Scott Brinker

Marketing technologists mourn Dennis Ritchie

October 13, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Marketers are paying tribute to Steve Jobs. But marketing technologists should pay tribute to Dennis Ritchie (standing in above photo, next to Ken Thompson), who sadly passed away this past weekend. As a great article in Wired points out, Jobs stood on the shoulders of Ritchie. See, Ritchie invented the C programming language, which he and Ken Thompson then used to build the UNIX operating system — which is the foundation of Apple’s OS, and …

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14 marketing technology organizational models

October 11, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 7 Comments

The good news is that, at last, everyone agrees: Marketing technology is now a major dimension of marketing. The marketing department and the IT department must collaborate. The challenge, however, is that beyond those two principles, there is a stunning diversity of opinions for how marketing technology should be managed and exactly what the new collaboration between marketing and IT should look like. I’ve heard from many different companies that are addressing this in very …

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Photo: make a difference by thinking differently

October 10, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

We were in New York this weekend, and we walked by the Apple Store on 5th Avenue. A large crowd of people had gathered around an impromptu memorial to Steve Jobs — made of post-it notes, messages on MacBook and iPad boxes, printouts of “Think Different” ads, flowers, apples. I found it touching and inspiring: A series of post-it notes spelled out this famous Apple advertisement: Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, …

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Book Review: Balancing the Demand Equation

September 25, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Top 10 Memorable Quotes from the CIO-CMO Forum

September 23, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Yesterday, I attended Forrester’s inaugural CIO-CMO Forum. Sharyn Leaver, one of the hosts from Forrester, kicked off the event by saying, “This is the first time we’ve brought CIOs and CMOs together in the same room — hope everyone comes out alive.” Nervous laughter. And so began a fascinating day of joint CIO-CMO sessions, with more than its fair share of jokes about IT and marketing stereotypes: marketing is nothing but spin and fluff, and …

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The new three-way: CIO, CMO & Agency

September 19, 2011 / Agencies / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

Good article on AdAge this morning, Friends With (Digital) Benefits: CMOs Link With CIOs. The article includes several great anecdotes, from both agencies and brands, talking about the increased frequency of three-way meetings — the CMO, the CIO, and the agency — all collaborating together: Agencies, especially those involved with digital work, say they’re increasingly taking meetings with both the CIO and CMO. Marketers in retail, financial services and media have been among the first …

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3 takeaways on advertising and trust from Nielsen

September 14, 2011 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Dave Chaffey curated a great graphic from Nielsen’s most recent report on Trends in Advertising Spend and Effectiveness: As a visualization of Nielsen’s Global Online Survey of U.S. Internet consumers from Q1, there’s a lot of insight embedded here. Of course, recommendations from people I know leads by a mile — 76% of people trust those kind of “earned ads.” Word-of-mouth and referrals remain the bedrock of building a brand. And as Dave rightly pointed …

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Marketing lessons from the CrunchFund controversy

September 6, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

This may be inside baseball, but I am mesmerized by the drama playing out at TechCrunch right now — and I can’t help but see a metaphor for the shift of marketing within it. The short version: TechCrunch is world’s most popular tech blog, acquired last year by AOL/Huffington Post, but largely permitted to retain its editorial independence. Founder Michael Arrington, a larger-than-life character on the tech scene, stayed on. However, Mike recently announced he …

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Computational science/computational marketing

September 1, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

This morning I was reading a transcript of a talk the late Jim Gray gave a few years back on eScience: A Transformed Scientific Method, and I was struck by the parallels in our current transformation of marketing. This terrific slide from Jim’s talk sums up the evolution of the paradigms of science: Although the purpose of science has remained constant — just as the purpose of marketing is indifferent to the digital revolution that …

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7 Laws of Technology for Marketers

August 29, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Not every marketer needs to be a technologist. But given how deeply technology is now entwined in modern marketing, every marketer should be familiar with the essential laws of technology that effect your strategies and operations. Here are seven laws of technology that every marketer should know — along with a few nuggets of techno-culture that make for great beer conversation with the IT department: 1. Moore’s Law The most famous technology law of all …

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