Scott Brinker

6 questions with the CMO of Salesforce ExactTarget

September 23, 2014 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In conjunction with the Connections conference this week for the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud — which is a terrific product, but that’s a multisyllabic mouthful of a brand name — I had the privilege to do a Q&A with Woodson Martin, the CMO of that product. We covered a range of subjects, from how Woodson manages his own marketing team to how marketers can keep up with the rapid pace of change in marketing technology. …

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A call-to-arms for The Agile Era of business management

September 21, 2014 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

There are many posts, articles, and presentations about “agile marketing” out there — I’ve contributed my fair share — that dive into the process of agile management methodologies (mostly adaptations of Scrum). They’re good patterns for implementation — when you’re ready to dig in at that level. There are also plenty, plenty of high-level remarks out there about how businesses need to be agile — with very little insight about how. Hey, we should all …

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Growing Up Fast: Agile Management Practices

Marketers regularly use over 100 software programs

September 18, 2014 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

A lot of people look at my marketing technology landscape graphic and protest, “There’s too damn much software in marketing!” To many, it’s inconceivable that a marketer would ever be able to manage working with more than a handful of software products — and ideally, they’d work with just one. But I believe this overlooks the true pervasiveness of software. So as a little thought exercise, I’d like to demonstrate how most marketers are already …

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Aetna’s team of marketing technologists: don’t call them shadow IT

September 16, 2014 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

The roles of marketing technologists — including senior chief marketing technologists — still have high variance from one organization to another. In some, they are solo operators, serving as diplomats, translators, and expeditors between technical and marketing teams. In others, they run small teams under the label of something else, such as marketing operations or traditional IT. But increasingly, we’re seeing full-fledged marketing technology and innovation teams, recognized as their own function within marketing, with …

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Joseph Kurian, Chief Marketing Technologist at Aetna

7 videos from the inaugural MarTech of August 2014

September 13, 2014 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Want to get a glimpse of what the inaugural MarTech conference was like? We recorded 7 of the sessions on video, and after a little editing, we’ve released them on YouTube to share (if you’re reading this in email, click here to watch on the website): Opening remarks on martech, oxymorons, and bad-ass unicorns My introduction on the morning of the first day of the conference, describing why marketing technologists are sexier than data scientists …

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Predictive analytics and customer experience can be a dangerous mix

September 12, 2014 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 11 Comments

Two trends, each racing forward, that have the potential for disastrous collisions: The need for truly customer-centric organizations in a fully connected world. The use of algorithms, predictive analytics, and big data to optimize everything. In many cases, these can be synergistic. But some are train wrecks. I experienced just how badly those two things can clash first-hand this week, when the Westin Cleveland Downtown reneged on my supposedly prepaid reservation at Content Marketing World. …

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5 lies Westin told me at Content Marketing World

September 9, 2014 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 17 Comments

I’m here at Content Marketing World in Cleveland tonight. Actually, that’s not true. I’m more than an hour outside of Cleveland at some rundown, roadside motel, having been bussed here by the hotel I was supposed to be staying at tonight, the Westin Cleveland Downtown. You know, as a hotel, your core brand promise is pretty simple. Someone books a room. You give them a room. Sure, there are other finer points of expectations, but …

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Agile marketing? That would never work here

September 5, 2014 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 11 Comments

I’m writing this in Frankfurt, where I was honored to be one of the keynote speakers at André Morys’ Conversion Summit, a yearly gathering of several hundred conversion optimization professionals in Germany. My topic was agile marketing, one of my favorite. After 7 years of working in the conversion optimization space, I’m convinced that adopting agile is the single best thing a company can do to improve its results in conversion optimization. Usually when I …

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The revolution will not be advertised: HubSpot files for $100 million IPO

August 27, 2014 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

This week, HubSpot filed for a $100 million IPO. As a “marketing technology” story, that’s remarkable enough at face value. There have been only a handful of pure martech companies that have made it from a start-up dream to a publicly-traded company. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment in a crowded space. Their IPO will provide further evidence that this space is maturing — and will secure HubSpot’s position as one of the major marketing platforms in …

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5 things that amazed and inspired me at #MarTech

August 24, 2014 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 9 Comments

Wow. Where do I begin? The inaugural MarTech conference that took place last week was, at least for me, nothing short of an extraordinary experience. I am so immensely grateful to all of the speakers, sponsors, producers, advisors, and — above all — attendees who came together for two special days to celebrate the epic collision of the two worlds of marketing and technology. Thank you! But, wow, my head is still spinning. From the …

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