Scott Brinker

We’ve just unveiled the agenda for MarTech West, which is expanding this year to the San Jose Convention Center, April 23-25. I’m incredibly excited by how the program is shaping up and the topics we’ll be covering, from the state-of-the-art in AI to the state-of-the-world with GDPR. If you’re an executive or senior practitioner at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management, you’ll want to a check it out. For instance, here are some of …

The ground truth of marketing technology: our agenda for MarTech West, April 23-25 in San Jose Continue Reading »

The Gartner hype cycle is one of the more brilliant insights ever uncovered in the history of technology. I rank it right up there with Moore’s Law and Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation from below. Gartner’s hype cycle describes a 5-stage pattern that almost all new technologies follow: A technology trigger introduces new possibilities — things like AI, chatbots, AR/VR, blockchain, etc. — which capture the imagination and create a rapid rise in expectations. (“Big …

The one thing everybody forgets about Gartner’s hype cycle, even in martech Continue Reading »

This is part 4 of a five-part series, providing an update on the 5 Disruptions to Marketing as we head into 2018. If you have not yet read Part 1: Digital Transformation (2018 Update), Part 2: Microservices & APIs (2018 Update), or Part 3: Vertical Competition (2018 Update), you might want to start there. 4. DIGITAL EVERYTHING (2018 Update) For the first half of the Internet revolution, “digital” meant the web. Email was there from …

5 Disruptions to Marketing, Part 4: Digital Everything (2018 Update) Continue Reading »

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. Ready to get to work? We interrupt our series on the 5 disruptions to marketing (2018) to bring you these three resolutions for getting the most out of your marketing technology stack in the year ahead — along with specific ideas for implementing them successfully. 1. Rationalize your martech stack. I love the term “rationalize” because the root of the word means to be …

3 New Year’s resolutions for your martech stack in 2018 Continue Reading »

This is part 3 of a five-part series, providing an update on the 5 Disruptions to Marketing as we head into 2018. If you have not yet read Part 1: Digital Transformation (2018 Update) or Part 2: Microservices & APIs (2018 Update), you might want to start there. 3. VERTICAL COMPETITION (2018 Update) I have been writing about vertical competition in digital marketing for several years: how companies at different points along the pathway between …

5 Disruptions to Marketing, Part 3: Vertical Competition (2018 Update) Continue Reading »

This is part 2 of a five-part series, providing an update on the 5 Disruptions to Marketing as we head into 2018. If you haven’t read Part 1: Digital Transformation (2018 Update) yet, you might want to start there. 2. MICROSERVICES & APIS (2018 Update) The rise of citizen technologists — citizen developers, citizen integrators, citizen analysts, and so on — was largely enabled by two big movements in the software world: Cloud computing — …

5 Disruptions to Marketing, Part 2: Microservices & APIs (2018 Update) Continue Reading »

At the end of last year, I wrote a series on 5 disruptions to marketing. I wanted to look beyond the typical kind of prediction posts that we are inundated with at holiday season to scope out the larger changes underway over the next 3-5 years: Digital transformation redefines “marketing” beyond the marketing department. Microservices & APIs (and open source) form the fabric of marketing infrastructure. Vertical competition presents a greater strategic threat than horizontal …

5 Disruptions to Marketing, Part 1: Digital Transformation (2018 Update) Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post by Stella Goulet, CMO of Avanade. Working on a marketing contract recently made me realize how complicated GDPR can be. Marketers can’t afford to sit back; we need to understand the implications of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and address them now. If you’re not sure what GDPR is all about, you’re not alone. According to a study by the World Federation of Advertisers, 70% of …

4 things marketers should do about GDPR now (other than panic) Continue Reading »

Gartner recently released their CMO Spend Survey 2017-2018. The headline of their report: Budgets Recede Amid Demand For Results. Let’s hear it for results! After three consecutive years of growth, average marketing budgets at enterprise companies (most of the companies Gartner surveyed have more than $1 billion in revenue) have slipped from 12.1% of company revenue in 2016 to 11.3% in 2017. And of particular interest to readers of this blog, the percentage of the …

Enterprise marketers spending 22% of their budget on martech Continue Reading »