Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?

Catching up on my backlog of info and subject areas from right before #MartechDay previously this month — which showcased the 2022 internet marketing technology landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the best of my record is the most recent State of Agile Marketing and advertising report from AgileSherpas.

As always, this is a wonderful, comprehensive report on how and why agile methodologies are becoming made use of in marketing and advertising. You can see from the chart higher than that agile has located its way into a wide variety of marketing things to do: marketing operations, resourceful services, website functions, social media, promoting, and so on.

It is even becoming used (30%) in situations internet marketing, which has extensive been the go-to case in point for skeptics: “Oh, agile could by no means work for activities.” (To be truthful, in a digital/hybrid party world, the pacing and adaptability of occasions advertising has increased appreciably.)

But not like previous yr, when 51% of members documented working with agile marketing, this time only 43% did. That’s near to the 42% from 2020. Is agile advertising backsliding?

Of study course, the most noticeable disclaimer is the survey sample. Even with 513 marketers collaborating in this most up-to-date survey, it’s even now a incredibly smaller subset of the varied internet marketing universe and no doubt issue to the ebbs and flows of choice bias.

But nonetheless. After virtually 15 many years of advocacy for agile advertising and marketing, the momentum of this motion seems… stalled?

Agile marketing and advertising concepts, tactics & labels

The concepts of agile marketing, even so, seem to be to be universally accepted as gospel fact these times. I cannot consider of a solitary marketer I have achieved in the past many yrs who hasn’t embraced the values of adaptability, mastering from experimentation, iterative improvement, cross-group collaboration, increased visibility into function-in-flight, team empowerment, and so on.

Marketing and advertising has turn into an agile job. Entire prevent.

Traditional agile techniques — these as sprints, day-to-day standups, kanban boards, and so on. — also feel to have proliferated commonly. Although in a lot of situations, they’ve morphed from their original type. We’ll come back to that in a minute, as I consider it’s the twist of put up-agile.

But the labels? Not so a great deal. I very seldom hear the conditions dash, standup, or kanban in advertising discussions. Even “agile marketing” as a phrase occurs much less regularly than it appeared a pair of yrs back.

Agile internet marketing vs. agile improvement trends

A few of charts from Google Tendencies help illustrate what is going on right here. First, let us just appear at the advancement of the search term “agile marketing”:

The chart reveals relative search volume for this time period above the earlier 18 a long time. You can see that it peaked all over 2017. (A calendar year after the release of Hacking Marketing. Coincidence?) Given that then, it is experienced fluctations up and down. But it largely strike a ceiling.

To get a greater sense of how significantly complete look for quantity there is for agile internet marketing, you want to examine it in opposition to a further craze. So let us examine it versus its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two matters pop suitable out. To start with, agile promoting has achieved only a small portion of the mindshare that agile improvement ever did. Second, fascination in agile growth has steadily declined since 2010. It’s about 1/4 of the volume it was at its peak.

What occurred in 2010? The increase of DevOps.

Indeed, DevOps turned the big that stood on the shoulders of agile growth. Its popularity has dwarfed agile progress, even from its heyday. And compared to those people two, agile marketing would barely even sign up on the scale.

But it is significant to take note that DevOps arose from Agile. To quote its Wikipedia article:

“Agile growth teams… couldn’t ‘satisfy the customer by early and ongoing delivery of valuable software’ except they subsumed the operations / infrastructure tasks affiliated with their purposes, several of which they automated.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the devices improvement lifecycle and present constant supply with higher program quality.” What is steady integration/continual deployment (CI/CD) if not the top mechanism for delivering iterative software package progress?

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

The plummeting expenses of “shipping” in the cloud

To be apparent, DevOps is not an agile administration methodology. It is not even an “ops” team (in most circumstances) like other ops features, these kinds of as advertising ops. Instead, it is a set of techniques, procedures, and technologies that developers use to ship computer software speedily, iteratively, and safely. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes creating and deploying computer software, but deciding what to build and when however requires to come about at a stage previously mentioned that. In concept, agile advancement methodologies these types of as Scrum can provide the framework for individuals decisions. But most dev groups I know really don’t explicitly use people methodologies any more. Most have invented their individual procedure, pulling concepts from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev venture management resources these kinds of as Jira.

My consider: DevOps — and more broadly, the cloud — has radically minimized the expenditures of iteratively developing software. Back again in the days when agile methodologies these as Scrum ended up developed, the charges and complexities of transport ended up much larger. The rigid composition of Scrum was an productive and necessary way to deal with that. Now in a fantastic DevOps natural environment? Not as essential?

That is not to say that strategy, setting up, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration essential all-around them aren’t important. They are as important to accomplishment as ever. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative release cycles? Not as important?

(Allow the flames from ardent agile advocates commence.)

Is there a DevOps equal in advertising and marketing?

Advertising and marketing ops is a various form of creature that DevOps. For 1, it is a job/crew within just the promoting org, fairly than a practice/procedure that all marketers use.

Yet there is some shared DNA. In lots of means, promoting ops teams operate as a DevOps-like enabler for entrepreneurs to be able to “ship” advertising quickly, iteratively, and safely and securely. Promoting ops manages the tech stack and procedures to empower that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

But with the rise of additional and more no-code abilities throughout martech, advertising ops is also empowering entrepreneurs with a lot more and far more self-company capabilities. Just as software deployment ops received “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into additional developers’ palms with DevOps, far more abilities to execute marketing and advertising — both internal and external marketing and advertising “deployments” — are staying shifted into the fingers of common marketers.

I really do not know that there’s a identify for this phenomenon. It is a form of democratization of specified aspects of advertising and marketing ops. (Preferably underneath the steering, governance, and guardrails of the qualified marketing and advertising ops workforce.) But it is ever more analogous to DevOps. Far more individuals can ship a lot more promoting, quickly, very easily, and securely.

Just as with program, strategy, arranging, roadmaps, prioritization, crew coordination and collaboration are important to proficiently harness this distributed electricity of development. But just as similarly, the expenditures in deploying most sorts of advertising and marketing have dropped drastically above the earlier ten years. This has made extra slack in the marketing generation course of action, which has manufactured rigid agile advertising methodologies… not as needed?

(Honestly posed as a dilemma, not a declaration.)

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

Speaking of slack, or, um, Slack, the previous 10 a long time has also brought an explosion of innovation in get the job done communications and collaboration products and solutions. For occasion, Slack and Microsoft Teams have grow to be ubiquitous — alongside with a whole ecosystem of apps that prolong and integrate with them. A new era of work administration platforms, such as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for marketers) Workfront, present greater framework and visibility into advanced, quickly-relocating priorities, assignments, and workflows.

In truth, the Administration category of the martech landscape experienced the major share expansion from 2020 to 2022.

These instruments have experienced a sizeable effects on how function receives completed. Lots of of them embed or permit agile (lowercase “a”) methods. Virtually none of them use the terminology of agile marketing and advertising methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, perform-in-development management, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, I’d say that Slack and Groups — accelerated by the Terrific Migration to Distant Do the job — have effectively killed changed the daily stand-up for most teams.

But it is not that the underlying basic principle of stand-ups has absent away. On the opposite, these workforce communications platforms generally make it simpler for groups to continue to be related throughout the working day in a fairly very low-effects manner. Troubles that come up can be dealt with faster than waiting for the future stand-up in a fixed time window that ever more fails to align with the schedules of distributed crew users.

Hey, I’m nevertheless a substantial fan of in-person collaboration, and I concur a little something is shed with out it. But other points are attained. And for much better and worse, distant and hybrid teams are the new usual. In this courageous new earth, Slack and Groups are a superior suit than everyday stand-ups for many.

And it’s not just engineering. Management strategies that I feel of as “point solutions” for precise needs — in distinction to a complete suite of procedures, as with formal agile marketing — have been popularized for much better cross-purposeful collaboration (e.g., pods exterior the context of formal agile) and multi-bash conclusion-earning (e.g., DARCI styles).

The web result? Marketing and advertising groups are turning into additional and additional agile.

They just do not automatically consider of their methods as official “agile promoting.”

From agile advertising to… advertising and marketing?

Whichever happened to digital marketing and advertising? It turned advertising.

Not for the reason that promoting grew to become considerably less digital. Quite the reverse. Electronic became so embedded in anything marketers had been performing that the label of the profession reverted to the necessarily mean: marketing. I’d phone that a victory for the electronic advertising movement, not defeat.

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

It’s possible “agile marketing” will restart its expansion as an explicit movement. Or it’s possible it will be changed by some freshly named methodology that is closer to what DevOps has come to be in the program improvement occupation. Or probably is just will become implicit in how modern advertising groups operate.

Agile is as agile does.

Irrespective, I still feel there is a substantial prospect for training marketing teams how to very best harness all these platforms, methods, and procedures. There’s never ever been more demand from customers for supporting advertising and marketing groups realize peak general performance through great training, enablement, consulting, and advisory companies in today’s atmosphere.

Does the title we connect with it actually issue?