March 2011 - Chief Marketing Technologist

An inspiring case of IT-marketing governance

March 31, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

I have to share an inspiring IT-marketing experience with you. I’ve advocated before that IT doesn’t need to own and implement all technology in an organization in order to provide valuable guidance and oversight. Instead, the CIO can provide governance on independently operated technology projects much in the same way that the CFO provides financial governance for other departments — while still letting those groups wield their budgets without micromanagement. Or, more broadly, how the …

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Analytics: it’s not about the math

March 27, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Earlier this month, I attended eMetrics and Conversion Conference in San Francisco, part of a “data-driven business week” federation of related events. One of the highlights was a keynote by Tom Davenport — author of the bestseller Competing on Analytics — titled “The New Quantitative Era.” Tom started with the observation that analytics teams are blossoming like flowers in Springtime throughout organizations. Web analytics, marketing analytics, HR analytics, supply chain analytics, predictive analytics, even actuarial …

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Better than “If pigs could fly…” I guess

March 15, 2011 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

I’ve had an AT&T iPhone for several years now, and I must confess, the service in Boston and New York has been pretty poor. Dropped calls, weak signals — the usual complaints. Which is why I found this ad in the San Francisco airport amusing: “If There Really Were a Camelot, AT&T Would Have You Covered.” I presume the intent of the ad was to imply that AT&T could provide coverage anywhere. But an equally …

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75% of CMOs rearranging their teams in 2011

March 13, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

A colleague recently alerted me to an article in Marketing Week that shares new data from a Forrester report by Chris Stutzman: An astonishing 75% of chief marketing officers plan to rearrange their teams by the end of this year, according to a study seen exclusively by Marketing Week. Why? Because new forms of media and communications are having such a fundamental effect on business that the customer is closer to becoming king than ever …

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If it’s in an infographic, it must be true

March 12, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Making the rounds on Twitter is a hilarious “infographic” by smarter.org and byJess.net, Why Apples Are Better Than Oranges, satirizing half a dozen different ways in which data, statistics, and visualization can be — and often are — thoroughly abused. As the soft art of marketing has been juxtaposed with the mathematical precision of analytics, fascinating hybrids of evidence and imagination have proliferated — often wrapped in very pretty illustrations. Want to keep yourself and …

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The tyranny of consumerization. Really?

March 4, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

A headline on Computerworld this morning caught my eye: Apple’s iPad 2 provokes IT anxiety. I can imagine the iPad stirring up a lot of reactions — including mere indifference — but anxiety? That seems incongruous. Unless maybe you’re HP, Motorola or Samsung. But the article starts off with, “As exciting as the new iPad 2 is bound to be for both consumers and business users, some IT executives who will have to support the …

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Visualizing marketing analytics with Tableau

March 1, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Wow. Yesterday, I saw a demo of Tableau, a software package for doing “visual analysis” of databases and other raw datasets. I was amazed. That is one of the coolest pieces of software I have ever seen. In a nutshell, Tableau makes it incredibly easy to visualize the patterns and relationships in just about any dataset you point it at. These visualizations are largely driven by drag-and-drop and let you quickly explore and analyze data …

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