Scott Brinker

Marketers are fiercely passionate about their marketing stacks

May 2, 2015 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

“It’s okay to love your marketing stack. Just don’t love your marketing stack.” That’s what was running in the back of head last week, as I was moderating a “Show Us Your Marketing Stack” panel at the B2B Marketing Innovation Summit run by Demandbase in San Francisco. Three top marketing executives — Susan Ganeshan, CMO of Clarabridge; Kristin Hersant, VP marketing at Livefyre; and Franz Aman, SVP of brand and demand at Informatica — had …

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8 tips for marketing tech companies on pitching CMOs

April 29, 2015 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

The following is a guest post written by Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, with special advice from Julie Bernstein, COO for Stitch Fix and former CMO at Sephora. Ashu is the author of MarTech and the Decade of the CMO. I get pitched all the time — and I’ve heard it all. From the good to the bad, to the disastrous. As an early stage investor in martech companies, it’s part of my …

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Pitching marketing technology to the CMO

Call-for-speakers for MarTech Europe — share your brain

April 27, 2015 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

The marketing technology industry — now affectionately called “martech” — is truly a global phenomenon. We’re seeing tremendous marketing innovation across every region of the world. And while some of the dynamics of this new brand of marketing are universal, many of the most creative and interesting ideas emerge from the adaptation of these new capabilities in different cultures and markets. That is one of the primary reasons that I am so incredibly excited for …

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I’m sorry, but marketing software is still a world in flux

April 22, 2015 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

I’m sorry. I know a lot of people wish that the marketing technology merry-go-round would slow down and consolidate. And I fully appreciate why that’s desirable. Unfortunately, the evidence I keep encountering says we’re not there yet. Here are a few points on the curve that I’ve recently come across that suggest that marketing software remains a sector of frothy innovation: 1. Social Relationship Platforms (SRP). We’ve come a long way from simple social media …

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Point Solutions vs. Suites in Social Relationship Platforms

A 2-sided silver bullet for marketing and sales alignment?

April 17, 2015 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

Disclaimer: I wear two hats, professionally speaking. With one hat, I write this blog and chair the MarTech conference series — both of which I try to run with a vendor-agnostic editorial viewpoint. However, with my other hat, I am also the co-founder and CTO of a marketing software company, ion interactive. While I rarely write about ion interactive here (my last such post was nearly a year ago), I do occasionally “cross the streams” …

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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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