Scott Brinker

2 important agile marketing insights from HubSpot’s CMO

November 19, 2013 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Kudos to Frank Days, John Cass, and now Amy Callahan, who have kicked started the Boston Agile Marketing Meet-Up back into gear over the past couple of months. In September, David Quinn of EMC gave a terrific presentation of their experience with agile marketing, the video of which is available on YouTube. (You can also read the Q&A I had with David and Amy back in May, how EMC successfully adopted agile marketing.) Last week, …

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Mike Volpe presenting on Agile Marketing

The many marketing departments of tomorrow

November 15, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 12 Comments

Before I get an inbox full of angry emails from everyone who doesn’t work in the marketing department, let me disclaim that the above diagram was intended somewhat humorously. Hey, it’s Friday — lighten up! But the funny thing about humor is that it often contains a nugget of truth. Decades ago, David Packard — of Hewlett-Packard (HP) fame — declared, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” And although marketing …

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Why data-driven marketers shouldn’t trust the data fully

November 12, 2013 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

There’s a great new report out by the IBM Institute for Business Value, Analytics: A blueprint for value, that’s well worth reading. The above graphic — stating that 66% of leaders from their research are “confident” in their data and “trust” it — is excerpted from it. However, this post is not about that report (well, not really). Let me first disclaim that the context of that graph, as best as I can tell, is …

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The epic collision of marketing and technology

November 8, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

Yesterday, I had the privilege of presenting at the FWD:B2B Marketing and Technology Conference organized by Godfrey, one of the world’s leading B2B marketing agencies, along with several of my heroes in digital marketing, including Michael Brenner and Paul Gillin. My topic was “the epic collision of marketing and technology,” which is admittedly a hyperbolical title — the conference session equivalent of linkbait. But it is a collision, and in all seriousness, it is epic. …

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Digital is easy. Try A/B testing in the real world.

October 31, 2013 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

If I was going to recommend one book for an executive to read about the power of controlled experiments in business, it would be Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi. It’s impossible to read this book and not walk away enthused about the potential of testing and experimentation. Jim is the founder and chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), which bills itself as the world’s largest, purely …

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The emerging third-party era of marketing automation

October 29, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 34 Comments

Will marketing technology consolidate into a handful of behemoth super-platforms? Or will it continue to diversify with more innovative new software? My theory on marketing technology consolidation vs. diversification has been both. I believe that a set of “backbone” platforms will serve as the foundation of marketing’s technology infrastructure, but they will promote open APIs and robust third-party developer communities. Marketers will have the best of both worlds: a coordinating platform for standardized data and …

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Marketing Automation Third-Party Software

CEOs look toward disruptive technology more than CMOs

October 18, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

CEOs have come to recognize, more than ever, that disruptive technology poses the single biggest existential threat to the future of their businesses. Or, on the optimistic side of that coin, it promises tremendous opportunity for them to capture new ground. IBM recently released their latest global C-suite study — The Customer-activated Enterprise — and I highly recommend downloading it. Their research was conducted by interviewing over 4,183 C-level executives from across 70 countries and …

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This CMO wrote the book on big data marketing, literally

October 14, 2013 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

As marketers, we have more data at our disposal now than our predecessors could have imagined in their wildest dreams. However, this bounty of data is not without challenges. Two recent posts I wrote on these challenge — data is the most underutilized asset in marketing and strategic data vs. data theater — were inspired by some excellent research on data-driven marketing conducted by Teradata Applications (formerly known as Aprimo). In discussing their report with …

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10 reasons why marketing nerds are so darn lovable

October 9, 2013 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

Lattice Engines was kind enough to include me in a recent list of their favorite marketing nerds. I’m certainly honored by the esteemed company they put me in, with true tech-savvy marketing wizards such as Ann Handley, Mike Volpe, Christopher Penn, David Raab, Joe Chernov, and many others whom I admire. But I have to admit, I find the label flattering unto itself. When I was growing up, “nerd” wasn’t usually a complimentary label. But …

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Debunking 3 myths of agile marketing

October 7, 2013 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Agile marketing continues to grow in popularity. Why? The old “waterfall” approach to marketing planning and execution simply can’t keep pace with the speed at which prospects (and competitors) can move in the superconductive digital world. In a Forrester report earlier this year, from which the graph below was excerpted, analyst Laura Ramos wrote, “The traditional annual planning routine is ripe for extinction, as 69% of our B2B marketing leaders say that conditions change too …

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