Scott Brinker

I was delighted to spend a couple of days at the SAS Global Forum in D.C. this week, where I presented the story of agile marketing to their data-driven — really, truly data-driven — audience. (The Cliff-Notes version: Agile management methods mixed with good analytics are a potent combination. The technology is ready. The challenges now are human.) While there, I listened in on an excellent keynote by Colin Powell. Now, I’ve always liked Colin …

General Colin Powell: programmer and agile manager? Continue Reading »

Last night, Vala Afshar and Michael Krigsman announced on Twitter that I would be their guest on CxO Talk show this Friday. A harmless enough promotional tweet, I thought. But crikey, it instigated a bit of a Twitter brawl over the topic of CMOs, CIOs, and tech budgets. Here’s a sample of how it started: Twitter is not my preferred format for a meaningful discussion, so I thought I’d reply with this post. And I …

10 things I hate about narrow CIO vs. CMO arguments Continue Reading »

“The modern CMO and marketer can no longer be just a brand ambassador, they must also have a deep understanding of marketing technology. Scott Brinker helps the reader to understand how technology can be used for both successful marketing strategy and execution.” – Jonathan Becher, CMO, SAP I’ve written a very short book, A NEW BRAND OF MARKETING, that’s free to download and share. It frames the epic collaboration underway between marketers and technologists, set …

A NEW BRAND OF MARKETING: The 7 Meta-Trends of Modern Marketing as a Technology-Powered Discipline Continue Reading »

The Internet was supposed to be The Great Disintermediation Machine, collapsing the relationship between marketers and customers from this: To this: And indeed, that disintermediation has happened in many businesses. E-commerce is now over a trillion dollars a year. While some of that goes through Internet retailers like Amazon, much of it is direct with brands themselves. For pure digital businesses, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions — where the marketer and the customer are separated …

Software is the new channel middleman in marketing Continue Reading »

Looking at the latest marketing technology landscape, you might ask yourself, “How the heck do marketers make sense of all of this?” Increasingly, the answer is: they have a chief marketing technologist. A terrific new research report by Laura McLellan of Gartner, How the Presence of a Chief Marketing Technologist Impacts Marketing, confirms that this senior hybrid role — “part strategist, part creative and part technologist” and “broadly the equivalent of a CTO and a …

81% of big firms now have a chief marketing technologist Continue Reading »

Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose covered my latest marketing technology landscape as part of their PNR: This Old Marketing podcast this week. They start on this segment around the 24:49 mark, with a riff on the Saturday Night Live The Rent Is Too Damn High skit. “Digital marketing is too damn complicated!” It’s a terrific discussion about the interplay between marketing, technology, IT, strategy, and process. These were some of the points raised in their …

Strategy, marketing, and technology are all intertwined Continue Reading »