Marketing with agents

How a CMO runs a department of talented marketers, their personal agents, and a shared bench of marketing agents

The marketing org chart is changing shape. The people on it stay at the center, and each of them now works with a personal agent. Around them sits a second group: specialist agents that do defined jobs in the department's processes and run inside the company's own network. A CMO who sees the department this way manages three things well: the people, the agents, and the rules between them.

Two kinds of agents, with two different owners

A personal agent belongs to the marketer. It knows how that person works, what they are responsible for this quarter, and how they like things written. It drafts, follows up, keeps track of what is waiting on whom, and tells its owner what needs a decision. Its identity is the person's, so when a product marketer changes roles, their agent goes with them.

A department agent belongs to the company. It fills one role in one or more processes and does it the same way for everyone who asks. It is held to the company's standards, works within a budget the company sets, and leaves a record of what it did. When someone leaves, it stays.

The split matters because it answers the questions a CMO gets asked first: who owns this work, who pays for it, who can stop it, and what remains when a person moves on.

Start from the processes the department already runs

A useful way to decide which department agents to run is to start from the work itself. The AgentMesh Catalog writes down 80 marketing processes in eleven value streams, from Planning and Audience through Content, Campaigns, Media spend, Leads, Customers and PR to Reporting. Each process names its steps, the points where a person has to sign off, and the agent roles it needs.

Take Approve Marketing Material, which every other content process calls before anything goes out. It uses a handful of department agents:

• a Standards keeper, which holds the organization's written marketing standards;
• a Brand check, which scores material against those standards before people sign it;
• a Disclosure check, which scores it against the disclosure rules in every market it will run in;
• a Decision coordinator, which runs the decision from the open question to the recorded answer.

The people who sign stay people. The agents make sure that by the time a piece reaches them, every check has been run and its result is attached.

A launch, from one marketer's desk

A product marketer is launching a feature next month. She asks her personal agent to turn the product team's notes into a launch brief, and edits it until it says what she means. Her agent sends the brief to the department's Campaign manager, which runs the campaign from the brief to the learnings.

From there the work fans out. The Copywriter writes the words and the Designer makes the visual assets. Everything passes through the approval process above. The Media buyer handles the paid side within the spend limit the department set for it. Inbound responses go to the Lead scorer, which turns a form submission into a scored, routed lead in minutes, and the Consent manager keeps the record of who agreed to be contacted, on which channel and when.

After the launch, the Spend reconciler checks each media invoice against what was ordered and what actually ran, and Analytics reports the results with their sources attached.

Most of this happens while the marketer is doing something else. Her personal agent tells her when a draft is ready for her, when a sign-off is waiting on her, and when the first numbers are in. She spends her time on the parts that need her judgment: the message, the trade-offs, and the conversations with sales and product.

What the CMO manages now

• The people. Hiring, judgment, taste, and the relationships with customers, the press, analysts and the rest of the company. None of that moves to an agent.
• The roster of department agents. Which roles are filled, by which agent, from which vendor, and how each one is performing. An agent that underperforms can be replaced without retraining a single person, because the role and the process stay the same.
• The rules. The written standards the checks score against, a spending limit for each agent that buys anything, and the points in each process where a person must sign.
• The record. Every request and every hand-off between agents, signed by the agent that made it, so a question about who approved what months ago has an answer.

Why the department agents run inside the company's own network

A bench of specialist agents from several vendors, plus a personal agent for every marketer, adds up to a lot of agents talking to each other. Running them in the company's own mesh gives the CMO and the security team the controls they would ask for anyway:

• only agents the company has admitted can reach the department's agents;
• each agent works within the budget it was given;
• every message carries its sender's signature and is recorded;
• one kill switch stops any agent everywhere it can act;
• agents from different vendors, and those of agencies and partners the company lets in, work together over the same network without a custom connection for each pair.

Personal agents fit the same picture. A marketer's agent joins the company's mesh with its owner's identity, works with the department agents under the same rules, and is never asked to become something the company owns.

Where to start

Pick one process that runs often and has clear standards. Approving marketing material is a good first choice, because every other content process depends on it and its delays are easy to measure. Give each marketer on that team a personal agent, fill the process's roles with department agents, and keep the human sign-offs exactly where they are. Measure how long a piece takes from submission to release, and how often it comes back for rework, before and after.