Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?

Catching up on my backlog of info and subjects from in advance of #MartechDay previously this thirty day period — which showcased the 2022 marketing technology landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the major of my record is the latest Condition of Agile Marketing and advertising report from AgileSherpas.

As often, this is a terrific, detailed report on how and why agile methodologies are becoming made use of in marketing and advertising. You can see from the chart earlier mentioned that agile has observed its way into a vast variety of promoting things to do: advertising operations, artistic expert services, web page functions, social media, advertising, etc.

It’s even being applied (30%) in functions promoting, which has prolonged been the go-to case in point for skeptics: “Oh, agile could never ever function for occasions.” (To be fair, in a digital/hybrid event globe, the pacing and adaptability of gatherings marketing has amplified substantially.)

But in contrast to very last yr, when 51% of contributors noted using agile advertising and marketing, this time only 43% did. Which is near to the 42% from 2020. Is agile promoting backsliding?

Of system, the most apparent disclaimer is the study sample. Even with 513 marketers collaborating in this most current survey, it is nonetheless a really smaller subset of the assorted advertising and marketing universe and no question subject to the ebbs and flows of variety bias.

But nevertheless. Immediately after practically 15 many years of advocacy for agile promoting, the momentum of this movement seems… stalled?

Agile marketing principles, techniques & labels

The principles of agile promoting, having said that, feel to be universally accepted as gospel fact these times. I just can’t assume of a solitary marketer I’ve satisfied in the previous several a long time who has not embraced the values of adaptability, finding out from experimentation, iterative advancement, cross-team collaboration, bigger visibility into get the job done-in-flight, workforce empowerment, and many others.

Advertising has develop into an agile job. Complete end.

Typical agile practices — this sort of as sprints, each day standups, kanban boards, and so on. — also seem to have proliferated widely. Though in a lot of instances, they’ve morphed from their first form. We’ll come back again to that in a minute, as I consider it is the twist of write-up-agile.

But the labels? Not so much. I pretty almost never hear the conditions dash, standup, or kanban in advertising and marketing conversations. Even “agile marketing” as a phrase arises much less usually than it appeared a couple of a long time back.

Agile advertising vs. agile progress tendencies

A couple of charts from Google Trends aid illustrate what’s occurring right here. Initial, let us just search at the expansion of the look for time period “agile marketing”:

The chart exhibits relative lookup volume for this time period above the past 18 many years. You can see that it peaked around 2017. (A year just after the release of Hacking Promoting. Coincidence?) Considering the fact that then, it is experienced fluctations up and down. But it mainly strike a ceiling.

To get a far better sense of how substantially complete research volume there is for agile marketing and advertising, you need to have to evaluate it against yet another pattern. So let’s look at it versus its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two issues pop proper out. Initially, agile promoting has obtained only a little fraction of the mindshare that agile enhancement at any time did. Next, desire in agile advancement has steadily declined considering that 2010. It’s about 1/4 of the quantity it was at its peak.

What happened in 2010? The increase of DevOps.

Indeed, DevOps grew to become the huge that stood on the shoulders of agile growth. Its attractiveness has dwarfed agile improvement, even from its heyday. And as opposed to these two, agile marketing would scarcely even sign-up on the scale.

But it is critical to observe that DevOps arose from Agile. To quote its Wikipedia article:

“Agile enhancement teams… couldn’t ‘satisfy the customer by early and continuous shipping and delivery of useful software’ except they subsumed the operations / infrastructure responsibilities related with their programs, numerous of which they automatic.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the devices enhancement lifecycle and deliver ongoing shipping with substantial program quality.” What is ongoing integration/constant deployment (CI/CD) if not the final mechanism for providing iterative software program improvement?

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

The plummeting costs of “shipping” in the cloud

To be apparent, DevOps is not an agile administration methodology. It is not even an “ops” team (in most scenarios) like other ops functions, these types of as advertising ops. Fairly, it’s a established of tactics, procedures, and technology that builders use to ship program promptly, iteratively, and properly. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes developing and deploying software program, but deciding what to construct and when nevertheless requires to come about at a degree earlier mentioned that. In concept, agile development methodologies these types of as Scrum can provide the framework for those people choices. But most dev groups I know never explicitly use all those methodologies any more. Most have invented their have course of action, pulling ideas from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev venture administration equipment these as Jira.

My take: DevOps — and additional broadly, the cloud — has considerably lessened the expenses of iteratively developing software package. Again in the days when agile methodologies these kinds of as Scrum had been designed, the expenses and complexities of transport were being considerably larger. The rigid structure of Scrum was an successful and vital way to take care of that. Currently in a excellent DevOps setting? Not as required?

That’s not to say that technique, scheduling, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration demanded around them are not needed. They’re as essential to achievement as at any time. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative release cycles? Not as essential?

(Let the flames from ardent agile advocates begin.)

Is there a DevOps equal in marketing?

Advertising ops is a unique kind of creature that DevOps. For just one, it is a position/group inside of the advertising org, alternatively than a observe/course of action that all marketers use.

Nevertheless there is some shared DNA. In a lot of techniques, marketing and advertising ops teams operate as a DevOps-like enabler for entrepreneurs to be able to “ship” promoting rapidly, iteratively, and properly. Promoting ops manages the tech stack and procedures to permit that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

Nonetheless with the increase of more and extra no-code capabilities across martech, marketing and advertising ops is also empowering entrepreneurs with more and much more self-provider abilities. Just as software deployment ops got “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into extra developers’ palms with DevOps, far more abilities to execute advertising and marketing — both interior and exterior promoting “deployments” — are getting shifted into the palms of normal entrepreneurs.

I don’t know that there is a title for this phenomenon. It’s a type of democratization of sure aspects of promoting ops. (Ideally underneath the steerage, governance, and guardrails of the skilled internet marketing ops crew.) But it is significantly analogous to DevOps. A lot more people today can ship additional advertising and marketing, quickly, simply, and securely.

Just as with software, technique, arranging, roadmaps, prioritization, group coordination and collaboration are necessary to proficiently harness this distributed energy of development. But just as likewise, the fees in deploying most kinds of advertising and marketing have dropped substantially in excess of the previous ten years. This has designed more slack in the advertising output process, which has created rigid agile marketing and advertising methodologies… not as required?

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

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

Talking of slack, or, um, Slack, the past 10 yrs has also introduced an explosion of innovation in function communications and collaboration products and solutions. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Groups have grow to be ubiquitous — along with a entire ecosystem of applications that lengthen and combine with them. A new generation of perform management platforms, these types of as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for marketers) Workfront, deliver bigger composition and visibility into sophisticated, speedy-relocating priorities, initiatives, and workflows.

Indeed, the Management classification of the martech landscape had the most significant share expansion from 2020 to 2022.

These instruments have had a important effects on how function gets completed. Numerous of them embed or allow agile (lowercase “a”) practices. Pretty much none of them use the terminology of agile advertising and marketing methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, function-in-development administration, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.

In the meantime, I’d say that Slack and Teams — accelerated by the Great Migration to Distant Operate — have correctly killed replaced the every day stand-up for most teams.

But it is not that the fundamental principle of stand-ups has gone absent. On the contrary, these workforce communications platforms frequently make it less difficult for groups to keep connected all through the day in a rather low-impact method. Problems that occur can be addressed more rapidly than waiting for the next stand-up in a preset time window that increasingly fails to align with the schedules of dispersed group users.

Hey, I’m still a enormous admirer of in-person collaboration, and I concur something is missing with no it. But other issues are attained. And for far better and worse, remote and hybrid teams are the new standard. In this brave new entire world, Slack and Teams are a greater suit than everyday stand-ups for numerous.

And it is not just know-how. Administration approaches that I believe of as “point solutions” for particular needs — in distinction to a total suite of practices, as with formal agile advertising — have been popularized for superior cross-practical collaboration (e.g., pods outside the house the context of formal agile) and multi-celebration final decision-earning (e.g., DARCI models).

The web effect? Advertising groups are getting additional and far more agile.

They just don’t essentially imagine of their methods as formal “agile advertising.”

From agile marketing to… internet marketing?

Whichever occurred to electronic internet marketing? It turned advertising and marketing.

Not for the reason that advertising and marketing grew to become less digital. Pretty the opposite. Electronic turned so embedded in every thing entrepreneurs had been undertaking that the label of the career reverted to the necessarily mean: advertising and marketing. I’d get in touch with that a victory for the digital promoting motion, not defeat.

Likewise, is agile internet marketing basically becoming… internet marketing?

Maybe “agile marketing” will restart its expansion as an explicit movement. Or possibly it will be replaced by some freshly named methodology that is closer to what DevOps has turn out to be in the computer software progress occupation. Or possibly is just gets to be implicit in how modern-day marketing teams run.

Agile is as agile does.

Irrespective, I nonetheless believe there is a big opportunity for training promoting teams how to most effective harness all these platforms, procedures, and procedures. There’s by no means been far more demand for assisting marketing and advertising teams accomplish peak performance by means of good schooling, enablement, consulting, and advisory expert services in today’s surroundings.

Does the title we get in touch with it definitely matter?