Real-world progress in digital marketing lags behind MarTech, the blending of marketing and technology. Why? Because marketers lack agility, a crucial piece to the puzzle, according to Roland Smart (pictured), vice president of social and community marketing at Oracle Corp.

“Digital transformation is … dominating the marketer’s consciousness at the moment,” Smart said, adding that there is a growing stack of marketing technology at their avail, but they will need more than that to complete the transformation.

Smart spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this week’s Oracle Modern Marketing Experience conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. (*Disclosure below.)

The second piece to the digital transformation is the agile transformation, said Smart. “The Agile Manifesto,” written in 2001, became the bible in software development, which owes much to the agile methods of continuous trial and iteration.

“Marketers have an opportunity to take a page from that book, as, of course, marketers are managing more software than ever before,” said Smart, author of “The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage.”

Agility is more cultural than technological, with a rapid trial and iteration cycle based on empirical data and feedback is at its heart. The best marketing technologies a company can adopt are those that enable agility in the culture, according to Smart. For instance, Oracle’s marketing group uses Oracle Maxymiser, a testing and optimization platform, along with cloud-based content marketing tool Compendium and Oracle Eloqua, which automates lead generation and subscription tasks.

Oracle implemented these tools to modernize its inbound marketing; indeed, “modernize” is another way to describe agile transformation, Smart said.

CMOs to play new role

Agile transformation revamped the role of product managers in recent years, making them stewards of innovation. It too can change the role of chief marketing officers, said Smart. However, they will also need greater influence over customer touchpoints.

“One way to get that influence is to share the process of the people who have control over those things,” like product managers, he said.

When the marketer has become the steward of customer experience, “that’s when I would say we’ve sort of reached a modern era,” said Smart.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. The conference sponsor, Oracle, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE