Scott Brinker

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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Brand impact or conversion rate? Both, please!

April 18, 2012 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

From my latest article on Search Engine Land, 5 Colorful Sketches on Conversion Optimization: The accompanying write-up in the article: There can be a perceived tension between conversion rate optimization and brand impact, which dates back to the early rivalries of direct marketing vs. brand marketing. But it’s a false choice: you can — and should — do great on both dimensions. Sure, there are cheesy used car salesman type tactics that you can use …

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The marketing technology ecosystem wheel

April 6, 2012 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Experian — another one of those multi-billion dollar companies engaged in enterprise marketing — released their 2012 Digital Marketer Trend and Benchmark Report earlier this week. Right up in the front of this hefty 154-page report is a spread on understanding the marketing technology ecosystem — which is clearly the substrate upon which modern marketing is being built. Experian includes a couple of great infographics that help visualize all of the different pieces in that …

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HubSpot’s brilliant marketing organization structure

April 5, 2012 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

Jonathon Colman, SEO marketer for REI, shared with me a deck he put together for ad:Tech, From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams, which has some great insights on agile marketing. Here’s his deck: From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams – adTech 2012 View more PowerPoint from Jonathon Colman At the end, he included a number of links to other resources on agile marketing (including this blog, thank you!). As …

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Why landing pages are awesome (a Venn diagram)

April 2, 2012 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

I picked up the new 53 Paper app for the iPad this weekend. Really a beautiful piece of software for sketching ideas without having to be an Illustrator jockey. Inspired me to share why I find landing pages (and microsites, conversion paths, and other kinds of post-click marketing) — the focus of my company, ion interactive — so fascinating and rich with possibilities: The intersection of performance marketing, content marketing, and technical wizardry. What’s not …

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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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