Scott Brinker

One CMO’s advice for getting started with agile marketing

December 8, 2013 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Sometimes an idea is just ready to happen and is simultaneously discovered by multiple people at once. A famous example is when Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus. Another is agile marketing. Some years ago, after agile software development had gained significant momentum, several different marketing leaders independently realized, “Hey, this agile approach might work in my department…” And agile marketing was born. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, now the CMO of Mindjet, was one of those early …

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The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the Marketing Matrix

December 3, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 16 Comments

Today, I’m giving one of the opening keynotes at the Gilbane Conference, making the case for why marketing technologists are amazing, Neo-like characters in the marketing world equivalent of The Matrix. The attendees, a 50/50 mix of IT and marketing professionals, are collectively the ideal audience for this. It’s the combination of their talents — increasingly blended into hybrid roles such as marketing technologists, creative technologists, growth hackers, and data scientists — that represents the …

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Everything digital is controlled by software

The epic collision of marketing and technology on video

November 25, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

The good folks at Godfrey have posted all the videos and presentation decks from their FWD:B2B Conference, which was held earlier this month at the beautiful Ware Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Here’s the video of my presentation on the epic collision of marketing and technology, which covers three major shifts in marketing that have rippled out from this cosmic event: From communications to experiences From art and copy to also code and data From rigid …

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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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