Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?

Catching up on my backlog of information and subjects from in advance of #MartechDay earlier this month — which highlighted the 2022 advertising and marketing know-how landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the top of my list is the most up-to-date Point out of Agile Marketing and advertising report from AgileSherpas.

As always, this is a great, thorough report on how and why agile methodologies are becoming employed in internet marketing. You can see from the chart previously mentioned that agile has observed its way into a broad selection of marketing and advertising functions: advertising operations, resourceful companies, website operations, social media, advertising, etc.

It’s even being utilized (30%) in occasions advertising, which has extended been the go-to example for skeptics: “Oh, agile could hardly ever do the job for occasions.” (To be honest, in a digital/hybrid party planet, the pacing and adaptability of occasions advertising and marketing has increased drastically.)

But compared with last year, when 51% of members claimed utilizing agile advertising and marketing, this time only 43% did. That’s close to the 42% from 2020. Is agile marketing and advertising backsliding?

Of study course, the most noticeable disclaimer is the study sample. Even with 513 marketers taking part in this most current survey, it is still a very smaller subset of the numerous advertising and marketing universe and no question issue to the ebbs and flows of assortment bias.

But nonetheless. Right after practically 15 many years of advocacy for agile internet marketing, the momentum of this motion seems… stalled?

Agile advertising and marketing principles, methods & labels

The principles of agile marketing and advertising, however, appear to be universally recognized as gospel truth of the matter these days. I can not think of a solitary marketer I’ve achieved in the earlier quite a few several years who hasn’t embraced the values of adaptability, learning from experimentation, iterative enhancement, cross-workforce collaboration, increased visibility into work-in-flight, group empowerment, and many others.

Advertising and marketing has develop into an agile occupation. Total halt.

Typical agile procedures — these as sprints, every day standups, kanban boards, and many others. — also feel to have proliferated broadly. Whilst in numerous circumstances, they’ve morphed from their unique form. We’ll occur again to that in a minute, as I think it’s the twist of post-agile.

But the labels? Not so a great deal. I pretty almost never hear the phrases sprint, standup, or kanban in advertising and marketing conversations. Even “agile marketing” as a term arises fewer commonly than it seemed a few of decades in the past.

Agile advertising vs. agile enhancement tendencies

A pair of charts from Google Tendencies aid illustrate what’s occurring below. Initial, let’s just glance at the growth of the search term “agile marketing”:

The chart displays relative research volume for this time period around the previous 18 several years. You can see that it peaked around 2017. (A yr after the release of Hacking Marketing and advertising. Coincidence?) Given that then, it is had fluctations up and down. But it mostly hit a ceiling.

To get a superior sense of how a great deal absolute search quantity there is for agile internet marketing, you have to have to assess it in opposition to another craze. So let’s compare it against its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two factors pop right out. 1st, agile marketing and advertising has accomplished only a tiny portion of the mindshare that agile advancement at any time did. 2nd, curiosity in agile advancement has steadily declined given that 2010. It’s all-around 1/4 of the quantity it was at its peak.

What occurred in 2010? The rise of DevOps.

Indeed, DevOps became the big that stood on the shoulders of agile progress. Its attractiveness has dwarfed agile advancement, even from its heyday. And in contrast to those people two, agile advertising would scarcely even register on the scale.

But it’s critical to observe that DevOps arose from Agile. To estimate its Wikipedia article:

“Agile growth teams… could not ‘satisfy the shopper through early and continual shipping of useful software’ until they subsumed the operations / infrastructure tasks involved with their applications, a lot of of which they automated.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the systems growth lifecycle and supply continual shipping with higher application excellent.” What is ongoing integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) if not the greatest mechanism for offering iterative software enhancement?

As Forrest Gump could possibly say, “Agile is as agile does.”

The plummeting expenses of “shipping” in the cloud

To be crystal clear, DevOps is not an agile management methodology. It is not even an “ops” crew (in most conditions) like other ops capabilities, these types of as advertising and marketing ops. Fairly, it’s a set of tactics, procedures, and know-how that builders use to ship software program quickly, iteratively, and properly. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes constructing and deploying computer software, but deciding what to build and when nevertheless needs to materialize at a degree over that. In concept, agile advancement methodologies these types of as Scrum can present the framework for all those conclusions. But most dev groups I know don’t explicitly use individuals methodologies anymore. Most have invented their have procedure, pulling concepts from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev challenge management equipment these as Jira.

My get: DevOps — and much more broadly, the cloud — has considerably lessened the prices of iteratively producing software. Back again in the days when agile methodologies this kind of as Scrum ended up created, the expenses and complexities of shipping and delivery were being significantly higher. The rigid framework of Scrum was an helpful and vital way to manage that. Right now in a good DevOps atmosphere? Not as necessary?

That is not to say that approach, preparing, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration expected around them are not necessary. They’re as essential to achievements as ever. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative launch cycles? Not as necessary?

(Let the flames from ardent agile advocates begin.)

Is there a DevOps equivalent in marketing and advertising?

Internet marketing ops is a various form of creature that DevOps. For a person, it is a role/team in the marketing org, fairly than a follow/method that all entrepreneurs use.

However there is some shared DNA. In lots of methods, marketing and advertising ops teams functionality as a DevOps-like enabler for marketers to be equipped to “ship” promoting rapidly, iteratively, and safely and securely. Internet marketing ops manages the tech stack and processes to empower that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

However with the increase of more and extra no-code capabilities throughout martech, marketing ops is also empowering entrepreneurs with extra and extra self-services capabilities. Just as software package deployment ops received “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into more developers’ fingers with DevOps, extra capabilities to execute marketing — both of those inner and exterior promoting “deployments” — are getting shifted into the fingers of common entrepreneurs.

I never know that there’s a name for this phenomenon. It’s a form of democratization of certain aspects of internet marketing ops. (Preferably beneath the steerage, governance, and guardrails of the specialist internet marketing ops staff.) But it is ever more analogous to DevOps. More people today can ship far more marketing and advertising, speedily, quickly, and safely.

Just as with software program, method, setting up, roadmaps, prioritization, crew coordination and collaboration are vital to efficiently harness this dispersed electrical power of development. But just as likewise, the costs in deploying most varieties of marketing have dropped dramatically more than the previous 10 years. This has created a lot more slack in the advertising and marketing generation process, which has manufactured rigid agile promoting methodologies… not as vital?

(Truthfully posed as a issue, not a declaration.)

New agile procedures: Pods, DARCIs, Slack, “Work OS”

Speaking of slack, or, um, Slack, the earlier 10 many years has also brought an explosion of innovation in do the job communications and collaboration solutions. For occasion, Slack and Microsoft Teams have turn out to be ubiquitous — along with a whole ecosystem of applications that increase and combine with them. A new technology of function management platforms, such as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for marketers) Workfront, offer better construction and visibility into complex, rapid-shifting priorities, tasks, and workflows.

In fact, the Management class of the martech landscape experienced the premier proportion growth from 2020 to 2022.

These tools have experienced a major affect on how operate gets finished. Several of them embed or allow agile (lowercase “a”) practices. Practically none of them use the terminology of agile marketing and advertising methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, operate-in-progress administration, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, I’d say that Slack and Teams — accelerated by the Fantastic Migration to Distant Work — have proficiently killed replaced the daily stand-up for most teams.

But it is not that the fundamental basic principle of stand-ups has gone absent. On the contrary, these team communications platforms normally make it a lot easier for teams to stay linked through the day in a reasonably low-affect method. Problems that occur can be dealt with more rapidly than waiting around for the future stand-up in a preset time window that increasingly fails to align with the schedules of distributed group members.

Hey, I’m nonetheless a substantial fan of in-human being collaboration, and I agree something is lost without it. But other factors are acquired. And for better and even worse, remote and hybrid groups are the new regular. In this courageous new globe, Slack and Teams are a far better healthy than each day stand-ups for numerous.

And it’s not just technology. Administration solutions that I feel of as “point solutions” for distinct needs — in distinction to a entire suite of procedures, as with formal agile promoting — have been popularized for much better cross-functional collaboration (e.g., pods outside the house the context of official agile) and multi-bash decision-making (e.g., DARCI versions).

The web effect? Marketing groups are turning into more and much more agile.

They just do not necessarily imagine of their techniques as official “agile advertising.”

From agile marketing to… advertising?

Whatever transpired to digital promoting? It became marketing and advertising.

Not mainly because advertising turned considerably less electronic. Really the reverse. Digital grew to become so embedded in everything marketers have been carrying out that the label of the profession reverted to the imply: internet marketing. I’d call that a victory for the digital promoting motion, not defeat.

In the same way, is agile advertising just becoming… promoting?

Probably “agile marketing” will restart its expansion as an specific motion. Or perhaps it will be replaced by some newly named methodology that is closer to what DevOps has become in the software package improvement career. Or it’s possible is just gets to be implicit in how modern day internet marketing groups run.

Agile is as agile does.

Irrespective, I nevertheless feel there is a huge prospect for instructing advertising and marketing teams how to ideal harness all these platforms, practices, and procedures. There’s in no way been far more demand from customers for serving to internet marketing groups achieve peak performance as a result of superior teaching, enablement, consulting, and advisory products and services in today’s surroundings.

Does the identify we simply call it really subject?