2018 – Page 3 – Chief Marketing Technologist

Choosing between being strategic or being agile is a false dichotomy

July 11, 2018 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

“Agile marketing” is a crutch for those who do not have a real strategy. That was the headline from an article published this week by Samuel Scott on The Drum. Now, I’m a fan of The Drum. They generally have sharp coverage of marketing and media topics. I’m also a fan of Samuel in particular. His writing is punchy and makes you think. But painting agile marketing and strategic brand leadership as polar opposites is …

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MarTech, the vendor-agnostic conference for marketing technology and operations leaders, returns in October

June 25, 2018 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

(Note: the above infographic is just a sneak peak of the partial agenda for MarTech coming up — more sessions and keynotes will be announced soon.) Man, if you’re in marketing, the world is spinning fast. Technologies such as customer data platforms (CDPs), machine learning, chatbots, microservices, and more are quickly racing through the Gartner Hype Curve, from inflated expectations to real-world impact. This has become abundantly clear to me as I’m programming the next …

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The future of marketing belongs to hybrids, but don’t call them unicorns

June 10, 2018 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 8 Comments

I’ve grown to dislike the label “unicorn” in martech. In the early years of the marketing technology revolution, marketing technologists — hybrid professionals who applied technical skills in a marketing context — were sometimes called unicorns. Partly because they brought seemingly magical capabilities to marketing. But mostly because finding the perfect blend of marketing and technology talent was incredibly rare. “Oh, you’re looking for a unicorn,” was HR’s way of saying, “Good luck, Don Quixote.” …

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Democratizing martech: distributing power from IT to marketing technologists to everyone

May 29, 2018 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

I am fascinated by “citizen technology.” That’s a terrible name for it, because it implies digital government technology, which is not what I’m talking about. (Although that too is a fascinating topic for discussion on another day.) Rather, the labels of citizen analyst, citizen data scientist, citizen developer, citizen integrator, etc., refer to people who are not experts in a particular discipline — such as data analysis, data science, software development, systems integration, etc. — …

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Democratization of Technology: Martech Example

The paradox of simultaneous martech consolidation and expansion, illustrated

May 20, 2018 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Man, people sure do find anecdotes more persuasive than data. (As an aside, this is why machine learning can be so helpful in applying true data-driven marketing — our human biases really skew our perception of reality.) We most recently released the 2018 marketing technology landscape with the data showing nearly 7,000 martech-related vendors. I then followed up with a post — intentionally a little provocative — proposing that the myth of martech consolidation is …

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Martech Cyclical Consolidation on Top of Underlying Software Expansion

The myth of martech consolidation is dead. Now what?

May 7, 2018 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, we hosted the MarTech West conference in San Jose. My personal thanks to all of the amazing speakers who brought such passion and insight to their martech-in-the-real-world presentations — you were awesome. Rather than offer my “hot takes” of the event a few days later, I decided to take a little more time to rest and reflect on what I personally took away from the experience. There were so many fascinating …

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Calling marketing technology and operations leaders: come speak at MarTech East, October 1-3

May 1, 2018 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Want to speak at MarTech East in Boston, October 1-3? We invite you to propose a compelling presentation idea at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management that you’d be passionate about delivering. Sessions at MarTech East will be a mix of 45-minute in-depth presentations and panels and 20-minute TED-style talks with slides. We’re looking for session proposals that are “graduate level” in nature — not Digital Marketing 101 — where a speaker will be …

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54 marketing stacks from The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards

April 24, 2018 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Wow, I am just in awe of the 54 entries we received into The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. The quality of the illustrations this year were particularly remarkable. These are marketers who clearly have a lot of passion for their infrastructure. (How’s that for something you wouldn’t have heard 5 years ago?) If you’re new to this, a “marketing stack” is the collection of software that a marketing team uses to ply their …

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Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2018): Martech 5000 (actually 6,829)

April 24, 2018 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 27 Comments

UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available. Like the running of the bulls in Pamplona — an apt simile? — it’s become a yearly tradition for me to release the marketing technology landscape at the MarTech conference in the spring. So here at our event in San Jose today, I’m pleased to unveil the 2018 edition of one of the most loved-and-hated slides in marketing: Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2018) — 4.6MB Slide …

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10 days until MarTech, 10 things I’m looking forward to

April 13, 2018 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Marketing technology and operations is the heartbeat of modern marketing. And there’s no event better than MarTech to plug you into the ground truth of how that discipline is evolving. Our next MarTech is now just 10 days away, April 23-25 in San Jose. I’m incredibly excited by everything that’s come together for this conference — it will be our best one yet. Here are the top 10 things I’m looking forward to: #1. Release …

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