Scott Brinker

Techs hiring creatives to embrace the creative world

March 29, 2012 / Agencies / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

A big part of this blog is encouraging marketers to bring technologists fully into their teams as a way to grok the use of technology in modern marketing. A couple of days ago, AdAge ran an article — Why Facebook Is Hiring Ad Agency Creatives — that illustrates an example of the inverse: a technology company hiring creatives to better embrace the possibilities with the creative community. During a session at the 4A’s Transformation Conference, …

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What do you call a marketing technologist?

March 23, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

There’s a punchline in there somewhere, but I’m partially serious. While everyone is coming around to the merging of marketing and technology/IT — and the value of hybrid roles to lead and operate at that intersection — the titles that people use for these roles vary tremendously. I like the phrase chief marketing technologist (a biased choice, I admit). My annual survey of marketing technology memes for 2012 favored the titles director of marketing technology, …

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Why marketing software will never be like ERP

March 21, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 15 Comments

I ran across a thought-provoking article earlier this week on GigaOm — Marketing is the next big money sector in technology — by Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures. It begins with the reference to the Gartner report from December the suggested by 2017, CMOs will have larger technology budgets than CIOs, which is a great place to start. Ajay predicts that a new wave of companies leveraging big data for the benefit of driving …

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State of the Marketing Technologist 2012

February 27, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 7 Comments

It’s that time of year again. This blog’s anniversary — our fourth (!) — and time to look at the evolution of the “marketing technologist” meme over the past year. First, let’s start with an update on Google searches: Google Search February 2008 February 2011 February 2012 chief marketing technologist 320 320,000 265,000 ↓ 17% director of marketing technology 7,520 847,000 1,670,000 ↑ 97% marketing technology 625,000 2,670,000 ↑ 327% marketing technologist 109,000 203,000 ↑ 86% …

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Digital marketing matures beyond “best practices”

February 17, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

My latest article on Search Engine Land, Landing Pages 3.0, makes the case that landing pages and conversion optimization are moving beyond the era of “best practices.” But I actually believe this is a representative sign of digital marketing maturing more broadly. Consider this excerpt from the article: Whereas the height of Landing Pages 2.0 was an ever-expanding list of rules and rubrics for implementing good landing pages, marketers who have graduated to a Landing …

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3-minute interview: why marketing technologists now

February 3, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Bertil Snel, who arranged for me to present on the marketing technologist role at last year’s Adobe Partner Day, just posted a follow-up — the marketer of the future is a “techy” — including a post-event video interview we did backstage. His post is in Dutch, but thanks to the miracle of Google Translate, I’m pretty sure that he’s not making fun of my exaggerated hand waving. But judge for yourself. Here’s the 3-minute “short …

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Marketing as an object-oriented program?

February 2, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

I ran across an inspiring blog post this week by Jacques Spilka of Whatsnexx, titled Complexity killed marketing automation! (The if-it-bleeds-it-leads school of blog post headlines.) Jacques made two insightful points: 1. Marketing automation programming can get complicated fast First, he cut right to the quick of the challenge of marketing automation: for marketing automation to be really effective, it needs to be wielded by the marketer, not by the marketing automation expert. Most marketing …

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CMOs to agencies: adapt or die

January 24, 2012 / Agencies / By Scott Brinker / 7 Comments

The CMO Council released their latest report on client/agency effectiveness this week. (You can download a free executive summary from that link, or spring $199 for the full report.) Out of the myriad of survey-driven stats from 6,000 corporate marketers across a wide range of major brands, one figure stands out as particularly striking: only 9% of senior marketers believe traditional ad agencies are doing a good job of evolving and extending their service capabilities …

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The Marketing Technology Frenemy Triangle

January 23, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

The title of an article in last week’s AdAge Digital was Tech-Consulting Giants Slide Closer to Creative-Shop Turf. The subhead read, “Deloitte, Accenture are among big IT players looking to learn digital biz of marketing brands to consumers.” You can almost hear the sound of cappuccino being sneezed out in a Madison Avenue office somewhere. Brian Whipple, the CEO of Accenture Interactive, was quoted as saying, “Clients, in my view, are finding it more credible …

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2011 was a big year for marketing technology

January 5, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 7 Comments

The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI), a leading investment bank in the marketing space, issued a report yesterday of 2011 M&A activity across media, information, marketing services and technology sectors. JEGI reports that those sectors “saw nearly 900 transactions in 2011 totaling $47 billion, a 9% rise over 2010.” From a marketing technology perspective, the marketing and interactive services sector is the most interesting, which had “291 transactions announced at a total value of $15.1 …

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