Scott Brinker

Front row to the merging of marketing and technology

September 9, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Bob Lord and Ray Velez, respectively the CEO and CTO of digital agency Razorfish, teamed up to write a book on the intertwining of marketing and technology. It’s called Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology. How could I not love such a book? Actually, Bob Lord is now the former CEO of Razorfish. He was recruited away for the job of CEO of AOL Networks earlier this summer by Tim Armstrong. …

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Strategic data vs. data theater in data-driven marketing

September 2, 2013 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Let’s face it: we’re swimming in a sea of essentially infinite data at this point. In a recent Teradata report, “lack of needed data” was cited as the least common obstacle to data driven-marketing. Only 22% of the marketers surveyed said that’s what held them back. The most common obstacle? “Lack of process to bring insights into decision-making.” Data may be marketing’s most underutilized asset, but it’s hardly its most scarce. Teradata honed in the …

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Conquering the challenges of social media at scale

August 29, 2013 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

“Marketing infrastructure.” Not too many years ago, that might have been nominated as an oxymoron, right up there with a deafening silence, sweet sorrow, and jumbo shrimp. But now, that’s where some of the most interesting developments in marketing are happening. Marketing operations is on the rise. Process is “the new black” in data-driven marketing. Even social media marketing, when it’s tackled at scale, is in many ways an infrastructure challenge. It’s one thing when …

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Data is the most underutilized asset in marketing

August 27, 2013 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

According to a new study on data-driven marketing by Teradata Applications (the artists formerly known as Aprimo), 45% of marketers believe that data is the most underutilized asset in the marketing organization. Most underutilized. That’s throwing down the gauntlet. And indeed, 78% of the marketers surveyed say that they feel pressure to become more data-driven. The research, conducted with more than 2,200 marketers at companies with $100 million or more in revenue, revealed a number …

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How ReadyTalk successfully adopted agile marketing

August 22, 2013 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

As the clockspeed of marketing continues to accelerate, more and more marketers are exploring agile marketing — the application of agile management techniques in the marketing department — as a way to adapt to this new environment. But agile marketing is not yet a textbook methodology. While agile processes have been well developed in software engineering circles over the past two decades, the application of them to marketing is relatively new. And while there are …

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ReadyTalk's Agile Marketing Scrum-ban Board

3 important lessons for marketers from Google’s CIO

August 21, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

You can imagine that being the CIO at Google could be a pretty tough gig. The whole company is teeming with super smart engineers. A large number of them are under 30 millennials who are famously opinionated. The culture encourages this and thrives on independent initiatives. And experimental techno-Petri dishes surely sprout around every corner. You try to provide IT that makes all those folks happy. So I was fascinated to read a great interview …

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When a marketing technologist is also the CMO

August 19, 2013 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

There are generally two audiences for my blog: (1) CMOs and marketing executives, who want to understand how technology fits into the bigger marketing picture; and (2) marketing technologists, who know the technology and appreciate a site dedicated to their art. Every now and again, however, I connect with someone who is both a CMO and a marketing technologist. Such is the case with David Newberry, the Group Marketing Officer of Pitney Bowes Software. My …

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Marketing and technology changes continue to accelerate

August 13, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

If there’s one overarching takeaway from a recent survey of B2B marketing executives, it’s the one at the top of the chart above: 96% agree that the pace of change in technology and marketing will continue to accelerate. It’s been the recurring theme this year — the biggest change that marketers are facing is the nature of “change” itself. It’s an accelerating clockspeed in marketing that is pushing adoption of agile marketing. It’s the core …

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Beyond the technology, the art of customer experience

August 7, 2013 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In the upper right of Gartner’s latest magic quadrant analysis of web content management (WCM) providers — in the top of the “leaders” quadrant — there are three companies: Adobe, SDL, and Sitecore. If you’re an enterprise marketing department looking for a web platform, odds are you’re talking with one or all of these vendors. What’s interesting, however, is that if you’re thinking about a broader marketing technology backbone for your company — something that …

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Most marketing automation is really experience design

July 29, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 13 Comments

If you were going to pick a representative image of marketing automation, it would surely be one of these flow-like diagrams: If a customer visits this page, then send this email — if they’re a qualified lead — else wait 2 days and send them this other email — if we know their email address — else cookie them for display advertising retargeting. And so on. Being able to create and maintain these flows is …

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