Scott Brinker

Data as a new marketing channel

July 31, 2010 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Marketers love data. Web analytics, behavioral targeting, social media monitoring, audience measurement, and ever-expanding CRMs are all testament to the demand for more data about prospects and customers. But that kind of data flows one-way: from the outside world into marketing. However, a new way of marketing with data is emerging that heralds a more significant shift for marketing — and for the web itself. It’s about reversing the flow, having marketing publish data to …

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Scaling the new marketing organization

July 24, 2010 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

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 …

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The cloud threatens creative destruction for IT

June 13, 2010 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

The winds of change are blowing through IT, and it’s not a gentle summer breeze. Earlier this month, Hewlett-Packard announced they were cutting 9,000 IT jobs. They’re consolidating their data centers and making them far more automated, as more advanced software and hardware eliminates the need for so many hands-on system and network administrators. This isn’t a case of HP shutting down a business. They’re still going strong as a provider of IT infrastructure services …

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When marketing optimization feels like extortion

June 6, 2010 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

Forgive me for this rant, but I hope this will be helpful as an example of how short-sighted, overly aggressive marketing optimization techniques can backfire with long-term brand damage. I’ve been a register.com customer for about 10 years now. I know, some of you will instantly point out that they’re one of the most expensive domain registrars out there. I’ve known that in the back of my head for a while. But I don’t register …

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3 nimble trends changing content and marketing

June 1, 2010 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

Razorfish just released a great new report, Nimble: Publishing in the Digital Age, written by Rachel Lovinger. The target audience is clearly large publishers and mega media companies, but there are important trends here that are relevant to everyone who thinks of distributing content on the web — e.g., anyone in marketing. The three key points that pop out to me — particularly because I keep seeing them in a lot of posts and discussions …

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The Marketing Technology Manifesto

May 23, 2010 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

I continue to receive terrific feedback about my presentation and essay on the rise of the marketing technologist — thank you to everyone who has contributed comments, anecdotes, and ideas. The pent up desire for marketing to take control of its technological destiny is clearly bursting at the seams. You’ve inspired me to take that 3,000 word essay and 54 slide presentation and try to boil it down to its essence, in 153 words. In …

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Trust, brands, and the marketing dashboard of the future

May 21, 2010 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

This week, I ran a pilot of my latest study for improving trust in online advertising — the first time I’ve run an experiment with human subjects physically in the lab. Two thoughts I wanted to share from the experience: First, don’t ever underestimate the power of brands. I’ll share more about that once we finish the study. But search marketers in particular, I cannot stress this enough: brands are immensely influential in the context …

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3 big picture marketing themes from #ConvCon

May 9, 2010 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

Last week was the inaugural Conversion Conference (#ConvCon), a new event organized by landing page optimization expert Tim Ash and co-located with the eMetrics marketing optimization summit. While there were plenty of terrific sessions on landing pages and conversion optimization — my post-click marketing craft and trade at ion — three larger marketing themes emerged that I want to share with you. Theme #1: Agile Marketing In conversion optimization — what marketers do to increase …

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15 sessions on marketing and the semantic web

April 29, 2010 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Looking for a conference that really pushes the envelope of digital marketing? Last year, I gave a talk at the Semantic Technology Conference on marketing in the semantic web. At the time, the topic was in its infancy. But as predicted, a lot happens in one year. This June, at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco, there is now a whole track dedicated to this subject, Marketing in the Web 3.0 World. And, …

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Crowd sourced ads in Google — outside Google’s control

April 24, 2010 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

What if you could enhance your ads in Google with collective intelligence — without going through Google? Earlier this month, browser bookmark extension company Xmarks unveiled their plans to monetize their business with a service called SearchBoost. They take the idea of Google including ratings in ads to a whole new a level. Here’s how it works: Xmarks is a free browser add-on for Firefox, IE, Safari, and Chrome. It was originally designed to synchronize …

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