Scott Brinker

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 …

Data is the most underutilized asset in marketing Continue Reading »

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 …

How ReadyTalk successfully adopted agile marketing Continue Reading »

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 …

3 important lessons for marketers from Google’s CIO Continue Reading »

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 …

When a marketing technologist is also the CMO Continue Reading »

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 …

Marketing and technology changes continue to accelerate Continue Reading »

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 …

Beyond the technology, the art of customer experience Continue Reading »

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 …

Most marketing automation is really experience design Continue Reading »

Abstraction and Probability in Marketing Automation

Memo to Microsoft: Marketing. Marketing. Marketing.

July 23, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 13 Comments

Dear Steve Ballmer — I have three words for you. Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. No, not Microsoft’s own marketing — although that’s a related topic. The “marketing” that Microsoft must urgently pay attention to is marketing as a software-driven business function. It is the hottest growing market in enterprise and SMB software alike. And its future is clearly much bigger than the traditional boundaries of the marketing department — marketing in a digital world is on …

Memo to Microsoft: Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. Continue Reading »

A vision of marketing orchestration beyond automation

July 22, 2013 / Interviews / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Southwest Airlines. Whole Foods. Lego. Dollar Rent-a-Car. Under Armour. These are all great brands. And behind every great brand these days, it’s worth asking — if you’re a marketing technologist — what marketing software are they using? The common denominator across those five — and many more like them — is a cloud-based digital marketing suite from Responsys. Responsys was named a Leader in email marketing by Forrester last year, but that’s just the tip …

A vision of marketing orchestration beyond automation Continue Reading »

Robots vs. marketers: the algorithmic marketing matrix

July 18, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 11 Comments

Last week, Bank of America suffered brand damage with an automated social media bot. Their intent was good: to automatically detect tweets that mentioned the bank and reach out with an invitation to help. But their algorithm was unable to distinguish between a routine customer service situation and a brand nightmare protest. The result — a partial clip of the exchange is shown to the right — was a PR train wreck. It became instantly …

Robots vs. marketers: the algorithmic marketing matrix Continue Reading »