September 2010

CMO Strategy: Establish a Chief Marketing Technologist

Advertising Age just published an article of mine, The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist, in their CMO Strategy section. This is a sneak preview of the session I’ll be presenting at the Pivot conference in a few weeks. The article begins with a refrain that is familiar to readers of this blog: We have entered a Golden Age of marketing technology. There are now thousands of software applications built for nearly every aspect of …

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Technology is just a tool… but are you skilled with it?

“Technology is just a tool.” This is a popular refrain in discussions around marketing technology. Marketers invoke it as a way to emphasize the marketing over the technology. And IT invokes it as a way to categorize marketing technology as the same as any other kind of technology. Since marketing and IT are both a little uneasy about the explosion of marketing software, it’s a nice bromide. I agree that technology is just a tool. …

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5 reasons to be excited about Pivot conference

When I heard that Chris Shipley was producing a new conference focused on the modern dynamics of brand marketing, I was instantly intrigued. First of all, it’s a terrific topic. While other events have tackled aspects of this — such as a plethora of social media events or shows on state-of-the-art advertising — I believe there has been an unfulfilled need for a more holistic, strategic and integrative view. This is the promise of Pivot, …

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Should marketing technology be centralized?

As marketers adopt more and more marketing technology in their work, particularly cloud-based applications, with many choices and many different opinions about what software is best for a particular purpose, the question arises: To what degree should marketing applications be centralized or standardized within an organization? This question usually arises from the bastions of the besieged IT department that pictures many different marketers buying many different software packages on their own, all willy-nilly in the …

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The Chief Language Officer Parable

Some people believe that all technology should be centralized in the IT department. They reject the idea that marketing should control its own software — even though modern marketing is now deeply entwined with the technologies it uses. The premise of these naysayers is that only IT can responsibly manage technology, cloud computing or not. Perhaps. But consider this metaphoric tale… Effective immediately, no one outside the Language Department is allowed to write anything, on …

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Marketing and IT share a common fear

Change is scary. Big, organization-altering, career-shifting change is downright terrifying. While it can be fun to blog about disruptive innovation and creative destruction — commenting as an observer to the end of the world as we know it — actually being caught in the middle of such change is another sensation entirely. Believe me, I have a lot of empathy for those in the maelstrom. Back in the early 90’s, I ran a bulletin board …

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