But there’s a pattern to this ongoing cycle of disruptive technology, and an apparent direction as well. The clues are everywhere—especially in the efforts marketers are making to salvage the fading programs they’ve just begun to master—and they point to a shifting balance of power between businesses and markets that is significantly changing the practice of marketing.

The most dramatic clue is one that is continually trumpeted in the marketing trade press as some kind of modern corporate tragedy. The average life expectancy of a CMO in an American business is now somewhere between 18 and 23 months. If you ask senior marketers to explain this phenomenon, the most common lament is that CEOs, corporate boards, and Wall Street analysts and investors, just don’t get it. No one understands the incredible value marketers deliver. Put aside the inherent irony that marketers are somehow unable to effectively position their own profession, and it looks to me like a simple case of natural selection. Companies will continue to cycle through marketers until they find a survival advantage. Is it pretty? No. Is it fair? Life rarely is. But when a CMO tells me dismissively, as one recently did, that technology is “not strategic” and is better left to “the younger set”, I start looking over his shoulder for something looming with big teeth.

Here’s the thing. Technology has always been strategic to marketing. In the earliest days of marketing as a corporate discipline, when marketing literally meant “getting your products to market”, technology was significantly focused on transportation. Canals. Railroads. Steam engines. Livery vehicles. Technology and marketing hand in hand. Printing presses and merchandising. Radio, television and advertising. Databases and direct marketing. Computers and mass customization. Internet and electronic commerce. This is an oversimplification, but you get the idea. There’s been a long trajectory of symbiotic relationships between technology and marketing. And yet somehow we live in a world today where marketing and IT are more often at odds than in partnership.

Of course that’s changing, but the transition is chaotic. Beyond all the hype about social computing and Web 2.0, there are three technology meta trends that I’m particularly intrigued by today.

The first is the drive toward greater metrics of performance and accountability. There’s a complex economic drive at work here that I’ve laid out elsewhere, but there’s also a simple technological factor. We’ve evolved incredibly powerful applications and methodologies for measuring complex business systems, and marketing is under a microscope because businesses have a growing capacity to connect the dots between expenses and outcomes. CFOs aren’t breathing down marketers’ necks because they don’t understand the art of marketing, which most don’t, but because they subscribe to the science of measuring risk and return. Marketers come up short in this duel not because they’re unable to adopt the dogma of ROI, but because they parrot this dogma and accept its limitations without seizing metrics to build their own momentum. There are a few beacons in the fog here. Multivariate testing. Dynamic optimization. Contextual ads. Behavioral analytics. But week after week I meet marketers who say they want to embrace innovation, and then put up a barrier to each new technology until someone can prove ROI so they can make a business case to finance. I’ve said this before, but it’s like a prehistoric fish in a dying inland sea demanding a business case for legs.

The second trend is the oversimplification of marketing technology to make it consumable by the lucrative segment of technology challenged marketers. To some degree, this is a positive trend—vendors are being increasingly forced to vastly simplify complex client-server applications to get them through the decision-making process. If IT is a gate-keeper for your marketing applications, you can forget about scaling revenue. SOA. SaaS. On Demand. There’s a whole lot of streamlining going on. But there’s already a strain of hubris showing up among some marketers who suddenly find their annoying IT brother isn’t around to cramp their style anymore. Integration? We’ll worry about that later. Give me some of that point solution over there. Security? That’s what we pay a monthly service fee for. Hey. Let’s get a little open source over here so we customize this baby.

The third trend that’s amazing to watch is enterprise marketers getting cowboyed up with marketing applications. CRM. SFA. BI. EMM. And that’s just the big iron. But when you dig below the surface, as I discussed in my first post in this series, most marketers in this environment are so distracted by the demands of collecting and integrating so much data about their customers that they don’t have any time to build actual relationships with their customers anymore. This trend is of particular interest to me because it dovetails with another major trend. Just as enterprise marketing is fragmenting under the weight of technological complexity, the exact opposite is happening for consumers. Technology is making the buying process simpler. And while marketers are getting so distracted by technology they have little time for conversations with their customers, customers are finding technology makes it easier to carry on conversations amongst themselves. If that sounds poetic, I suspect it’s because the trends are fundamentally intertwined.

I won’t belabor the whole argument now—you can tab through a bunch of posts on the subject starting here—but we come full circle to the argument that the balance of power between business and customers is changing—or more accurately, returning to a state of greater stability. In its simplest form, the argument goes like this: 150 years ago, technology enabled businesses to scale far beyond the regional communities that previously sustained them. They could manufacture great surpluses of products, and advancing transportation enabled them to reach new markets where they had no business reputation, but where the development of branding and advertising could fill the gap. The cost of creating, serving and communicating with mass markets was overwhelmingly expensive, and concentrated in the hands of enterprise. But as technology continued to advance, the simpler technologies became less expensive and more available to the masses. Until we reached the tipping point where consumers could connect to each other directly, and branding and advertising could no longer stand in place of a company’s reputation within the community that sustains it.

The more consumers find it easier to compare notes on the companies they patronize, the more marketers struggle to retain the control they’ve long taken for granted. Sometimes this shows up as denial: You know this whole social marketing thing? It’s just a passing fad. Other times it shows up as hubris: Once we get all these applications fully integrated, we’ll have a demand generating machine! But sometimes it inspires a few really smart marketers to step back and question the whole design of their marketing machine, and to take a new look at their relationship with technology. Whether this will happen among today’s generation of marketing executives, or whether we’ll have to wait for the next generation to take over, I guess just have to watch to find out.