Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?

Catching up on my backlog of info and matters from before #MartechDay before this month — which highlighted the 2022 advertising and marketing technological innovation landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the top rated of my listing is the hottest State of Agile Marketing and advertising report from AgileSherpas.

As often, this is a great, extensive report on how and why agile methodologies are currently being applied in marketing and advertising. You can see from the chart higher than that agile has found its way into a huge wide variety of internet marketing routines: advertising and marketing functions, resourceful services, web page operations, social media, advertising, etcetera.

It’s even staying used (30%) in situations advertising and marketing, which has extensive been the go-to case in point for skeptics: “Oh, agile could never ever work for gatherings.” (To be fair, in a virtual/hybrid celebration world, the pacing and adaptability of activities advertising has increased substantially.)

But in contrast to previous calendar year, when 51% of contributors described applying agile promoting, this time only 43% did. Which is near to the 42% from 2020. Is agile promoting backsliding?

Of class, the most noticeable disclaimer is the study sample. Even with 513 entrepreneurs taking part in this newest survey, it is nevertheless a incredibly compact subset of the numerous marketing and advertising universe and no question matter to the ebbs and flows of selection bias.

But however. Immediately after nearly 15 several years of advocacy for agile promoting, the momentum of this motion seems… stalled?

Agile marketing principles, tactics & labels

The ideas of agile marketing, having said that, look to be universally recognized as gospel truth of the matter these days. I just can’t think of a one marketer I have fulfilled in the previous various yrs who hasn’t embraced the values of adaptability, understanding from experimentation, iterative advancement, cross-staff collaboration, bigger visibility into work-in-flight, crew empowerment, and so forth.

Marketing and advertising has turn into an agile occupation. Comprehensive halt.

Typical agile techniques — this kind of as sprints, each day standups, kanban boards, etcetera. — also seem to be to have proliferated broadly. Even though in many cases, they’ve morphed from their first form. We’ll arrive back to that in a moment, as I think it’s the twist of submit-agile.

But the labels? Not so much. I pretty hardly ever listen to the phrases dash, standup, or kanban in advertising and marketing conversations. Even “agile marketing” as a term occurs a lot less routinely than it appeared a couple of decades back.

Agile internet marketing vs. agile enhancement developments

A pair of charts from Google Traits assist illustrate what is happening listed here. Initial, let us just search at the growth of the look for phrase “agile marketing”:

The chart demonstrates relative research quantity for this time period about the previous 18 decades. You can see that it peaked about 2017. (A year immediately after the launch of Hacking Internet marketing. Coincidence?) Because then, it is had fluctations up and down. But it mostly hit a ceiling.

To get a greater perception of how considerably absolute look for quantity there is for agile marketing and advertising, you need to compare it towards yet another craze. So let’s look at it against its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two matters pop right out. Initially, agile advertising has accomplished only a tiny fraction of the mindshare that agile enhancement ever did. Second, curiosity in agile advancement has steadily declined since 2010. It’s all-around 1/4 of the quantity it was at its peak.

What occurred in 2010? The rise of DevOps.

In truth, DevOps grew to become the giant that stood on the shoulders of agile improvement. Its attractiveness has dwarfed agile improvement, even from its heyday. And as opposed to those two, agile promoting would hardly even sign up on the scale.

But it’s important to note that DevOps arose from Agile. To quote its Wikipedia post:

“Agile advancement teams… couldn’t ‘satisfy the client by way of early and continual shipping and delivery of beneficial software’ until they subsumed the functions / infrastructure duties related with their programs, lots of of which they automated.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the systems growth lifecycle and supply steady delivery with superior application excellent.” What is ongoing integration/ongoing deployment (CI/CD) if not the greatest system for delivering iterative software package growth?

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 administration methodology. It’s not even an “ops” staff (in most scenarios) like other ops capabilities, such as advertising ops. Alternatively, it is a set of procedures, procedures, and engineering that builders use to ship software program immediately, iteratively, and safely. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes making and deploying software, but deciding what to develop and when continue to requires to transpire at a degree previously mentioned that. In idea, agile development methodologies these types of as Scrum can deliver the framework for these decisions. But most dev groups I know never explicitly use people methodologies any longer. Most have invented their own approach, pulling principles from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev task administration applications this sort of as Jira.

My choose: DevOps — and far more broadly, the cloud — has significantly lowered the charges of iteratively developing computer software. Back in the times when agile methodologies this sort of as Scrum ended up designed, the charges and complexities of shipping and delivery were a great deal larger. The rigid composition of Scrum was an productive and vital way to control that. Now in a excellent DevOps surroundings? Not as important?

That’s not to say that tactic, planning, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration essential all over them aren’t required. They are as crucial to good results as ever. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative launch cycles? Not as essential?

(Permit the flames from ardent agile advocates begin.)

Is there a DevOps equal in marketing and advertising?

Advertising ops is a diverse form of creature that DevOps. For just one, it is a role/workforce inside the advertising and marketing org, instead than a observe/method that all marketers use.

However there is some shared DNA. In lots of approaches, promoting ops groups operate as a DevOps-like enabler for marketers to be capable to “ship” advertising and marketing swiftly, iteratively, and securely. Marketing ops manages the tech stack and procedures to allow that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

However with the rise of far more and far more no-code abilities throughout martech, advertising ops is also empowering entrepreneurs with far more and extra self-services capabilities. Just as software program deployment ops received “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into extra developers’ arms with DevOps, extra capabilities to execute advertising — both equally inside and external internet marketing “deployments” — are currently being shifted into the hands of common marketers.

I don’t know that there is a name for this phenomenon. It is a variety of democratization of selected sides of promoting ops. (Ideally less than the guidance, governance, and guardrails of the qualified marketing and advertising ops crew.) But it is increasingly analogous to DevOps. Additional people today can ship far more internet marketing, rapidly, very easily, and safely and securely.

Just as with computer software, technique, scheduling, roadmaps, prioritization, group coordination and collaboration are crucial to properly harness this distributed electricity of generation. But just as likewise, the charges in deploying most forms of advertising and marketing have dropped radically above the past ten years. This has created additional slack in the advertising and marketing creation system, which has built rigid agile promoting methodologies… not as required?

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

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

Talking of slack, or, um, Slack, the previous 10 several years has also introduced an explosion of innovation in get the job done communications and collaboration items. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Groups have turn out to be ubiquitous — along with a complete ecosystem of apps that increase and combine with them. A new technology of operate administration platforms, these as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for marketers) Workfront, present greater construction and visibility into complicated, quickly-transferring priorities, jobs, and workflows.

In fact, the Management class of the martech landscape had the largest percentage advancement from 2020 to 2022.

These equipment have had a considerable influence on how work gets completed. Several of them embed or help agile (lowercase “a”) practices. Pretty much none of them use the terminology of agile internet marketing methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, do the job-in-development management, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.

In the meantime, I’d say that Slack and Teams — accelerated by the Fantastic Migration to Remote Operate — have properly killed replaced the everyday 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 commonly make it a lot easier for teams to continue to be linked in the course of the working day in a relatively lower-impression fashion. Concerns that crop up can be dealt with speedier than waiting around for the following stand-up in a preset time window that more and more fails to align with the schedules of distributed crew customers.

Hey, I’m nevertheless a massive admirer of in-individual collaboration, and I concur a thing is lost with no it. But other things are acquired. And for much better and even worse, distant and hybrid groups are the new usual. In this courageous new world, Slack and Teams are a superior suit than day by day stand-ups for several.

And it is not just know-how. Administration approaches that I believe of as “point solutions” for certain wants — in contrast to a full suite of procedures, as with official agile promoting — have been popularized for greater cross-functional collaboration (e.g., pods outside the house the context of official agile) and multi-bash conclusion-earning (e.g., DARCI products).

The net effect? Marketing and advertising groups are becoming much more and a lot more agile.

They just really do not always assume of their practices as formal “agile internet marketing.”

From agile marketing to… marketing and advertising?

Whichever took place to digital internet marketing? It became promoting.

Not mainly because marketing and advertising became a lot less electronic. Fairly the opposite. Electronic turned so embedded in everything marketers have been carrying out that the label of the career reverted to the imply: advertising. I’d call that a victory for the digital promoting movement, not defeat.

In the same way, is agile marketing basically becoming… internet marketing?

It’s possible “agile marketing” will restart its growth as an express motion. Or it’s possible it will be changed by some freshly named methodology that is nearer to what DevOps has come to be in the software package enhancement profession. Or maybe is just gets to be implicit in how present day internet marketing groups operate.

Agile is as agile does.

Irrespective, I even now think there is a huge opportunity for educating marketing and advertising groups how to best harness all these platforms, tactics, and processes. There is under no circumstances been much more desire for serving to internet marketing groups realize peak overall performance by good coaching, enablement, consulting, and advisory expert services in today’s environment.

Does the identify we phone it genuinely matter?