Teams

Sometimes content and ideas just coalesce into a meaningful narrative.

I'm reading Prof. G's Friday newsletter about traveling to the Moon and "ding" everything came together. He talked about the Artemis 2 mission. On the one end, we have the AI gurus and those backing 'em with investments ... suggesting AI will bring the end of work as we know it and the only thing we can do is trust those who are bringing the end of work to us to ... well ... to do who knows what.

That's one end.

There's the other end of the spectrum. That's the end you are on.

You are part of an ecosystem of Teams.

Your marketing team is part of that ecosystem.

Your merchandising team is part of that ecosystem.

Other teams support marketing or merchandising ... creative, IT, website ops.

Your teams are supported by vendor-based teams ... really important people. They manage social media or your search budget (as examples). They help execute your email marketing program.

Teams aren't only represented by people. Your categories represent "teams" of product working together to support your customer. Your marketing channels represent "teams" that support the products that support your customer.

All these Teams interact. With each other. With your customers.

As every new technology evolves and advances, it seeks to become a Team that interacts with your existing human-based Teams and marketing/merchandising Teams.

The metrics we have to measure Teams are woefully inadequate. We measure the ROAS of digital advertising without regard to the effectiveness of the Team of humans managing the process or the long-term payback of digital advertising. FACEBOOK ROAS IS 3.43 THIS WEEK, DOWN 8%. So what? What if ROAS is down 8% but the Team of humans managing the process prevented ROAS from being -16%? I'll take the the Team of humans all day long. But how are you measuring the Team of humans?

What about a lousy Leader managing a category that is growing by 15% industry-wide? Is the lousy Leader responsible for good performance? Is Amazon responsible for developing a great marketplace that causes 5% of the 15% increase?

I'm going to frame discussions in terms of Teams and Storytelling in the near term. It has become painfully clear that we don't have a framework for thinking about the importance of Teams ... and not just human Teams ... we have Teams of categories that work together, we have Teams of marketing channels that work together. We need to do a better job before AI does our jobs for us.