Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?

Catching up on my backlog of knowledge and topics from in advance of #MartechDay earlier this month — which showcased the 2022 advertising and marketing technologies landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the major of my listing is the most up-to-date Condition of Agile Internet marketing report from AgileSherpas.

As normally, this is a marvelous, detailed report on how and why agile methodologies are becoming used in advertising. You can see from the chart higher than that agile has observed its way into a large range of promoting things to do: promoting operations, inventive solutions, website operations, social media, advertising and marketing, etcetera.

It’s even being utilized (30%) in gatherings marketing and advertising, which has prolonged been the go-to case in point for skeptics: “Oh, agile could under no circumstances work for events.” (To be fair, in a digital/hybrid function entire world, the pacing and adaptability of situations advertising has greater appreciably.)

But compared with final year, when 51% of individuals documented making use of agile advertising, this time only 43% did. Which is near to the 42% from 2020. Is agile advertising backsliding?

Of system, the most evident disclaimer is the study sample. Even with 513 entrepreneurs taking part in this latest survey, it is however a quite smaller subset of the varied advertising and marketing universe and no doubt matter to the ebbs and flows of collection bias.

But nevertheless. Following virtually 15 a long time of advocacy for agile advertising, the momentum of this movement seems… stalled?

Agile advertising principles, procedures & labels

The principles of agile advertising and marketing, however, look to be universally accepted as gospel fact these times. I just can’t assume of a single marketer I have achieved in the past numerous years who hasn’t embraced the values of adaptability, mastering from experimentation, iterative advancement, cross-workforce collaboration, bigger visibility into function-in-flight, crew empowerment, and many others.

Advertising and marketing has come to be an agile career. Whole stop.

Traditional agile tactics — these kinds of as sprints, day-to-day standups, kanban boards, etcetera. — also appear to be to have proliferated extensively. Whilst in lots of conditions, they’ve morphed from their unique variety. We’ll arrive back to that in a minute, as I assume it’s the twist of publish-agile.

But the labels? Not so a lot. I very almost never hear the terms dash, standup, or kanban in marketing and advertising conversations. Even “agile marketing” as a term occurs a lot less frequently than it seemed a couple of several years in the past.

Agile internet marketing vs. agile progress trends

A few of charts from Google Developments aid illustrate what’s occurring below. Initial, let’s just seem at the progress of the search time period “agile marketing”:

The chart shows relative search volume for this term around the past 18 several years. You can see that it peaked about 2017. (A year right after the release of Hacking Advertising. Coincidence?) Due to the fact then, it’s experienced fluctations up and down. But it mainly hit a ceiling.

To get a better feeling of how a lot absolute lookup quantity there is for agile advertising, you will need to look at it against another development. So let us compare it in opposition to its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two factors pop ideal out. Initially, agile advertising has achieved only a tiny portion of the mindshare that agile progress ever did. Next, desire in agile development has steadily declined because 2010. It’s close to 1/4 of the volume it was at its peak.

What occurred in 2010? The rise of DevOps.

Without a doubt, DevOps became the big that stood on the shoulders of agile growth. Its attractiveness has dwarfed agile progress, even from its heyday. And compared to people two, agile advertising would scarcely even register on the scale.

But it’s significant to note that DevOps arose from Agile. To quotation its Wikipedia write-up:

“Agile progress teams… could not ‘satisfy the consumer by means of early and ongoing shipping and delivery of valuable software’ until they subsumed the functions / infrastructure responsibilities affiliated with their applications, several of which they automatic.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the techniques growth lifecycle and deliver continuous shipping with large software high-quality.” What is continual integration/steady deployment (CI/CD) if not the top mechanism for providing iterative software package enhancement?

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

The plummeting fees of “shipping” in the cloud

To be distinct, DevOps is not an agile management methodology. It is not even an “ops” workforce (in most scenarios) like other ops functions, these types of as advertising and marketing ops. Rather, it is a set of practices, procedures, and technologies that developers use to ship software quickly, iteratively, and properly. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes creating and deploying program, but deciding what to create and when however demands to occur at a level higher than that. In principle, agile improvement methodologies such as Scrum can offer the framework for all those conclusions. But most dev groups I know don’t explicitly use these methodologies any more. Most have invented their personal system, pulling concepts from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev undertaking management resources this kind of as Jira.

My acquire: DevOps — and extra broadly, the cloud — has radically minimized the charges of iteratively building software program. Back in the days when agile methodologies these kinds of as Scrum have been developed, the prices and complexities of transport were substantially increased. The rigid composition of Scrum was an productive and required way to handle that. Now in a fantastic DevOps atmosphere? Not as essential?

That is not to say that system, arranging, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration demanded close to them are not needed. They are as critical to achievement as at any time. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative release cycles? Not as necessary?

(Allow the flames from ardent agile advocates commence.)

Is there a DevOps equivalent in marketing?

Marketing ops is a various variety of creature that DevOps. For one, it is a role/team in the marketing org, somewhat than a practice/system that all marketers use.

Yet there is some shared DNA. In a lot of approaches, internet marketing ops groups purpose as a DevOps-like enabler for entrepreneurs to be able to “ship” marketing speedily, iteratively, and safely. Advertising and marketing ops manages the tech stack and processes to enable that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

Nevertheless with the increase of a lot more and far more no-code capabilities across martech, marketing and advertising ops is also empowering entrepreneurs with additional and extra self-company capabilities. Just as software package deployment ops bought “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into additional developers’ hands with DevOps, additional capabilities to execute internet marketing — both of those inner and external internet marketing “deployments” — are currently being shifted into the fingers of standard entrepreneurs.

I do not know that there is a name for this phenomenon. It’s a sort of democratization of specific aspects of advertising and marketing ops. (Ideally under the steering, governance, and guardrails of the professional promoting ops staff.) But it is ever more analogous to DevOps. More individuals can ship far more promoting, speedily, very easily, and safely and securely.

Just as with software package, approach, arranging, roadmaps, prioritization, team coordination and collaboration are important to proficiently harness this dispersed electrical power of generation. But just as in the same way, the prices in deploying most sorts of advertising and marketing have dropped considerably about the previous decade. This has established extra slack in the marketing generation approach, which has designed rigid agile marketing methodologies… not as essential?

(Truthfully posed as a question, not a declaration.)

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

Talking of slack, or, um, Slack, the previous 10 a long time has also introduced an explosion of innovation in perform communications and collaboration solutions. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Teams have come to be ubiquitous — alongside with a complete ecosystem of applications that prolong and integrate with them. A new technology of function management platforms, these kinds of as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for marketers) Workfront, give higher framework and visibility into elaborate, rapidly-transferring priorities, jobs, and workflows.

In fact, the Management classification of the martech landscape experienced the most significant proportion development from 2020 to 2022.

These instruments have had a sizeable effects on how operate will get performed. Many of them embed or allow agile (lowercase “a”) practices. Pretty much none of them use the terminology of agile marketing and advertising methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, work-in-progress management, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, I’d say that Slack and Groups — accelerated by the Excellent Migration to Distant Do the job — have efficiently killed replaced the day by day stand-up for most groups.

But it is not that the fundamental theory of stand-ups has absent absent. On the contrary, these workforce communications platforms commonly make it less difficult for teams to keep linked all over the working day in a somewhat small-effect method. Issues that arise can be resolved quicker than ready for the future stand-up in a fastened time window that more and more fails to align with the schedules of distributed workforce users.

Hey, I’m however a huge lover of in-individual collaboration, and I agree a thing is lost without it. But other matters are gained. And for far better and worse, remote and hybrid teams are the new usual. In this courageous new globe, Slack and Teams are a better in good shape than day by day stand-ups for many.

And it is not just technological innovation. Management approaches that I consider of as “point solutions” for specific wants — in contrast to a complete suite of methods, as with official agile advertising — have been popularized for improved cross-functional collaboration (e.g., pods outside the house the context of formal agile) and multi-celebration selection-producing (e.g., DARCI designs).

The net effect? Advertising teams are getting more and much more agile.

They just don’t necessarily consider of their techniques as formal “agile advertising and marketing.”

From agile internet marketing to… marketing and advertising?

Whichever happened to electronic marketing? It grew to become internet marketing.

Not since advertising grew to become fewer electronic. Fairly the opposite. Digital grew to become so embedded in every little thing entrepreneurs were being performing that the label of the occupation reverted to the imply: internet marketing. I’d simply call that a victory for the digital advertising movement, not defeat.

Similarly, is agile promoting simply just becoming… advertising?

Possibly “agile marketing” will restart its progress as an specific motion. Or possibly it will be changed by some recently named methodology that is nearer to what DevOps has become in the program advancement career. Or perhaps is just gets implicit in how modern-day marketing and advertising groups operate.

Agile is as agile does.

Regardless, I however feel there is a substantial chance for instructing advertising teams how to finest harness all these platforms, techniques, and processes. There’s under no circumstances been much more demand from customers for serving to marketing groups accomplish peak effectiveness by means of excellent schooling, enablement, consulting, and advisory expert services in today’s surroundings.

Does the name we contact it genuinely matter?