications for iPhone and iPad – the internet will be increasingly used as a medium for people interacting with applications, not browsers and HTML pages.

The Web Has No Pages, Really.
Web pages are not pages at all. In some ways they are still inferior to their printer counterparts.  Turning a page is instant; loading a page is still far from that. Viewing a page is consistent with the designer’s execution, while web pages render in a variety of ways, based on programming and browser technology.

As we move from the screen to hand display, we will consume ever more information through applications.  They provide more consistent, space-concentrated, responsive user experiences.  Web and application design will completely overlap.

Will Corporate and Brand Websites Still Have a Place?
Absolutely.  But the Chief Listening Officer and Engagement Architects from the company application will have a greater share of the juicer innovation projects that define the firm.

Compare this to annual reports, business cards, or printed resumes.  Corporations still make lovely annual reports.  They just don’t matter as much now that other channels provide richer expressions of the corporate brand.  People still have business cards, but when was the last time you were impressed by high-quality card stock?

So by all means finish that corporate website redesign. But then, seriously, it’s time to look to the other buckets of web distribution and figure out what’s really next.

This is an idea I hope we can start to discuss in all the places we talk about the future of the Web.

It is from one of this blog’s first posts, in 2007, Web 3.0 – Envisioning the Web’s Next Big Change.

Here’s the idea:

Web 3.0 will be characterized by integration of the web into application-driven experiences. If user-generated content is a mainstay of 2.0 – then machine integrated content is the base of Web 3.0.

The result will be a web experience that at first is highly distributed and less centered on home pages. This, I believe, will easily transition to applications experiences that don’t rely on the conventions of pages, sites, or even being online.

This systematic integration is already changing the web.

• Its technical drivers include the use of XML, ASP business models, open id/federated identity, rich media applications and open APIs. (Think of Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter).
• Its legal driver is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Web 2.0 is enabled through this provisions subsidy of legal immunity for republishers.)
  
• Its market drivers include the desire to organize and unify (mash-up) information from distributed sources such as social networks to create consolidated user experiences (think Salesforce and Hootsuite).

In many cases (Web 3.0) won’t appear to be the Web at all. Applications will consume and produce public web content — but the user experience will be increasingly mediated. The online experience will be increasingly an application experience.

In a Web 2.0 world, brands built their own sites, and customers said what brands stood on them and on social sites. In a Web 3.o world, the concept of specific sites evolves into offsite experiences and mash-ups that integrate content.

The Web 3.0 world is less about place (or domain) than voice and identity.

Section 230 Protection Is a Root of the Siteless Web
As this is both a legal and tech blog, I should point out that most of the “siteless web” today is hugely “subsidized” by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Our current connected network of application sites that aggregate or host ideas contributed by others would likely not exist without this legal structure.

Example 1: Brand Sites Don’t Frame Brands; Web Applications Like Search and Social Media Do.
Go type Modernista.com into Google. Click on the first result.

Modernista! doesn’t produce or promote a home website at all. It has created an interface to the web.

The firm’s customers make a considered purchase that is more influenced by what others say than how an agency describes itself on its brand sites.

The Modernista! site is an interface to a distributed set of links to other websites. Their “About Us” section is Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter. Their portfolio is on Delicious.  Their news section is what Google News and Google Blog Search say about them.

Their authority is not from the endorsement of these sites. It is from the ideas posted by those who use them. Modernista!’s credibility comes from the sites they don’t control — and ironically, those sites don’t control the content either.

The truth from outside the company can be rewarding and risky.

Did they just win an award, lose an account, post an idea? Customers know that truth and brand are in fact different things. Modernista! realized this early, and has managed to that new reality.

Example 2: Brands Migrate Off-Site to “Fish Where the Fish Are.”
Some businesses are choosing to skip building their own sites or to promote their off-site presences ahead of the brand website.

The kayak rental shop I went to on vacation decided to forego the work of building, maintaining, and promoting its own site.

Instead, it set up an easy-to-remember Meetup account and positioned itself where its demographic was already going.

In the past, brand sites have tried to build their own communities. Most failed. Brands aren’t naturally good at aggregating audiences, and most people are too busy to create multiple identities in what are essentially walled gardens run by beer companies, film distributors, or potential lawyers.

But what if brands were in social networks with their clients, and brought something of value to the party? It is easier to do this, and the market-reach results are greater.

Brand Terms Need to Send Competitors to Oblivion, Not Win Top Spots.
The most obvious example of this may be our own names.  Search Google for “Dave Wieneke.” Just like with Modernista! you’ll see a string of pages that I either partly control or don’t control at all:

• LinkedIn (which is all about connecting and endorsing others)
• UsefulArts and its Twitter discussion.
• The law blog portal Lexmonitor.
• My presentation on Usability and Brand Power on SlideShare.
• And so on…

The goal isn’t to change the order of these results; it’s to make sure there is positive coverage of Dave Wieneke the digital marketer, as opposed to the ichthyologist or the golf pro with the same name.

Now see how this applies to the former model of the monolithic brand website. For SEO these smaller results work as a team, not to take the top position, but to take up many positions on the page.

Decentralized and Recentralized
But this tactic isn’t just for doing Google searches on ourselves. This fundamental change will shift the landscape on how brands reach people. Email marketing (a sweet spot for me) will be fundamentally transformed. And application and machine design will start to leverage this change in use cases.

I’m looking forward to elaborating these last points. But for now, do you see this too? Is the brand website in decline, and is it being supplanted by a set of increasingly mashed-up offsite experiences?

It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.

Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate, and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion, and participation.

And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict.

That’s why the Internet is a tool for peace. With it, anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of non-violence.

And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the Net.