Scott Brinker

In defense of marketing technology point solutions

July 15, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

There is a myth that implementing a marketing technology point solution is a bad idea. Like giving your significant other a bathroom scale as a birthday present is a bad idea. First aid kit sold separately. But it is a myth. (The bathroom scale is still a bad idea though.) I’ll explain what a point solution is, why they’re considered bad, and why that’s bunk. I’ll discuss what the real problem is with point solutions …

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Less Integration vs. More Specialized Capabilities

Convergence of marketing and technology interview

July 12, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Jeff Ogden, host of the popular video series Marketing Made Simple TV, interviewed me for his latest show on the convergence of marketing and technology: (Apologies that the audio and video are a little out of sync — apparently a bug in the recording by Watchitoo that they’re fixing for subsequent shows.) We discussed topics around a number of popular posts from this blog: Marketing technology landscape supergraphic Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically …

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With big technology budget comes big CMO responsibility

July 1, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

“It’s no longer a question of whether technology plays a role in marketing; it’s about what role the CMO needs to play in selecting the best solution to drive marketing and overall business success.” So begins the latest Forrester report, The CMO’s Role In Technology Purchasing ($499), by Sheryl Pattek. She summarized the report in a terrific blog post, Savvy CMOs Must Steer Their Marketing Technology Decisions In The Right Direction (free). So what role …

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Technology Authority v. Knowledge Matrix

Gartner’s mind-blowing digital marketing transit map

June 20, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

In the competition for the best visualization of the kaleidescopic marketing technology space — other entries include my marketing technology landscape from last year and the marketing technology LUMAscape from last month — I’d say Gartner has just jumped into the lead with their new digital marketing transit map. Their high-level map is visualized around types of products and services — represented as stations on the map — rather than the individual vendors themselves. However, …

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Martec’s Law: Technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically

June 13, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 19 Comments

I believe these two things are true: Technology is changing very rapidly, and those changes seem to be accelerating. Changing an organization — how it thinks and behaves — is still hard and slow. These two truths are at the core of this blog’s mission: helping marketers understand how marketing technology is changing and how they can successfully adapt their organizations to those changes. But I’ve struggled to find a concise way to visualize the …

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All around the world, marketing = change

June 12, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Last month, I was invited on a fascinating marketing roadshow with SAS in southeast Asia, keynoting CMO events in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India. I’ve posted my slide deck and an essay version of my presentation on Combining Art & Science in Modern Marketing, if you’d like to read it. (Fair warning: it’s about a 30-minute read — consider it more like a free e-book!) Although it wasn’t my first visit to the …

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Salesforce and ExactTarget: a good combo, but not the end game of marketing technology

June 7, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 9 Comments

It was a big week for marketing technology. Salesforce agreed to acquire ExactTarget (which had acquired marketing automation vendor Pardot less than a year ago) for a whopping $2.5 billion. Given that ExactTarget was at ~$356 million revenue yearly run-rate as of last quarter, that’s roughly a 7X multiple on revenue. Congratulations to all the folks at ExactTarget — a well-deserved outcome for Scott Dorsey and his team. They’ve been pioneering marketing technology for 13 …

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Art and science in marketing: meaning, truth, and money

June 6, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 8 Comments

It’s been a few weeks since my last post — sorry for the radio silence. I’ve been on a whirlwind tour of southeast Asia with SAS, keynoting CMO events in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India. It was a fascinating and inspiring journey, but regrettably, I didn’t find much time to write while on the road. But there are many reflections and ideas that I’m eager to share with you now that I’m back. …

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Everyone in marketing should be a marketer scientist

May 15, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

(This also appears as a guest post on SAS’s Left of the Date Line blog for the Asia Pacific region.) Later this month, I’ll have the privilege of meeting with groups of CMOs and other marketing leaders across southeast Asia as part of an event tour with SAS Institute. We’ll be visiting Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India, as well as doing a live webcast for Australia and New Zealand on Tuesday, May 21. …

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How EMC successfully adopted agile marketing

May 13, 2013 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

Agile marketing has been gaining a lot of steam over the past year, but we’re still in the “early adopter” stage of this movement. (If you have no idea what agile marketing is, I recently posted a video introduction to agile marketing as well as an essay version.) Most teams that have adopted agile marketing have had to figure it out on their own, improvising from ideas of agile development and adapting the process as …

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