Scott Brinker

The wild marketing technology alliance of Infosys and WPP

June 15, 2012 / Agencies / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

I had an interesting call earlier this week with Samson David, the global head of business platforms for Infosys. Our chat came about because Infosys, in partnership with WPP and its Fabric subsidiary, is now promoting its own marketing technology platform for major brands, BrandEdge. There are so many fascinating layers to this story, it’s hard to know where to begin. First, the facts. BrandEdge is a software solution developed by Infosys that aims to …

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25% of these firms have a chief technologist in marketing

June 8, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Julie Schwartz, SVP of research for the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, shared some fascinating results from a recent survey on marketing transformation they conducted with the following companies: They asked marketers in these firms about a number of different roles — community manager, social engagement leader, chief content officer, data scientist, and chief technologist: Do you have this role now? Do you expect to have this role in the next 1-3 years? Do you …

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Godin’s hierarchy of business to business needs

May 29, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

The problem with the Chicago school of economics isn’t so much its belief in rational decision-making — we can save for another day the computational complexity arguments against such precision in our thinking. Rather, it’s that it is too easy to misjudge what people are optimizing in their decisions. How many times have you looked at something a large organization does and remarked to yourself, “Yikes, that seems a little irrational.” The irony is that …

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CMOs are the new CIOs — crazy or prescient?

May 25, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

A headline on Forbes caught my eye the other day: Are CMOs the New CIOs? It cites the Gartner study following the money from IT to marketing and concludes (emphasis added is my own): The convergence between marketing and technology is undeniable, and it’s still in its infancy. Imagine a world where a brand’s success will ultimately come down to how well it can handle and leverage an infinite network of relationships and market interactions. …

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Marketing technology: suite, platform, or portfolio?

May 23, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

This is a follow-up to my post on why marketing software will never be like ERP (but it’s still going to be a ridiculously huge, multi-billion dollar industry). The marketing technology landscape continues to expand and evolve at a breakneck pace. But while its vibrancy is in large part due to a fertile environment for start-ups, the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake in this reincarnation of the marketing industry has attracted the attention …

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Engineers are becoming a lot like marketers too

May 14, 2012 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

I spend a lot of time thinking about how engineering culture and capabilities are seeping into marketing’s ecosystem. Marketers are becoming more tech-savvy by the day, which is a fascinating transformation to behold. But it struck me recently how much the inverse is happening too: many of the signature characteristics of marketing have now become a part of engineering culture. Engineers are becoming quite marketing-savvy in their trade. This isn’t about engineers working in marketing …

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Marketing technologist: part optimist, part pessimist

May 7, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

I think a great marketing technologist should be part optimist, part pessimist. The optimist needs to indulge his or her imagination to drive the organization forward. To wonder, “what if?” To keep an open mind about new technologies and processes. To engage in the sort of creative free association and collaborative brainstorming that leads to innovation. And, most importantly, to be fearless in diving into the implementation of those ideas, making them real. The pessimist …

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Silicon Valley Marketing Technologists: Growth Hackers

April 30, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Awesome little essay by Andrew Chen from last week: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. As far as I’m concerned, you can almost perfectly substitute “growth hacker” with “marketing technologist,” as much of the rationale for this new breed of marketer is the same. Here’s his opening paragraph (emphasis added is my own): The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are …

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The tech talent time bomb in marketing

April 27, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

One of the other points that leaped out at me in the Econsultancy/Adobe report I discussed earlier this week — Are agencies hopelessly screwed or on the verge of a spectacular Renaissance? — was the increasing challenges of finding good technical talent. Under the heading “the tech talent time bomb,” the report cites research from McKinsey that claims: “By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep …

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Are agencies hopelessly screwed or on the verge of a spectacular Renaissance?

April 25, 2012 / Agencies / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Maybe both. It would be hard to overstate how thoroughly disrupted marketing has been by technology over the past 10 years — or how much disruption still awaits in the decade ahead. It’s against that backdrop that the giants of the marketing industry — agencies and their conglomerate ecosystems — are increasingly wrestling with their evolving role in this new era. Not unlike the struggle of marketing technology within client organizations — which is not …

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