Gartner confirms 70% have chief marketing technologist

70% Have a Chief Marketing Technologist

Last year, Gartner found a surprising result — should I have been surprised? — from their high-tech marketing budget survey: 72% of their respondents indicated that there was a “chief marketing technologist” type role in their organization. While I’ve been predicting the rise of the marketing technologist for several years, that struck me as a [...]

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What do you mean by marketing as a science?

Marketing: Science or Art?

I’m fascinated by this chart that was included in a recent report by Eloqua and BtoB Magazine, Defining the Modern Marketer: From Ideal to Real. Based on a survey of 556 B2B marketing professionals from companies of all sizes and industries, the report reveals current perceptions about what “modern marketing” is today — and should be [...]

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“Brand debt” and a gap in the agile marketing manifesto

Brand Debt in Agile Marketing

Agile marketing is often celebrated for speed — empowering marketing teams to get more ideas out into the market faster. But while that is often a valuable side benefit, it’s not one of the key principles behind agile marketing. In fact, putting too much emphasis on speed can be detrimental to marketing’s larger mission. The [...]

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How formal should your marketing experiments be?

Marketing Experimentation Risk Matrix

How formal should your marketing experimentation programs be? That was the question I was asking myself looking at the above “test definition brief” that was included in a report jointly produced by Google and the Marketing Leadership Council: The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing. The report — which I think is terrific overall for a [...]

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Marketing data: exploration vs. confirmation

Marketing Data: Exploration vs. Confirmation

There is tremendous excitement around data-driven marketing. A whole catalog of data-related phrases are echoing throughout the marketing world: big data, data mining, data science, data exchanges, data management platforms, controlled experiments (“big testing“), analytics, metrics, dashboards, etc. But the data driving all these different activities isn’t quite the same. Or, more accurately, the contexts in [...]

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The blurring of agencies, software vendors, and IT shops

Service Providers in the EMM Stack

The Jordan Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI), a leading investment bank in the marketing and media space, recently released a new report on the enterprise marketing management (EMM) stack. They start by noting that from 2010-2012, four companies (“The Big Four”) have invested over $20 billion in marketing technology M&A: Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce. But [...]

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Data is marketing’s gateway drug to software fluency

The Circle of Life of Data

In observing the language that CIOs and CMOs alike keep using around the big data bubble — where both parties seem ready to acknowledge that marketing is in the hot seat for making productive use of data — I’m starting to conclude one of two things: “Data” is a euphemism for all application-level marketing technology. [...]

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Moving a blog is quintessential marketing technologist work

Theory vs. Practice

Migrating a blog from one platform to another reminds me of the saying: “In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they’re different.” In the process of moving this blog from Typepad to WordPress — on the occasion of our 5th anniversary — I was struck by how this is exactly the sort [...]

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5 years worth of marketing technology geekery

5 Years of Chief Marketing Technologist

This month marks the 5th anniversary of the launch of this blog. The momentum that has grown around these topics of marketing technology management, marketing technologists, marketing software, marketing data, agile marketing, etc., has been incredibly exciting. Thank you for reading, sharing, and contributing. On the occasion of this 5th anniversary, I decided to invest [...]

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Balancing marketing technology and IT at a Fortune 500 firm

Mayur Gupta

Marketing technology management can look straightforward on paper, when analysts and pundit-bloggers such as myself draw simplified diagrams of new organizational structures with a few quick brushstrokes. But the real work of implementing these organizational changes for “the new marketing” — and the cultural shifts entangled in that mission — especially at a major Fortune [...]

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