Scott Brinker

From marketing specialties to marketing mash-ups

May 6, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

Written version of my Search Insider Summit presentation today: In the beginning, there was marketing. Simply marketing. Then, in the era of Mad Men, the marketing universe split in two. Suddenly, we had brand marketing, building a brand image, a position in the market — marketing above the fray. Versus direct marketing, right down in the frothy fray of persuading individual prospects to do something, the origin of calls-to-action and conversion rates. Specialized galaxies of …

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A Few Good Marketers

May 3, 2011 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Jessep: You want conversions? Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to them. Jessep: You want conversions? Kaffee: I want the clicks. Jessep: You can’t handle the clicks! Son, we live in a world that has web pages. And those web pages have to be built for persuasion. Who’s going to do it? You? You, IT manager? I want greater usability than you can possibly fathom. You weep for FrontPage software and you curse user-centered design. You …

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Lobbying for marketing technologists outside IT

April 26, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

Last month, the IT Services Marketing Association published an interview with me, Do You Need a Chief Marketing Technologist? (Note: the article is free for ITSMA members, but $195 for everyone else.) Although I’ve made the case for a chief marketing technologist several times before on this blog (my original post, my Search Insider presentation, and my Pivot presentation), the ITSMA interview had some great discussion and pushback on whether marketing should have its own …

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Carpe marketing technology — seize the platform, boys

April 25, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

This weekend, I caught up on my reading, including a Forrester report on Marketing Technology Adoption 2011 that was sponsored by Unica/IBM. (You should be able to find a copy on Unica’s Interactive Marketing Journey microsite.) There are a number of interesting observations in the report, driven from a survey of 137 customer intelligence professionals from around the world. (By the way, if you want to read more about this emerging field in marketing, here’s …

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An inspiring case of IT-marketing governance

March 31, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

I have to share an inspiring IT-marketing experience with you. I’ve advocated before that IT doesn’t need to own and implement all technology in an organization in order to provide valuable guidance and oversight. Instead, the CIO can provide governance on independently operated technology projects much in the same way that the CFO provides financial governance for other departments — while still letting those groups wield their budgets without micromanagement. Or, more broadly, how the …

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Analytics: it’s not about the math

March 27, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Earlier this month, I attended eMetrics and Conversion Conference in San Francisco, part of a “data-driven business week” federation of related events. One of the highlights was a keynote by Tom Davenport — author of the bestseller Competing on Analytics — titled “The New Quantitative Era.” Tom started with the observation that analytics teams are blossoming like flowers in Springtime throughout organizations. Web analytics, marketing analytics, HR analytics, supply chain analytics, predictive analytics, even actuarial …

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Better than “If pigs could fly…” I guess

March 15, 2011 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

I’ve had an AT&T iPhone for several years now, and I must confess, the service in Boston and New York has been pretty poor. Dropped calls, weak signals — the usual complaints. Which is why I found this ad in the San Francisco airport amusing: “If There Really Were a Camelot, AT&T Would Have You Covered.” I presume the intent of the ad was to imply that AT&T could provide coverage anywhere. But an equally …

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75% of CMOs rearranging their teams in 2011

March 13, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

A colleague recently alerted me to an article in Marketing Week that shares new data from a Forrester report by Chris Stutzman: An astonishing 75% of chief marketing officers plan to rearrange their teams by the end of this year, according to a study seen exclusively by Marketing Week. Why? Because new forms of media and communications are having such a fundamental effect on business that the customer is closer to becoming king than ever …

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If it’s in an infographic, it must be true

March 12, 2011 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Making the rounds on Twitter is a hilarious “infographic” by smarter.org and byJess.net, Why Apples Are Better Than Oranges, satirizing half a dozen different ways in which data, statistics, and visualization can be — and often are — thoroughly abused. As the soft art of marketing has been juxtaposed with the mathematical precision of analytics, fascinating hybrids of evidence and imagination have proliferated — often wrapped in very pretty illustrations. Want to keep yourself and …

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The tyranny of consumerization. Really?

March 4, 2011 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

A headline on Computerworld this morning caught my eye: Apple’s iPad 2 provokes IT anxiety. I can imagine the iPad stirring up a lot of reactions — including mere indifference — but anxiety? That seems incongruous. Unless maybe you’re HP, Motorola or Samsung. But the article starts off with, “As exciting as the new iPad 2 is bound to be for both consumers and business users, some IT executives who will have to support the …

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