July 2013 - Chief Marketing Technologist

Most marketing automation is really experience design

July 29, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 13 Comments

If you were going to pick a representative image of marketing automation, it would surely be one of these flow-like diagrams: If a customer visits this page, then send this email — if they’re a qualified lead — else wait 2 days and send them this other email — if we know their email address — else cookie them for display advertising retargeting. And so on. Being able to create and maintain these flows is …

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Abstraction and Probability in Marketing Automation

Memo to Microsoft: Marketing. Marketing. Marketing.

July 23, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 13 Comments

Dear Steve Ballmer — I have three words for you. Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. No, not Microsoft’s own marketing — although that’s a related topic. The “marketing” that Microsoft must urgently pay attention to is marketing as a software-driven business function. It is the hottest growing market in enterprise and SMB software alike. And its future is clearly much bigger than the traditional boundaries of the marketing department — marketing in a digital world is on …

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A vision of marketing orchestration beyond automation

July 22, 2013 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Southwest Airlines. Whole Foods. Lego. Dollar Rent-a-Car. Under Armour. These are all great brands. And behind every great brand these days, it’s worth asking — if you’re a marketing technologist — what marketing software are they using? The common denominator across those five — and many more like them — is a cloud-based digital marketing suite from Responsys. Responsys was named a Leader in email marketing by Forrester last year, but that’s just the tip …

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Robots vs. marketers: the algorithmic marketing matrix

July 18, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 11 Comments

Last week, Bank of America suffered brand damage with an automated social media bot. Their intent was good: to automatically detect tweets that mentioned the bank and reach out with an invitation to help. But their algorithm was unable to distinguish between a routine customer service situation and a brand nightmare protest. The result — a partial clip of the exchange is shown to the right — was a PR train wreck. It became instantly …

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In defense of marketing technology point solutions

July 15, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

There is a myth that implementing a marketing technology point solution is a bad idea. Like giving your significant other a bathroom scale as a birthday present is a bad idea. First aid kit sold separately. But it is a myth. (The bathroom scale is still a bad idea though.) I’ll explain what a point solution is, why they’re considered bad, and why that’s bunk. I’ll discuss what the real problem is with point solutions …

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Less Integration vs. More Specialized Capabilities

Convergence of marketing and technology interview

July 12, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Jeff Ogden, host of the popular video series Marketing Made Simple TV, interviewed me for his latest show on the convergence of marketing and technology: (Apologies that the audio and video are a little out of sync — apparently a bug in the recording by Watchitoo that they’re fixing for subsequent shows.) We discussed topics around a number of popular posts from this blog: Marketing technology landscape supergraphic Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically …

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With big technology budget comes big CMO responsibility

July 1, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

“It’s no longer a question of whether technology plays a role in marketing; it’s about what role the CMO needs to play in selecting the best solution to drive marketing and overall business success.” So begins the latest Forrester report, The CMO’s Role In Technology Purchasing ($499), by Sheryl Pattek. She summarized the report in a terrific blog post, Savvy CMOs Must Steer Their Marketing Technology Decisions In The Right Direction (free). So what role …

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