Marketing, like basketball, is an effort best performed in teams, but marketing organizations need to rethink how they play the game, says Pini Yakuel. Thanks to new technologies, groups of specialists can be turned into cross-functional teams of pros, like a championship NBA team of players who can all run the ball, shoot and block shots as needed.
“It’s a new model for work that emphasizes versatility, unlocking people’s multi-potentiality, and having the production process of a piece of work being done more smoothly, efficiently, cost-effectively,” said Yakuel, CEO of Optimove, a real-time customer data platform. “You can unlock a lot of benefits by being able to be position-less.”
Marketing departments are still set up along the model Henry Ford conceived a hundred years ago to build the Model T: “Today we work like an assembly line: One person does the production, another person does the content, another person does the studio work and the art, another person does the operations to tie everybody together,” said Yakuel.
This worked well in the past to get projects done at scale, but Yakuel faulted the model for its communications problems and slow speeds. “It’s pretty slow. It’s pretty vulnerable,” he said. “It’s less efficient. It takes us longer. It’s more expensive. It’s more error-prone. And it’s not as joyful for employees.”
By comparison, Yakuel, a big basketball fan, proposes a framework borrowed from professional basketball, where players are encouraged to step out of their assigned positions during games. His concept, “position-less marketing,” would offer modern marketing teams the same flexibility, said Yakuel. Position-less marketers can, with some assistance from technology, perform many of the related functions that connect with their stated position without having to run through the gauntlet of other departments to get work done.
When a big tectonic shift in technology, such as the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence, takes hold, marketers should be reminded that they need to be flexible and diversify their skills, said Yakuel.
“You still have your key superpowers and key traits,” he said. “(But) with AI today, each one of us is being enhanced to still have the main capability, but we have some flairs, or some other capabilities that were never accessible for us.”
The popularity of generative AI invites teams to try more cross-functional work, by enabling members to step out of their assigned spots on the assembly line. For example, a team member who is not a designer could take on small design tasks using generative AI, freeing the design team to devote their time to design-intense work that is a better use of their talents. Or a writer working on content could leverage data analysis tools without needing to impose on data analysts, leaving them free for more important business intelligence tasks.
“Look, we’re still going to have a top-notch designer doing the toughest design job, but a lot of work is not like that,” he said. “Eighty percent of your needs are simple things that you could never do, because you’ve got zero design skills. But if you have a little bit, and you’re being enhanced by AI, you can do it better.”
Enabling Position-less Marketing
Adopting position-less marketing will require a new approach, said Yakuel. In this structure, the CMO’s role becomes more focused on setting standards and defining a framework for excellence, then supporting it with training and upskilling programs.
“The executive needs to design this framework that says: What does ‘good’ look like? What do I expect? What are the standards of each one of these operations?” Yakuel said. “The team can sometimes say: ‘Hey, if the requirement for high-quality design in this piece of work is X, I can get to X with AI. I don’t need a designer.’ Or: ‘I’m a data guy, now I can meet X and I can basically skip the need for calling those data guys and letting them focus on things that require much higher-quality data work.’”
Management needs to invest in AI tools and training to encourage staff to use them by sharing information across the company. Buy-in from the top is important, said Yakuel. He is an eager ambassador in his own organization, in informal chats around the cafeteria and in meetings: “I’m definitely getting a lot of people excited,” he said. “I’m showing examples and people say ‘Oh, that’s cool.” Then they tell somebody else… It’s a lot of this infectious enthusiasm that you want to do.”
Some people may be defensive of their turf, as other staffers are enabled to do the same tasks, but this has been happening with many other technologies before, said Yakuel. “History tells us that eventually progress triumphs,” he said.
Teams may need to be restructured and some positions reallocated to accommodate this new approach, but the top performers in each function will still be performing those, only less distracted by minor projects. As Yakuel noted, even in basketball, the tallest player will be shooting and scoring.
“A seven-footer is still a seven-footer and a seven-footer is still rim-protecting and grabbing a lot of rebounds and dunking the ball,” said Yakuel. “I’m not proposing to get rid of the deep specialties that each one of us have, but we can now spice it up with more flavors.”
Position-less marketing can improve job satisfaction and career prospects for staffers. They will have more training and skills, Yakuel explained.
“All of a sudden you’re well-versed in AI, you can enhance yourself, you can do more things than you could before,” he said. “It works really well with human traits because each one of us, we have a little Leonardo da Vinci hidden within us.”
