Scott Brinker

Google brings agile to agencies with “Agile Creativity” vision

August 9, 2012 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

Hackathons. Prototyping. Beta testing. Sounds like a typical day in Silicon Valley software, right? Not this time. This is the language of Madison Avenue in the 21st century. Or at least it will be, if Google’s new Agile Creativity initiative takes root. In collaboration with a number of agency visionaries, Google has produced a compelling half-manifesto/half-tipsheet with recommendations for how agencies can reinvent themselves as “agile” businesses. It merges the DNA of Silicon Valley and …

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Mr./Ms. CMO — tear down these walls!

August 8, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Three separate worlds: Paid media such as advertising and sponsorships. Earned media such as Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, search engine rankings, and every other review and comment that other people make about you. Owned media such as your web site, microsites, landing pages, mobile apps, your brand’s Facebook page, your YouTube channel, and so on. Well, for marketers they’ve been three separate worlds. Typical marketing org charts and agency/vendor boundaries sharply delineate these domains, often …

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10 key principles of agile marketing management

July 31, 2012 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

You’ve probably been hearing more about agile marketing lately. Over the past 6 months, there has been a blossoming Renaissance of discussions, writings, and events on the subject — a number of which I summed up in a recent Search England Land column, Have You Adopted Agile Marketing Yet? In a nutshell, agile marketing adapts management methodologies from agile software development (and agile project management) and applies them to marketing teams. It’s also influenced by …

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Don Draper is disgusted by the new state of marketing

July 30, 2012 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

A clever email marketing campaign from the folks at MarketingProfs for their upcoming B2B Forum — which makes a larger point about just how much the culture of marketing has changed. I received the following email from “Don Draper” with the subject line, “Why I’m Not Attending MarketingProfs B2B Forum,” and I just had to read it: Just goes to prove that with email marketing, as with most other kinds of technology-powered marketing, the creative …

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We are the 1% (of global marketing spend)

July 27, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Marketers will spend about $1 trillion this year on external costs: everything from advertising of every kind, marketing services such as direct mail and lead generation, agency fees, data and intelligence such as market research, and — at the very bottom of the stack — software and technology. In 2012, marketing technology will account for only 1% of marketing spend. According to a recent report by research analyst Dan Salmon, the amount spent on software …

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Imagine 20 different technologies integrated into your website

July 23, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

How many different solutions do you estimate you have integrated to support your website capabilities today? How many do you anticipate you will have integrated into your website 2 years from now? For eCommerce professionals, the answers are surprising: 42% have 10 or more solutions integrated in their sites today 69% expect 10 or more solutions integrated in their sites within 2 years 31% expect 20 or more solutions integrated in their sites within 2 …

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The Renaissance career from engineer to CMO and beyond

July 20, 2012 / Other / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

I’ve seen this pattern, or variations of it, with increasing frequency. I’m not saying that everyone should follow this path. There are many roads to success and life satisfaction. But the Renaissance men and women making journeys like this fascinate and inspire me. Here’s to the crazy ones.

Interested in agile marketing? Read this interview

July 19, 2012 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

The agile marketing movement is underway, and right in the front lines of the charge is an agile champion named Jim Ewel. Jim publishes the Agile Marketing.Net blog. He helped organize SprintZero, the first public gathering of agile marketers. He coaches companies on how to implement agile marketing through his consulting practice, Peel the Layers. He’s organized the Seattle Agile Marketing meet-up. And I’m just scratching the surface. He’s on a mission “to evangelize agile …

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How to manage social media marketing (book review)

July 14, 2012 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

I just read Social Marketology by Ric Dragon, and I have to say, I love business books like this. It’s intelligent and practical, written in a direct yet entertaining style, and delivers meaty ideas that you can put into practice pretty much immediately. First, full disclosure, McGraw-Hill sent me a free copy of the book to review. But life is too short to read bad books, so I wouldn’t have made it past a casual …

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Best marketing operations blog? Thank you!

July 12, 2012 / Other / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Thank you to the readers of MarketingSherpa, who were kind enough to vote this site as the Best Marketing Operations Blog for 2012. It’s particularly humbling, because the other sites named in their “best blogs” awards include many of my favorite: Best Social Media Marketing Blog — Blue Focus Marketing Best Copywriting Blog — Copyblogger Best Optimization Blog — MarketingExperiments Best PPC Blog — PPC Hero Best Design Blog — Gnome Flash Best E-commerce Blog …

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