Scott Brinker

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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The very cool marketing technology LUMAscape

May 10, 2013 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Terry Kawaja and the brilliant folks at LUMA Partners — a modern investment bank specializing in the intersection of media and technology — have just released their Marketing Technology LUMAscape, shown above. A few years ago, Terry put together a similar landscape for the more specialized ad tech space, which became the reference document for that industry. It was also what inspired me to create a marketing technology landscape in a similar vein. However, while …

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Introduction to agile marketing (video presentation)

May 9, 2013 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

Last month, I presented a talk on Agile Marketing: Managing Marketing in a World of Constant Change at the Marketo User Summit in San Francisco. They professionally recorded the session, and with their permission, I’m pleased to be able to share the video and synchronized slide deck with you:

The New Kingmakers are a rising force in marketing too

May 8, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

In a world powered by software, the developers who create that software — especially the really good ones — are increasingly the center of influence and power in business. That’s the core thesis of Stephen O’Grady’s brief-but-brilliant, 48-page book, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World. This is highly relevant to marketers and marketing technologists. The genesis for Stephen’s book was the striking realization that as part of the democratization of technology in organizations …

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5 ways to make stats in content marketing more credible

May 2, 2013 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 7 Comments

As marketers, we want to be better consumers of data. Presented with data and its analysis, we want to be able to judge its accuracy and relevance to our decision making. We want to gauge its ambiguity and uncertainty, even though on the surface we’re being presented with quantified “facts.” We want to detect bias and account for it. So let’s start with our own statistics in content marketing. Because, seriously, too many of the …

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Suspicious Statistics in Content Marketing

Marketing technologists and growth hackers, oh my

April 30, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

The terms “marketing technologist” and “growth hacker” seem to be gaining traction out there. Voice-based marketing automation provider ifbyphone recently released their annual State of Marketing Measurement Survey for 2013, which included the following results on the evolution of the marketing team: 31% have a marketing technologist 25% have a growth hacker Marketing automation is used more frequently by teams with growth hackers (44%) than teams without growth hackers (26%) Ifbyphone defines a marketing technologist …

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Pragmatic marketing vs. hype cycles and false dilemmas

April 27, 2013 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

Darling, I don’t know why I go to extremes Too high or too low there ain’t no in-betweens — Billy Joel There’s a common fallacy known as a false dilemma or false dichotomy. It’s where you’re artificially presented with a black-and-white, either-or choice: you’re forced to choose between all of one or all of the other. “You’re either with us or against us!” It’s a fallacy because, most of the time, you’re not actually constrained …

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Advice from a Jedi Knight of marketing experimentation

April 25, 2013 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

A couple of months ago, I wrote a column on Search Engine Land titled Why Big Testing Will Be Bigger Than Big Data. A shorter spin-off of my post here on the big data bubble in marketing, its overarching message was that in a world of ever more data, experimentation would inevitably become king. The message seemed to resonate, and the article was widely shared. However, my suggestion that the number of people empowered to …

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