Former head of comms at BMC Software Mark Stouse is preparing to introduce four ventures related to marketing and communications analytics in coming months.

The ventures are part of Vaulting Ventures, a consortium that Stouse founded that brings together professionals who are “tired of the status quo in marketing communications, especially when it comes to measuring business impact and making sure resources are being well-spent,” Stouse says.

[caption id="attachment_2909" align="alignright" width="150"]Mark Stouse Mark Stouse[/caption]

He declined to name others involved with initiative at this point, but said the number is between 20 and 30 people. Stouse parted ways with BMC Software earlier this summer.

“Some people [in the venture] bring money and brains — others just bring brains and perspective,” Stouse says. “What’s unusual is you can earn equity based on sweat, if you aren’t in a position to ‘buy’ it. But it’s not a trade organization, it’s private but the things that spring from the organization won’t be private.”

There are four ventures incubating as part of the organization, including Vocem, based in public opinion polling, and a revamped iteration of the Influence Scoring System (ISS) that Stouse has advocated for and implemented at organizations including Honeywell and BMC during his tenures at each organization.

He describes Vocem — which he expects to debut in Q4 — as “a new take on public opinion polling that will have implications not only from a political standpoint but also as a large-scale focus group.” The Holmes Report has previously reported on ISS as a measurement system that ties marketing and communications investment to sales productivity and other financial metrics. Its latest iteration is slated to come to market in Q1. The remaining ventures are “too nascent” to discuss, Stouse says.

“All of the ventures are absolutely about making business intelligence a major point of correlation,” Stouse says. “The polling I’ve done of CxOs in the last several years has shown the reason they are so frustrated is they really believe marketing and communications are important to their growth and prosperity — too important to maintain the status quo.”

The “status quo” Stouse refers to is marketing and communications defining their ROI via awareness and lead generation rather than their contribution to an organization’s bottomline.

“That has made a professional culture where everyone defines their value by the size of their expense line,” Stouse says. “It creates a huge cognitive dissonance between business that prizes minimizing expenses and maximizing returns.”

When the ventures come to market, he expects their appeal to be among both client-side organizations and marketing agencies.