Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?

Catching up on my backlog of knowledge and matters from right before #MartechDay previously this month — which highlighted the 2022 advertising and marketing technological innovation landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the top of my checklist is the newest Condition of Agile Marketing report from AgileSherpas.

As usually, this is a great, in depth report on how and why agile methodologies are getting utilised in promoting. You can see from the chart above that agile has uncovered its way into a large selection of marketing activities: promoting operations, creative products and services, website functions, social media, promotion, and so on.

It’s even getting applied (30%) in activities promoting, which has lengthy been the go-to instance for skeptics: “Oh, agile could in no way operate for functions.” (To be truthful, in a digital/hybrid event earth, the pacing and adaptability of events promoting has increased drastically.)

But in contrast to previous year, when 51% of participants noted working with agile marketing and advertising, this time only 43% did. That’s near to the 42% from 2020. Is agile marketing backsliding?

Of program, the most noticeable disclaimer is the survey sample. Even with 513 entrepreneurs taking part in this most recent survey, it is still a extremely smaller subset of the assorted advertising and marketing universe and no doubt matter to the ebbs and flows of range bias.

But still. After practically 15 years of advocacy for agile advertising, the momentum of this movement seems… stalled?

Agile advertising and marketing concepts, practices & labels

The rules of agile marketing, however, look to be universally accepted as gospel real truth these times. I just cannot imagine of a one marketer I’ve fulfilled in the past quite a few years who hasn’t embraced the values of adaptability, studying from experimentation, iterative enhancement, cross-team collaboration, bigger visibility into get the job done-in-flight, workforce empowerment, and many others.

Promoting has come to be an agile job. Complete quit.

Vintage agile practices — these types of as sprints, each day standups, kanban boards, etc. — also look to have proliferated widely. Even though in many situations, they’ve morphed from their original sort. We’ll come again to that in a moment, as I think it is the twist of article-agile.

But the labels? Not so a great deal. I pretty hardly ever listen to the conditions sprint, standup, or kanban in marketing conversations. Even “agile marketing” as a expression arises much less commonly than it appeared a couple of yrs back.

Agile advertising and marketing vs. agile advancement trends

A few of charts from Google Traits support illustrate what is going on in this article. Very first, let’s just look at the progress of the research phrase “agile marketing”:

The chart displays relative search quantity for this expression more than the previous 18 decades. You can see that it peaked all around 2017. (A 12 months right after the release of Hacking Marketing and advertising. Coincidence?) Due to the fact then, it’s had fluctations up and down. But it mostly strike a ceiling.

To get a far better sense of how much complete look for volume there is for agile marketing, you have to have to evaluate it towards one more trend. So let’s review it towards its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two items pop proper out. Initial, agile internet marketing has achieved only a tiny portion of the mindshare that agile development ever did. Second, interest in agile development has steadily declined because 2010. It’s all-around 1/4 of the volume it was at its peak.

What transpired in 2010? The increase of DevOps.

Indeed, DevOps turned the big that stood on the shoulders of agile progress. Its recognition has dwarfed agile enhancement, even from its heyday. And in contrast to individuals two, agile promoting would barely even sign-up on the scale.

But it’s crucial to notice that DevOps arose from Agile. To quotation its Wikipedia short article:

“Agile growth teams… could not ‘satisfy the shopper by way of early and steady shipping and delivery of beneficial software’ until they subsumed the operations / infrastructure tasks linked with their purposes, quite a few of which they automatic.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the devices improvement lifecycle and offer continual delivery with significant computer software good quality.” What is ongoing integration/ongoing deployment (CI/CD) if not the greatest system for providing iterative software progress?

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

The plummeting expenses of “shipping” in the cloud

To be distinct, DevOps is not an agile administration methodology. It’s not even an “ops” group (in most cases) like other ops features, these types of as promoting ops. Fairly, it is a set of tactics, processes, and technology that developers use to ship software program promptly, iteratively, and securely. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes setting up and deploying software program, but determining what to make and when nonetheless desires to come about at a degree over that. In idea, agile progress methodologies such as Scrum can present the framework for all those selections. But most dev groups I know really don’t explicitly use those people methodologies any more. Most have invented their have process, pulling ideas from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev venture administration resources such as Jira.

My consider: DevOps — and additional broadly, the cloud — has drastically decreased the costs of iteratively producing application. Again in the times when agile methodologies such as Scrum were produced, the costs and complexities of transport were considerably increased. The rigid construction of Scrum was an powerful and essential way to handle that. These days in a superior DevOps environment? Not as required?

Which is not to say that technique, planning, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration essential close to them aren’t essential. They’re as very important to success as ever. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative launch cycles? Not as important?

(Permit the flames from ardent agile advocates commence.)

Is there a DevOps equivalent in marketing?

Internet marketing ops is a various sort of creature that DevOps. For one particular, it is a job/group in just the advertising and marketing org, alternatively than a follow/system that all marketers use.

However there is some shared DNA. In many ways, advertising ops groups function as a DevOps-like enabler for entrepreneurs to be equipped to “ship” internet marketing rapidly, iteratively, and properly. Advertising ops manages the tech stack and processes to permit that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

Still with the rise of far more and a lot more no-code capabilities across martech, promoting ops is also empowering entrepreneurs with more and far more self-support abilities. Just as computer software deployment ops got “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into additional developers’ arms with DevOps, much more abilities to execute advertising and marketing — the two inside and exterior marketing and advertising “deployments” — are remaining shifted into the arms of normal marketers.

I really do not know that there’s a identify for this phenomenon. It’s a type of democratization of specific aspects of promoting ops. (Ideally underneath the steerage, governance, and guardrails of the pro promoting ops crew.) But it is ever more analogous to DevOps. Far more people today can ship more promoting, speedily, effortlessly, and safely and securely.

Just as with computer software, strategy, arranging, roadmaps, prioritization, workforce coordination and collaboration are necessary to efficiently harness this distributed electric power of creation. But just as equally, the fees in deploying most varieties of advertising and marketing have dropped substantially over the earlier 10 years. This has developed additional slack in the advertising and marketing creation system, which has built rigid agile promoting methodologies… not as vital?

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

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

Talking of slack, or, um, Slack, the past 10 years has also brought an explosion of innovation in perform communications and collaboration items. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Groups have become ubiquitous — alongside with a whole ecosystem of apps that prolong and integrate with them. A new generation of function management platforms, these types of as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for entrepreneurs) Workfront, provide greater framework and visibility into complicated, rapidly-shifting priorities, initiatives, and workflows.

Certainly, the Administration group of the martech landscape had the most significant share development from 2020 to 2022.

These resources have had a important effect on how operate receives performed. Lots of of them embed or allow agile (lowercase “a”) procedures. Pretty much none of them use the terminology of agile marketing methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, get the job done-in-development administration, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.

In the meantime, I’d say that Slack and Groups — accelerated by the Good Migration to Remote Function — have successfully killed replaced the every day stand-up for most groups.

But it’s not that the fundamental principle of stand-ups has gone absent. On the contrary, these staff communications platforms usually make it less difficult for teams to continue to be linked during the working day in a relatively small-influence way. Troubles that arise can be resolved a lot quicker than waiting around for the future stand-up in a mounted time window that increasingly fails to align with the schedules of dispersed group associates.

Hey, I’m continue to a big lover of in-individual collaboration, and I concur something is dropped with out it. But other factors are acquired. And for greater and worse, distant and hybrid teams are the new regular. In this brave new earth, Slack and Groups are a superior match than every day stand-ups for many.

And it’s not just technology. Administration solutions that I believe of as “point solutions” for particular desires — in contrast to a entire suite of techniques, as with formal agile advertising and marketing — have been popularized for better cross-practical collaboration (e.g., pods outside the context of formal agile) and multi-get together final decision-making (e.g., DARCI styles).

The net result? Marketing groups are becoming more and much more agile.

They just really do not automatically think of their techniques as official “agile promoting.”

From agile promoting to… internet marketing?

Whichever transpired to digital advertising and marketing? It grew to become marketing.

Not for the reason that promoting became fewer electronic. Really the opposite. Digital grew to become so embedded in everything marketers were being carrying out that the label of the profession reverted to the signify: marketing. I’d connect with that a victory for the digital promoting motion, not defeat.

Equally, is agile marketing and advertising just becoming… marketing and advertising?

Perhaps “agile marketing” will restart its growth as an express movement. Or perhaps it will be changed by some newly named methodology that is nearer to what DevOps has turn into in the application improvement job. Or perhaps is just results in being implicit in how present day advertising teams run.

Agile is as agile does.

Irrespective, I however imagine there is a huge prospect for educating promoting teams how to finest harness all these platforms, methods, and procedures. There’s by no means been far more demand for encouraging marketing groups reach peak efficiency as a result of fantastic coaching, enablement, consulting, and advisory companies in today’s setting.

Does the title we simply call it seriously subject?