Many of the processes your company employs, especially strategy, roadmap, and project planning, are meant to create certainty — Here’s what we need to do and by when. The planning waterfall moves nicely from strategy to roadmap to projects to tasks.

But marketing is anything but certain. Everything is changing around you - your products and services, your customers, your ad platforms, search engines, new acquisition channels, best practices, technology, and your company.

Your well-crafted plans are likely entirely based on opinions. This is called false-certainty planning or false predictability, the classic 12-month roadmap being the most obvious example. You create plans or make decisions based on assumptions that are treated as certainties, even though they are inherently uncertain. This approach can lead to overconfidence in the plan's success, resulting in an inability to adapt when conditions change or when initial assumptions prove incorrect.

How the Wright Brothers used agile & experimentation

In the late 1800s, governments around the world had invested over a billion dollars in aviation projects led by prominent scientific minds that had tried (and failed) to achieve powered man flight. Ultimately, they were beaten by two bicycle enthusiasts known as the Wright brothers.

But why did the Wright brothers succeed?

Instead of building an entire aircraft and trying to get it to fly, as many of their predecessors had done, the Wright brothers completed over 700 flights in gliders first. They started small, gathered data, and continuously iterated their way to success - building, measuring, and learning along the way. The timeline below summarizes the story of their success:

• 1899 - 1.5m wingspan kite

• 1900 - 5.3m wingspan tethered glider

• 1901 - 6.7m wingspan untethered glider

• 1902 - 9.8m untethered glider with rudder

• 1903 - 12.3m powered airplane, short straight-line flight

• 1904 - 12.3m powered airplane, short circular flight

• 1905 - 12.3m powered airplane, 30-minute flight duration

Experts believe it was this continuous learning and experimentation, what we would now call an agile approach, which led to their success.

The problem with campaigns & waterfall project delivery

Marketing projects typically follow the classic waterfall project delivery approach, and tend to look something like the following:

1. Come up with a theme for your marketing project or campaign

2. Seek approval from your manager and stakeholders

3. Build out the plan based on the agreed requirements, with support from in-house teams, agencies, designers, and developers

4. Bring together all campaign assets and test the user journey

5. Launch

Unfortunately, with this big bang approach, you take one huge swing and if you miss - if your target audience is wrong, the messaging doesn't resonate, people don't engage or convert - it's over.

If the initial plan was wrong (and let's face it, unless you've run exactly the same campaign before under very similar conditions, it's likely more of a guess than a plan), you have just spent considerable time and money building a campaign that nobody pays attention to and that achieves nothing. Big bang = big risk.

The problem is that the waterfall project methodology was developed during the mass production era (car manufacturing, steel production, tobacco production, etc) where problems were well-defined and the solutions clearly understood.

Using waterfall project management you can launch the "perfect" marketing campaign - one that is on time, on budget, and beautifully executed - but that delivers absolutely nothing for the business. Eric Ries refers to this successful execution of a bad plan as "achieving failure".

Ries also uses the term "success theatre" to describe charismatic individuals, often in larger organizations who are able to rally individuals and gather buy-in for projects that fail to deliver business value. Anyone can say “I have a vision for something big", it's far better to say "I have a vision for something big, and I've already run tests and proven that there is demand for it".

"There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

Peter Drucker

When our world is changing and evolving, customers are changing, customer expectations are changing, marketing channels are changing and your company strategy is changing, a 100-year-old project management approach no longer works. Enter marketing experimentation.

The benefits of marketing experimentation

What is needed is a new approach to marketing project management, one that is appropriate for marketers and marketing teams today that operate under conditions of uncertainty.

As a result of work done on agile methodology in IT and software development over the years we know a few things to be true about the big bang, waterfall approach to projects:

1. Longer projects tend to get longer, they suffer from more scope creep and are more likely to get interrupted

2. Cost and time increase with complexity

3. There is often zero customer value delivered until right at the end

These problems are not unique to the IT world. The same applies when writing a book or essay, when writing code, and in many other areas of life. Every creative human endeavor requires an enormous amount of trial and error.

Big bang equals big risk, and if we can decrease the time between pivots and changing the direction, we can increase the odds of project success. We need to shift from resource optimization and instead focus on time-to-market optimization. Marketing experimentation approach enables this shift from fixed time versus fixed scope.

The more seldom we release something into the world, the more expensive and risky each release is. Conversely, the more often we release things, the cheaper and safer those releases become.

This is where marketing experimentation, and the minimum viable test comes in.

Marketing experimentation & the minimum viable test

"Humans will do marvellous things to avoid getting into the arena, where the possibility of failure is present. That's why planning is so seductive. Planning can reduce uncertainty, and uncertainty is scary. But uncertainty can never be reduced to zero. So in most cases, it's best to get momentum and solve the biggest problems as they come."

Unless you've released the same thing, to the same audience, at the same time before, you're not really planning, you're guessing. And if you're going to be wrong, you're better off spending $100 and losing a few days' work, than spending $100,000 and losing 3 months of work.

This is why modern marketers run marketing experiments. Marketing experimentation is all about making specific, concrete predictions ahead of time in order to increase learnings and reduce uncertainty over the long term.

The goal of marketing experimentation is to move away from a big bet culture towards a more agile scientific approach to marketing with the ultimate goal of reducing waste.

Anyone can put compounds in a beaker and heat it up, in the same way that any marketing team can produce a piece of content - neither are science. The science comes from having a hypothesis, a set of predictions on what is likely to happen. The goal is for marketing to be effective, not purely efficient. Any marketing team can produce things in an efficient way, but only some are effective.