Scott Brinker

I know, you get asked to participate in a ton of surveys. You’re super busy, and most of the time, the results of these studies are of dubious value to your actual work. So it’s easy to pass on taking them. But if you like the content of my blog, and have ever found it helpful, I’d personally ask you to participate in this survey: Marketing Organizations in the Age of Martech. I also believe …

What do marketing orgs look like in the martech age? Let’s find out Continue Reading »

One of the points I raised when we released the 2017 marketing technology landscape was that “the platformization of marketing technology” was now fully underway. Heterogeneous marketing stacks have become the norm. Even if many of the integrations between different marketing technologies in a stack are still relatively “shallow” — i.e., passing around fairly lightweight data, such as contact record fields, activity events, and common campaign identifiers — there is nonetheless a basic level of …

Is marketing technology entering a post-platform era? Continue Reading »

Okay, I admit it. I’ve just been waiting for an excuse to post this “5 Stages of Martech” chart. These stages were originally slides in the opening keynote at MarTech San Francisco back in May, when we unveiled the 2017 marketing technology landscape. I figured a little comic relief was in order as we contemplated life in a world of 5,000+ marketing technology vendors. But just a few months later, The Martech 5000 doesn’t seem …

Struggling through the 5 stages of martech? Let’s learn together Continue Reading »

The agenda for MarTech Boston, October 2-4, has just been posted, and I am once again awed and humbled by the incredible cast of speakers who have agreed to participate. If you want to understand the real truth of how to lead at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management, this will be a two-day conference you won’t want to miss. Let’s start with the keynotes: David Edelman, CMO of Aetna, on B2C marketing and …

Check out the amazing speakers who will be at MarTech Boston Continue Reading »

It’s a scenario straight out of Kiefer Sutherland’s TV series 24. There’s a ticking time bomb somewhere in the city. The only way to stop it is to torture a captured suspect into revealing its location. Yes, torture is wrong. But is it worth it to save the lives of hundreds of innocent people? What do you do? This hypothetical dilemma has come up so many times in both fiction and serious philosophical and ethical …

If a marketing tactic works, but people hate it, should you use it? Continue Reading »

The easy answer, of course, is that they’ll both be controlled by Jeff Bezos and the rapidly evolving Amazon empire. That alone is a pretty remarkable for hybridizing the digital and the physical on such a massive scale. But in my worldview, Amazon’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods — insert requisite “Whole Paycheck” joke, such as it was cheaper than buying groceries there for the company cookout — gives Amazon a powerful new touchpoint …

Pop quiz: What do Amazon Alexa and Whole Foods have in common? Continue Reading »