Hello MRM (and Hello Acquia)

Last week I joined London based, customer experience marketing agency  MRM Meteorite – (who are part of MRM//McCann/ McCann WorldGroup and Interpublic Group) – to help drive their technology line of business, content management specifically and (as this press release details) our partnership with Acquia and their cloud based CMS platform.

It was a difficult decision to leave Tahzoo and the SDL ecosystem I have been associated with for so long (including SDL acquiring two of the vendors I worked for previously). I believe I left Tahzoo as a friend and was able to thank the leadership for the opportunity and support, specifically the CEO Brad Heidemann for his advice and guidance over the years I have known him. Super people, super company and I wish them continued success.

Anyway – onwards!

I have spent most of my career taking content management technologies to market, however I feel I have the soul of a content marketer and that soul is lifted by the capabilities of this new gig; an agency that brings together the holy trinity for digital marketers; creative, data and technology.

Proper creative too – things you can see on TV (like this P&O Ad) – that finally enables me to show my kids something that interested them 🙂 

I’m still getting around to meeting everyone (I’ve found the tea!), but I’m clearly surrounded by smart folks with great clients and whilst our agency has mature relationships with other CMS vendors and clients that leverage a range of our CMS delivery capabilities (we have a large Adobe practice for example), the investment in Acquia is exciting.

It’s exciting for two reasons;

Firstly I’m impressed by how MRM Meteorite are approaching our go-to-market around Acquia. Rather than “go find us a client, we’ll figure it out”, there’s a plan – people trained, certified and ready to go.

And secondly; Acquia are on a bit of a roll.

It’s easy to be cynical of the considerable hype around being hosted in The Cloud and the platform-as-a-service commercial model, but they serve this market well, giving an ease of entry, agility and scale, both technically and financially that dovetails exactly with the challenges our marketing leaders face today.

Specifically, the dual challenges of the content explosion, driven by the individualized, localized, multi-channel, multi-langual digital experiences demanded by consumers today and the demands from the C suite to do more with same or less (and faster). There is less and less opportunity, time or budget appetite for the big IT enterprise content platform projects.

The mature, community built, open source Drupal underpinnings are an asset as well, although I continue to maintain that open source is free puppies not free beer and being “open source” cannot be the only good reason you choose a solution as any CMS needs to deliver against a clients needs and, for a big chunk of this market; Acquia flavoured Drupal does that.

I particularly like Acquia Lift  which offers a competitive enterprise solution to many of the straightforward personalisation needs I’ve seen with clients over the years – although, you don’t need to take my word for it, as proper industry analysts agree.

No, I’m not giddy on the Acquia/Drupal Kool-Aid – as I said, we do great work with other vendors, I’m really impressed with our work for General Motors/Vauxhall brand on Adobe for example and we do some cool stuff with Sitecore, SDL and Episerver too. Gone are the days when I only had a hammer and every CMS problem I found was a nail – but Acquia offers a pretty good hammer.

So, a positive start.

And here is our show reel:

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Ian Truscott

I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.

You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or now Threads! – or listen to my weekly podcast at Rockstarcmo.com

The half-baked thoughts shared on this blog may not reflect those of my employer or clients, and if the topic of this article is interesting or you just want to say hello please get in touch.