Scott Brinker

9 big takeaways from last week’s #MarTech conference

April 6, 2015 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 14 Comments

Wow. Last week’s MarTech Conference was an awe-inspiring two and a half days for me. I am immensely grateful to the 29 speakers, 67 exhibitors and sponsors, and over 1,100 attendees who joined together in San Francisco to share their experiences and ideas on the state of marketing technology. It is springtime in martech, and I was a marketing nerd in heaven. This second MarTech event grew more than double the size of the first, …

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Microsoft announces acquisition of chiefmartec.com

April 1, 2015 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 14 Comments

UPDATE: Okay, okay, the jig is up. Way too many people have been genuinely congratulating me on this “acquisition.” Apparently, I am terrible at this whole April Fool’s thing — or too good at it? — as it’s not supposed to be that believable. Anyway, I’ll leave this up for posterity’s sake, but just to be completely blunt: everything below was completely made up. I love the good folks at Microsoft, but we’re not married. …

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Microsoft Acquires chiefmartec.com on April 1, 2015

Springtime in #MarTech — $25.2 billion blossoming

March 31, 2015 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

The following is an approximation of my opening presentation at the MarTech Conference this morning in San Francisco. Over 1,000 people are there, participating in the largest independent conference exclusively focused on marketing technology and marketing technologists. I am so happy that spring is here. It was a pretty crazy winter in Boston this year. This is a picture of the six-foot mountain of ice that I shoveled through on my sidewalk. Before I had …

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Investment in Marketing Technology as of March 2015

Computer scientist becomes CMO of $50 billion company

March 25, 2015 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

Jonathan Martin, the CMO of EMC, was a computer scientist by training. On nights and weekends, he was a musician in a band. That correlation between software engineering and musical talent is actually not uncommon — and illustrates why technologists are often artists of a digital medium, writing code to express ideas and affect an audience. From that start, Jonathan moved into pre-sales and product marketing at VERITAS (acquired by Symantec in 2004), became the …

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Who’s coming to MarTech? A very impressive community

March 12, 2015 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

The second MarTech Conference is just a little more than two weeks away, March 31 – April 1 in San Francisco, and I’m starting to feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. There’s an amazing set of speakers who are coming to share their experiences and expertise. There’s also a fascinating cross-section of marketing technology companies who will be exhibiting (note: that link describes 50, but we actually have over 60 now). I am immensely …

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The Marketing Technology Landscape (2015) now in Excel

March 11, 2015 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

One of the most common questions I get asked about my marketing technology landscape graphic — other than the rhetorical exclamation, “Are you kidding me?” — is: Do you have an Excel spreadsheet of all these companies that you can share with me? My answers have been, no, I’m not kidding. And no, sorry, I don’t have a version in Excel. Well, Matt Heinz, Brian Hansford, Robert Pease, and the rest of the good team …

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The Marketing Technology Landscape Excel Spreadsheet

The striking parallels between marketing automation and software engineering

March 10, 2015 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Marketing automation may be all the rage with the best of today’s tech-savvy marketers, but fundamentally it’s just another software engineering problem abstracted to a pretty user interface (albeit with a fraction the functionality of the most basic scripting languages). Those of us who spend any time building program flows in a marketing automation platform should really be called “Marketing Engineers.” Systems thinking and flow control are every bit as important in a tool like …

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New Relic Insights for Marketing Automation

Should you judge a marketing cloud by its website?

March 8, 2015 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

I’d recommend that the next acquisition that some marketing cloud companies should make is a web design firm. Seriously, whatever the multiple — and I say this as a friend — it would be worth it. Acqui-hire, code red. I was struck by this last week when I was methodically checking each of their websites, trying to discern the state of their respective ISV communities. It ended up being really hard to answer that question, …

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Speaking truth to marketers and marketing technology companies

March 4, 2015 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

Yes, that’s a sparkling, rainbow-colored unicorn kitten with butterfly wings. This came up in the following Q&A I had with marketing technology analyst extraordinaire David Raab. If you don’t yet know David, you may be scratching your head, wondering just what kind of Q&A I was running here. But if you do know him, you can certainly imagine him writing on his blog, in the context of explaining how customer data platforms (CDPs) can give …

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For every marketing tech firm consolidated, 1.5 are born

March 2, 2015 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

My doppelgänger (or am I his?) agrees: marketing technology isn’t consolidating yet. Digiday recently published a terrific podcast interview with Terry Kawaja, the CEO of LUMA Partners — an investment bank that specializes in adtech and martech companies. Of course, Terry and LUMA are probably most famously known for their amazing LUMAscapes that map out companies in marketing-related sectors such as display advertising, search, video, social, gaming, commerce, content, etc. Terry’s original display advertising LUMAscape …

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