Modern Marketing in the Age of Cybercrime

A reporter posed an interesting question to me recently, ‘what is marketing’s role in cybersecurity?’ I suspect from any CMO or marketing leader busy with too many priorities, the immediate reaction to this question would be, ‘I think that’s IT’s problem to figure out.’

The reality is, it’s very much our problem and here’s why.

Modern marketing takes advantage of some astounding technologies and tools that have appeared in recent years, changing marketing from an intuition-based art form and the world of glittering agencies into to the data science that it is. IDC estimates we will spend $32.4 billion in 2018 on the newest marketing technology to modernize our ability to capture, score, manage, nurture, clean, append, correlate, analyze, and connect data for the purpose of enticing, promoting, demoing, convincing, placing, closing, enabling, syndicating, or socializing anything on the planet. According to IDG research in their 2016 State of the CIO Study, Marketing is the second biggest technology buyer surpassing sales, engineering, finance, and HR!

As a result of these new tools, Marketing is now more quantifiable than ever and the pressure to show results while at the same time building the engine on a shoestring while also trying to recruit people and miraculously reposition and rebrand the company in five minutes flat is extraordinary. With this tremendous sense of urgency, we call on our friends at some of these technology companies, issue RFPs, and repurpose existing licensing agreements by our predecessors to build the best engine possible. Many, if not most, of these new tools are cloud-based because these smarty-pants entrepreneurs know that most of us aren’t getting a whole lotta love or support from our own IT departments.

Image Credit: Marketing Technology Advisors

So, we try to quietly solve these problems by outsourcing IT services or hiring technical experts in our marketing operations or web teams to help us integrate these different systems. Security teams actually have a name for this – they call it ‘shadow IT’. The other option – if you work with your security-aware IT department, they will want to put these vendors through a thorough assessment that we roll our eyeballs at because it will slow down the process by what feels like decades. For some companies, this step is skipped altogether.

The big applications, such as marketing automation, web content management systems, and the like are delivered by well-established vendors have gotten better at security, refining their solutions over time. However, some of the new (more affordable) solutions, maybe didn’t put as much emphasis on security requirements in their first rounds of funding during their rush to be first to market. So off we go, legal is focusing on exit terms and liability clauses, and procurement is looking to squeeze every possible nickel out of the cost.

Four months later we give birth to this fully integrated, Ferrari-class engine that makes us all bubbly and giddy inside – web-based, cloud-enabled, shiny as a new penny featuring all new messaging, branding, and personalization that puts a large grin on the face of even the crankiest sales rep. We congratulate ourselves and move on to the next phase to drive eyeballs and capture leads like a boss.

But there are problems with how you built your modern marketing infrastructure – because it was never built on the idea that your infrastructure would be a front door to a cybercriminal. It's critical when building the Modern Marketing Infrastructure, you have your security and IT teams look at it through they same lens as they would if it were the core infrastructure.

Remember, if your web platform get's breached, the cruel irony is you are also the one responsible for the breach communication plan and handling the reputation damage to the firm's brand, and your own.