Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative (published by Wiley)

My goal was to help marketers at all levels — even those with no technical background or inclination — adapt marketing management to the wild and wonderful whirlwind of a world now dominated by software.

My underlying thesis: as marketing becomes more and more entangled in software — as everything becomes more and more digital — the art of managing marketing increasingly resembles the art of managing software.

Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative

For most people, that probably sounds a little strange. After all, marketers and software developers have historically been on opposite ends of the career spectrum.

But when you realize that marketers are now paddling water up to their chins in websites (software), analytics (software), social media (software), marketing automation (software), interactive content (software), mobile apps (software), and so on, it starts to seem obvious. Software has eaten the world — and marketing too.

And this is actually a really good thing.

Software gives us the potential to innovate and scale marketing in highly agile ways that defy the conventional laws of gravity as we knew them in the classical marketing universe.

But it’s like the leap from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics — the “rules” of what’s possible are different and can feel a little counterintuitive. To effectively harness the digital forces of software, we must not only innovate what we produce in marketing, but innovate how we produce it too.

If this sounds intriguing to you, you can download the introduction, table of contents, and first chapter of Hacking Marketing as a free PDF.

Harvard Business Review: Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist

Harvard Business Review: Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist

I wrote an article in collaboration with Laura McLellanThe Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist, that was featured in the July-August 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review, part of their spotlight focus on “the new marketing organization.”

It describes the basic framework of the role and the forces that are motivating the growth of hybrid marketing/technology executives, and it also provides short vignettes of five real-world marketing technologists.

Here are several of the amazing marketing leaders — many of my heros — who graciously reviewed Hacking Marketing and offered these remarks:

I contributed a chapter to the book Multi-channel Marketing Ecosystems, edited by Markus Stahlberg and Ville Maila.

As part of their promotion for the book, the publisher has agreed to let me distribute a PDF of my chapter that discusses software as the new fabric of marketing — Software-driven marketing ROI. Click the previous link or the image to the right to download your free copy (no registration required).

Others have also covered my evangelism of this subject, including: