Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?

Catching up on my backlog of data and subjects from before #MartechDay before this thirty day period — which featured the 2022 internet marketing know-how landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the major of my list is the newest Condition of Agile Marketing report from AgileSherpas.

As often, this is a marvelous, comprehensive report on how and why agile methodologies are becoming utilised in advertising and marketing. You can see from the chart higher than that agile has discovered its way into a large wide range of marketing pursuits: advertising and marketing operations, inventive products and services, site functions, social media, promotion, and many others.

It is even remaining used (30%) in events advertising and marketing, which has lengthy been the go-to example for skeptics: “Oh, agile could never ever function for activities.” (To be good, in a digital/hybrid function planet, the pacing and adaptability of gatherings advertising has elevated considerably.)

But contrary to previous 12 months, when 51% of individuals claimed working with agile marketing and advertising, this time only 43% did. Which is near to the 42% from 2020. Is agile internet marketing backsliding?

Of course, the most apparent disclaimer is the study sample. Even with 513 entrepreneurs taking part in this most up-to-date survey, it’s continue to a extremely compact subset of the varied advertising and marketing universe and no doubt topic to the ebbs and flows of selection bias.

But even now. Soon after almost 15 years of advocacy for agile marketing, the momentum of this motion seems… stalled?

Agile promoting principles, tactics & labels

The ideas of agile advertising and marketing, however, appear to be to be universally acknowledged as gospel truth of the matter these days. I can’t feel of a one marketer I have met in the previous a number of yrs who has not embraced the values of adaptability, understanding from experimentation, iterative enhancement, cross-team collaboration, increased visibility into function-in-flight, crew empowerment, etcetera.

Advertising and marketing has turn into an agile profession. Full cease.

Common agile methods — this kind of as sprints, every day standups, kanban boards, and so forth. — also seem to be to have proliferated commonly. Even though in a lot of instances, they’ve morphed from their primary variety. We’ll come back again to that in a minute, as I believe it is the twist of post-agile.

But the labels? Not so considerably. I quite not often listen to the terms dash, standup, or kanban in marketing discussions. Even “agile marketing” as a phrase arises less frequently than it appeared a couple of many years back.

Agile marketing vs. agile advancement traits

A pair of charts from Google Tendencies help illustrate what’s occurring in this article. First, let’s just look at the growth of the look for time period “agile marketing”:

The chart shows relative search volume for this expression more than the earlier 18 yrs. You can see that it peaked all-around 2017. (A 12 months after the launch of Hacking Marketing and advertising. Coincidence?) Because then, it is had fluctations up and down. But it mainly hit a ceiling.

To get a better perception of how substantially absolute research volume there is for agile marketing and advertising, you want to assess it in opposition to one more development. So let us compare it from its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two items pop ideal out. Initial, agile advertising and marketing has achieved only a tiny fraction of the mindshare that agile development ever did. Second, fascination in agile growth has steadily declined considering the fact that 2010. It is all over 1/4 of the quantity it was at its peak.

What transpired in 2010? The increase of DevOps.

Certainly, DevOps became the large that stood on the shoulders of agile progress. Its recognition has dwarfed agile enhancement, even from its heyday. And in comparison to these two, agile advertising and marketing would scarcely even sign up on the scale.

But it’s crucial to observe that DevOps arose from Agile. To quote its Wikipedia post:

“Agile development teams… couldn’t ‘satisfy the customer by way of early and continual shipping of precious software’ except they subsumed the functions / infrastructure duties associated with their apps, quite a few of which they automatic.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the devices progress lifecycle and provide continuous delivery with large software high-quality.” What is steady integration/constant deployment (CI/CD) if not the greatest system for offering iterative software development?

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

The plummeting expenditures of “shipping” in the cloud

To be clear, DevOps is not an agile administration methodology. It is not even an “ops” crew (in most instances) like other ops capabilities, such as internet marketing ops. Instead, it’s a established of practices, procedures, and technological know-how that builders use to ship computer software rapidly, iteratively, and securely. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes creating and deploying computer software, but choosing what to build and when even now requires to materialize at a stage earlier mentioned that. In theory, agile growth methodologies this kind of as Scrum can supply the framework for people decisions. But most dev groups I know do not explicitly use all those methodologies any longer. Most have invented their personal method, pulling ideas from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev task administration instruments this sort of as Jira.

My just take: DevOps — and a lot more broadly, the cloud — has dramatically lessened the costs of iteratively acquiring software. Again in the times when agile methodologies these kinds of as Scrum ended up designed, the charges and complexities of shipping were a lot bigger. The rigid construction of Scrum was an effective and important way to deal with that. Today in a great DevOps ecosystem? Not as required?

That is not to say that approach, planning, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration expected all-around them are not needed. They are as essential to results as at any time. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative launch cycles? Not as needed?

(Let the flames from ardent agile advocates start.)

Is there a DevOps equivalent in marketing and advertising?

Promoting ops is a unique kind of creature that DevOps. For just one, it is a role/team within just the advertising and marketing org, relatively than a apply/method that all entrepreneurs use.

But there is some shared DNA. In a lot of techniques, advertising and marketing ops teams purpose as a DevOps-like enabler for marketers to be ready to “ship” marketing immediately, iteratively, and securely. Marketing and advertising ops manages the tech stack and processes to empower that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

But with the increase of a lot more and far more no-code abilities throughout martech, promoting ops is also empowering marketers with a lot more and more self-assistance abilities. Just as software package deployment ops received “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into much more developers’ palms with DevOps, far more capabilities to execute advertising and marketing — both equally inner and exterior advertising and marketing “deployments” — are becoming shifted into the fingers of general marketers.

I don’t know that there’s a title for this phenomenon. It is a sort of democratization of specific aspects of promoting ops. (Ideally underneath the steering, governance, and guardrails of the specialist internet marketing ops group.) But it is progressively analogous to DevOps. A lot more persons can ship a lot more marketing and advertising, rapidly, easily, and properly.

Just as with software, method, planning, roadmaps, prioritization, staff coordination and collaboration are critical to properly harness this dispersed power of generation. But just as equally, the prices in deploying most types of marketing and advertising have dropped radically around the earlier ten years. This has created more slack in the promoting production method, which has manufactured rigid agile internet marketing methodologies… not as necessary?

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

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

Talking of slack, or, um, Slack, the previous 10 decades has also brought an explosion of innovation in perform communications and collaboration merchandise. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Teams have become ubiquitous — along with a complete ecosystem of applications that extend and integrate with them. A new era of get the job done administration platforms, these as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for entrepreneurs) Workfront, present larger structure and visibility into elaborate, speedy-transferring priorities, tasks, and workflows.

Indeed, the Management group of the martech landscape experienced the most significant percentage growth from 2020 to 2022.

These resources have had a sizeable effect on how do the job will get done. Numerous of them embed or empower agile (lowercase “a”) methods. Practically 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.

In the meantime, I’d say that Slack and Groups — accelerated by the Good Migration to Distant Work — have effectively killed changed the day by day stand-up for most teams.

But it’s not that the fundamental theory of stand-ups has long gone absent. On the opposite, these group communications platforms frequently make it easier for groups to continue to be related all over the day in a comparatively very low-effects fashion. Difficulties that crop up can be dealt with more quickly than waiting for the subsequent stand-up in a fixed time window that significantly fails to align with the schedules of dispersed staff customers.

Hey, I’m nevertheless a massive fan of in-human being collaboration, and I concur anything is dropped devoid of it. But other points are obtained. And for improved and worse, remote and hybrid teams are the new regular. In this brave new entire world, Slack and Groups are a far better fit than every day stand-ups for quite a few.

And it is not just technologies. Management solutions that I assume of as “point solutions” for specific requirements — in contrast to a total suite of procedures, as with formal agile advertising and marketing — have been popularized for far better cross-purposeful collaboration (e.g., pods outside the context of formal agile) and multi-get together determination-generating (e.g., DARCI versions).

The internet effect? Marketing and advertising groups are turning out to be a lot more and much more agile.

They just don’t always imagine of their procedures as formal “agile marketing.”

From agile advertising to… advertising?

What ever happened to electronic advertising? It grew to become internet marketing.

Not since advertising turned considerably less digital. Very the reverse. Electronic turned so embedded in almost everything entrepreneurs were doing that the label of the job reverted to the suggest: marketing. I’d call that a victory for the digital marketing motion, not defeat.

Likewise, is agile marketing and advertising only becoming… marketing?

Possibly “agile marketing” will restart its expansion as an explicit motion. Or maybe it will be replaced by some newly named methodology that is closer to what DevOps has become in the software program advancement job. Or maybe is just gets to be implicit in how modern day marketing groups run.

Agile is as agile does.

Regardless, I however consider there is a big opportunity for teaching advertising and marketing groups how to best harness all these platforms, tactics, and processes. There’s never been extra need for serving to marketing teams accomplish peak overall performance as a result of good education, enablement, consulting, and advisory expert services in today’s atmosphere.

Does the identify we phone it truly make a difference?