September 2014 - Chief Marketing Technologist

8 discoveries from our marketing technologist survey

September 30, 2014 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

What is the profile of a marketing technologist? The prominence of marketing technologists and the chief marketing technologist (or CMTO) role has greatly expanded over the past six years. Just in the past year, the topic has been featured in an article in the July-August 2014 edition of the Harvard Business Review, and the first MarTech conference completely sold out. There is no denying marketing technology is hot right now. But few studies have been …

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Marketing Technologist and CMTO Skill Sets

SDL’s CMO on data-driven decisions, marketing and IT, and customer experience

September 29, 2014 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In today’s Q&A, I had the privilege of hearing from Paige O’Neill, the CMO of SDL, one of the top providers of customer experience management (CXM) software. Paige has had extensive experience across the marketing technology landscape, and it was fascinating to hear her perspective on how it’s changed — and is still evolving. Can you start by telling us a little about your background and your current role at SDL? Waking up every morning to …

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Over $21.8 billion of funding for marketing technology

September 26, 2014 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Hold on to your butts: there’s been over $21.8 billion of venture capital and private equity invested marketing technology companies. And that doesn’t include money raised from public offerings, M&A deals, or untracked investments from angels, friends and family — or the hundreds of companies who weren’t included on my landscape (as I always disclaim, it’s definitely not comprehensive). In other words, real investment in space is much greater than $21.8 billion. Earlier this week, …

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Marketing Technology Funding September 2014

Point/counterpoint: how big is the martech market?

September 24, 2014 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

We’re going to try something different here. Louis Gudema, the president of marketing consultancy revenue + associates, submitted a guest post to me with the contrarian (?) viewpoint that marketing technology is not as big of a market as some claim. He mostly takes issue with the “market opportunity” stated in HubSpot’s recent S-1 filing — not to pick on HubSpot per se, but because their S-1 is the most recent attempt to frame the …

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6 questions with the CMO of Salesforce ExactTarget

September 23, 2014 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In conjunction with the Connections conference this week for the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud — which is a terrific product, but that’s a multisyllabic mouthful of a brand name — I had the privilege to do a Q&A with Woodson Martin, the CMO of that product. We covered a range of subjects, from how Woodson manages his own marketing team to how marketers can keep up with the rapid pace of change in marketing technology. …

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A call-to-arms for The Agile Era of business management

September 21, 2014 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

There are many posts, articles, and presentations about “agile marketing” out there — I’ve contributed my fair share — that dive into the process of agile management methodologies (mostly adaptations of Scrum). They’re good patterns for implementation — when you’re ready to dig in at that level. There are also plenty, plenty of high-level remarks out there about how businesses need to be agile — with very little insight about how. Hey, we should all …

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Growing Up Fast: Agile Management Practices

Marketers regularly use over 100 software programs

September 18, 2014 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

A lot of people look at my marketing technology landscape graphic and protest, “There’s too damn much software in marketing!” To many, it’s inconceivable that a marketer would ever be able to manage working with more than a handful of software products — and ideally, they’d work with just one. But I believe this overlooks the true pervasiveness of software. So as a little thought exercise, I’d like to demonstrate how most marketers are already …

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Aetna’s team of marketing technologists: don’t call them shadow IT

September 16, 2014 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

The roles of marketing technologists — including senior chief marketing technologists — still have high variance from one organization to another. In some, they are solo operators, serving as diplomats, translators, and expeditors between technical and marketing teams. In others, they run small teams under the label of something else, such as marketing operations or traditional IT. But increasingly, we’re seeing full-fledged marketing technology and innovation teams, recognized as their own function within marketing, with …

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Joseph Kurian, Chief Marketing Technologist at Aetna

7 videos from the inaugural MarTech of August 2014

September 13, 2014 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Want to get a glimpse of what the inaugural MarTech conference was like? We recorded 7 of the sessions on video, and after a little editing, we’ve released them on YouTube to share (if you’re reading this in email, click here to watch on the website): Opening remarks on martech, oxymorons, and bad-ass unicorns My introduction on the morning of the first day of the conference, describing why marketing technologists are sexier than data scientists …

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Predictive analytics and customer experience can be a dangerous mix

September 12, 2014 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 11 Comments

Two trends, each racing forward, that have the potential for disastrous collisions: The need for truly customer-centric organizations in a fully connected world. The use of algorithms, predictive analytics, and big data to optimize everything. In many cases, these can be synergistic. But some are train wrecks. I experienced just how badly those two things can clash first-hand this week, when the Westin Cleveland Downtown reneged on my supposedly prepaid reservation at Content Marketing World. …

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