Marketing Needs More Collaboration with Security
Seventy-seven percent of companies faced a data breach last year, a figure that could be lowered with better collaboration between marketing and security, according to the CMO Council.
One-third of marketers surveyed by the CMO Council and KPMG for their just-released marketing and data security report say that security organizations are hesitant, even unwilling to collaborate to acquire, maintain, and secure customer data for a competitive advantage.
“The good news is that the vast majority of marketing leaders understand the importance of the marketing-security partnership to preserve brand reputation amid rising data privacy and security concerns,” the report says.
“From fueling [artificial intelligence] to finding actionable insights, customer data is the key to unlocking competitive advantage,” says Tom Kaneshige, the CMO Council’s chief content officer. “And the ability to acquire and protect customer data directly relates to the quality of the [chief marketing officer-chief information security officer] relationship. One of our most surprising findings is a performance gap in data insights. Among CMOs and CISOs in collaborative relationships, 97 percent are satisfied or very satisfied in their data insights. Only 37 percent in less collaborative relationships say the same thing.”
“The relationship between marketing and information security absolutely has to evolve because of the unknown territories we’re in, such as the influx of [generative AI] and the role of trust and privacy,” Aditi Uppal, vice president of digital marketing and demand generation at Teradata, says in the report.
Seventy percent of marketing and security leaders say they do collaborate at the beginning of marketing campaigns, but Bret Sanford-Chung, KPMG’s managing director of marketing advisory services, says more is needed. “It is critical to be hand in hand when getting into the nitty-gritty of the process. That said, the collaboration needs to be happening earlier. In 65 percent of campaigns, the security folks aren’t actively engaged by marketing during conceptualization and planning. There must be earlier involvement of security to reduce risk from the get-go.”
The partnership between marketing and security is critical, the report says, because collaboration between the two is necessary to keep data safe as AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) become more prevalent.
“With the proliferation of AI, specifically around chatbots like ChatGPT, it’s imperative that employees remain diligent in our efforts to safeguard sensitive data,” Jesmine La Russa, vice president of marketing for the Doctor’s Company, says in the report.
“A strong marketing-security partnership preserves brand reputation in an environment rife with privacy concerns,” the report says. “Working together, marketing and security can better acquire and protect customer data for actionable insights and enrich both the customer and employee experiences.”
Closing the Marketing-Security Gap
The report recommends that companies take the lead in AI technology by carefully examining their data collection, storage, and use across functions.
Marketing should engage the cybersecurity team early and often in everything from marketing priorities to campaign planning and not just during a crisis, according to Kaneshige. “They can collaborate to communicate security practices to customers, integrate customer feedback, and maintain or even enhance customer trust. Collaboration wards off adversarial relationships, which develop when either party takes actions without discussing them first.”
“Marketers don’t need to completely overhaul their processes to suit the security folks’ ideal wants or needs, but they should start to keep them more informed throughout the life cycle of a marketing campaign,” Sanford-Chung says. “Establishing some new touchpoints or risk reviews are simple enough things that can lead to some pretty large benefits. When you make efforts to protect your brand from risk, you also increase its desirability to customers who are more hypersensitive than ever about how their data is being used.”
The report adds that communication is critical to improving the marketing-security partnership: “Personal relationships are built on communication, collaboration, and mutual respect. It’s important for marketing and security to engage early and often on how to balance derivation of the business value of data with data protection. Problematic partnerships happen when communication occurs only during a crisis. The goal is to build fluid security guardrails and mechanisms up front in a natural manner, not bolt them on at the end.”