Scott Brinker

Experimental marketing: 1 out of 20 ain’t bad

If you think a hit rate of 1 out of 20 for marketing ideas is a poor showing, go Elf Yourself. No, really. Take a lesson from OfficeMax’s “Elf Yourself” holiday campaign, that has been a viral brand marketing hit for four Christmas seasons in a row. The www.elfyourself.com web site lets people upload photos of themselves, friends, family, pets, etc., and transpose their faces onto animated dancing elves — and then share those e-cards …

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8 things every marketing technologist should know

The term “marketing technologist” is sometimes broadly interpreted as anyone who wields technology in the marketing domain. However, since everyone in marketing should be doing that to some degree these days, it makes sense to distinguish what a marketing technologist does above and beyond that. I’ve drafted a set of skills and knowledge that I propose delineate a marketing technologist: In the inner ring are eight areas of expertise that I think every marketing technologist …

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Interview request for marketing technologists

Paul Dunay listed the rise of the marketing technologist as one of his 11 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2011. “Marketers for the last few years have been closet techno geeks, and it’s time for them to rise up — companies need digitally fluent marketers who can apply technologies to make marketing more measurable and scientific.” Hear, hear! So starting in 2011, I’d like to put a spotlight on these rising stars and launch a series …

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Champions of agile marketing

If I could pick one word to define the future of marketing, it would be agility. All the shifts in technology, media, channels, connections, and culture we’re experiencing have combined to accelerate the clockspeed of marketing. How rapidly can new ideas be tested? How quickly can successes be scaled? How swiftly can failures be caught and re-imagined? How close to instantaneous can reaction time be when opportunities or threats arise in the viral, global fabric …

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Marketing technology grows on a tree

The wonderful marketing folks at Eloqua, in collaboration with the amazingly creative team at JESS3, just released a gorgeous new infographic of blogs influencing the modern marketing space called The Blog Tree. It’s awesome. And I’m not just gushing because I’m on it. I’m gushing because I’m on it along with many of the blogs that I love and admire most. Seriously, this is a great list, beautifully visualized. Thanks, Eloqua and JESS3! P.S. As …

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131 different kinds of marketing

If ever you wanted evidence of just how sweeping and fragmented “marketing” is, try making a list of every kind of marketing out there. It starts simple enough, with search marketing, email marketing, product marketing, viral marketing — next thing you know, you have over a hundred terms! Inspired by a conversation with my friend Mark Kapij, I decided to put together such a list. To keep it somewhat manageable, I decided to only include …

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50 billion reasons for marketing innovation

Mary Meeker, the renowned Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley, just gave her presentation on Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit. Mary’s presentations are legendary because of the clear, data-driven insights she brings to what is a huge and highly chaotic market space. In this presentation, she posed 10 questions that Internet executives should ask and answer. The one I found most interesting was #4: Advertising. She advocates that advertising is still ripe for innovation …

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Marketing technologists make fire

“Shouldn’t all marketers be marketing technologists?” That’s a comment I’ve been hearing more frequently. One of the more interesting objections to my case for a chief marketing technologist is, “Shouldn’t the CMO be the chief marketing technologist?” I think there are two separate ideas being confounded here: 1. Marketers who are technology savvy. 2. Technologists who apply their skills in marketing. I know, that might sound like a subtle, nit-picky distinction. But there’s a big …

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IT dictators in an age of marketing democracy

Caron Carlson, editor of FierceCIO, just posted Letting Marketing Handle Its IT, Part 2, continuing the discussion started last week. (See my post on governance vs. management in marketing technology.) Caron highlights some of the comments left by readers to part 1 and draws her conclusion in the last two paragraphs of this new editorial: A comment by CIO Christine W. sums it up well. In her company, she writes, all technologies require her approval …

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Is this the future of marketing education?

While reading MapMyFollowers is a Great Twitter Data Visualization on ReadWriteWeb this morning, I saw this ad for a new graduate program offered by Columbia University: I know, the fact that someone paid attention to an ad is almost newsworthy unto itself these days. But what a fascinating program! I’ve remarked before that journalism is one of the few professions that’s suffering more disruption than marketing (for many of the same reasons). Here’s an attempt …

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