September 2010

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 […]

“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

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

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

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.

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