Scott Brinker

Tony Ralph, the director of ad technology at Netflix, delivered one of the best talks at MarTech in San Francisco earlier this year. It’s truly a “graduate level” discussion about how Netflix’s adtech/martech team developed a build-and-buy strategy for their own technology stack for bringing programmatic advertising in-house. While not every marketing team has access to the level of engineering talent that Netflix has, Tony makes a compelling case for businesses to internally develop customized …

In marketing tech at Netflix, APIs are the new black Continue Reading »

For many years, we kept being promised that “the year of mobile” was upon us. When it failed to materialize, it was easy to become jaded and write off much of the discussion of that coming wave of innovation as hype. But somewhat suddenly, we now look around, with everyone reaching for their phones every other minute — or checking them on their Inspector Gadget watches — having integrated them into their soaring digital expectations …

Marketing and the Internet of Things, closer than you think Continue Reading »

The following is a guest article by Roger Lee, a general partner at Battery Ventures. As regular readers know, I rarely publish guest posts, particularly those that emphasize individual vendors. When you read this one, you may think I have thrown that policy out the window, as Battery has invested in two out of three companies featured in it (update: three out of three, if you count that ExactTarget is now part of Salesforce). I …

A great example of a 3-vendor multi-platform stack Continue Reading »

I’m pleased to announce the results of our first-ever “Stackies” awards. As a quick recap, we invited marketers to send in a single-slide diagram of their marketing technology stack, the different marketing software products that they use in their work, organized in a way that makes the most sense to them. The four “best” stacks entered would split $1,876 to be allocated to charities they could choose. Before I reveal the winners, let me first …

21 marketing technology stacks shared in The Stackies Continue Reading »

The closing session at our last MarTech Conference in San Francisco was an all-star fireside chat, “Follow the Martech Money: VCs, IPOs, and M&A”, with three leading venture capitalists and one of the most influential investment bankers in the marketing tech space: Neeraj Agrawal of Battery Ventures Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures Brian Andersen of LUMA Partners They engaged in a candid discussion about how they view the forces …

A candid fireside chat with 4 heavyweights in martech money Continue Reading »

“Bill Gates got it immediately. It took Andy Grove 10 years to figure it out, and 20 years for Steve Jobs.” That quote in The New York Times by David B. Yoffie, Harvard strategy professor and co-author of a new book, Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs, immediately caught my eye. (Hat tip to M.G. Siegler.) What was “it” that these three titans of technology ultimately all figured …

4 topologies of integrated marketing technology stacks Continue Reading »