Amit Ashkenazi is VP Business Strategy at Fiverr, and also formerly a Partner at Viola Growth. This post was written during his tenure at Viola.

If you imagine what CMOs might have looked like or how they might have behaved a few decades ago, you’d probably picture a Don Draper type, smoking cigars and drinking single malt whiskey at a gentlemen’s club while closing multi-million dollar branding deals with an advertising agency “suit”. But if you fast forward to the natural habitat of a typical CMO a few decades later, it’s a very different picture.

As a partner at Viola Growth, I get to meet new types of CMOs both in our portfolio companies and in many new companies we meet with every day as part of our deal flow processes. New CMOs are no longer the high-flying, “wheeling and dealing” type with big egos, but Sheldon Cooper-like geeks with an obsession about numbers. We’re actually seeing more and more CMOs with B.Sc. rather than B.A. backgrounds.

The new era of marketing efforts is all about A/B testing, performance, automation and optimization. Best-in-class CMOs are measuring every dollar spent on their marketing activities based on numerous KPIs like brand uplift, return on investment, conversion, click-through rate, CAC, LTV, etc. Some even go to the extent of using control groups before launching their campaigns at scale, relying on advanced statistical analysis to ensure maximum performance before they spend a dime.

Moreover, CMOs nowadays hold significant IT budgets and allocate hefty sums towards marketing automation software in an effort to automate and optimize their marketing spend in the best way possible. According to a recent report by Gartner, the estimated spend on marketing software reached $6 billion in 2015 and is expected to grow at 24% per year until 2018 to $11.4 billion.

These days, modern marketers have to be agile and experimental, and try new ways to reach and engage audiences. As a result, the new generation of marketing software goes beyond basic CRM to advanced BI with predictive analytics, real-time event triggering, automated content generation and management, and advanced personalization. Machine learning capabilities, together with tremendous amounts of data, create great opportunities to tailor one-to-one offerings using customized pricing and engagement techniques. Marketers now need (and have access to) great technologies to support these advanced marketing initiatives and to generate useful insights based on scientific data about the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The new era of B2C business models such as self-serve SaaS, as well as verticals like e-commerce and FinTech, have also spurred the need for efficient and cheap customer acquisition capabilities and life-time-value (LTV) optimization. B2B companies also have to be budget-conscious and ROI-driven to make the most of every dollar spent, so they too have to be a lot more careful and precise about identifying the target audience that’s most likely to buy their product.

Gone are the days of mass marketing campaigns whose creation and execution were based on whatever deal was negotiated by two impeccably dressed, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking executives. It’s not even just about clever slogans or eye-popping visuals anymore. It’s partly about the creative, for sure, but it’s also (and arguably mostly) about defining target audiences and customer personas, campaign customization and optimization based on performance indicators, and automation made possible by a plethora of marketing software, which are now as much a part of the modern CMOs arsenal of tools as all of the “creative” tools they have traditionally used in the past.

In many ways, marketing is now becoming more a science than an art, and it will be interesting to see how it continues to evolve.

More posts by Amit Ashkenazi:
Why spending big to grow a company that’s based on shaky unit economics is a lousy idea
Everything as a Service (EaaS): Why eventually we might not need to “own” anything
Change Agents and how they impact new technologies
Raising money for your startup? Why you need to beware of inflated valuations
Love thy Competitor: Why competition can be a good thing for startups
What your approach to recruiting top talent says about you and your company (and why it really matters)
Seeking a strategic investor for your company? Here’s what you need to know