Scott Brinker

As marketers adopt more and more marketing technology in their work, particularly cloud-based applications, with many choices and many different opinions about what software is best for a particular purpose, the question arises: To what degree should marketing applications be centralized or standardized within an organization? This question usually arises from the bastions of the besieged IT department that pictures many different marketers buying many different software packages on their own, all willy-nilly in the …

Should marketing technology be centralized? Continue Reading »

Some people believe that all technology should be centralized in the IT department. They reject the idea that marketing should control its own software — even though modern marketing is now deeply entwined with the technologies it uses. The premise of these naysayers is that only IT can responsibly manage technology, cloud computing or not. Perhaps. But consider this metaphoric tale… Effective immediately, no one outside the Language Department is allowed to write anything, on …

The Chief Language Officer Parable Continue Reading »

Change is scary. Big, organization-altering, career-shifting change is downright terrifying. While it can be fun to blog about disruptive innovation and creative destruction — commenting as an observer to the end of the world as we know it — actually being caught in the middle of such change is another sensation entirely. Believe me, I have a lot of empathy for those in the maelstrom. Back in the early 90’s, I ran a bulletin board …

Marketing and IT share a common fear Continue Reading »

I believe marketing must lead its own technology. As detailed in my presentation Rise of the Marketing Technologist, I think marketing departments need marketing technologists on staff, led by a marketing CTO who reports to the CMO. It’s the only prayer marketing has in a world where technology is infused into every medium and message, operating and innovating at Google speed. Predictably, this is not a popular view in the IT department. IT’s self-identity for …

Shadow IT vs. Shadow Marketing Continue Reading »

What’s the best way to scale marketing? When marketing grows beyond one person, how do you divide up the work? This is one of the key strategic decisions the CMO makes, as the architecture of the marketing organization shapes its strengths and weaknesses. As my operations professor at MIT often said, “structure dictates behavior.” The most common way of organizing marketing has been a hybrid of three kinds of divide-and-conquer approaches: by product (and overall …

Scaling the new marketing organization Continue Reading »