Scott Brinker

Branding is dead! Long live branding!

Is branding really at odds with the new era of social media, or should the true meaning of branding be recognized as a broader mission that transcends logos and color palettes? If you’re a brand marketer and an ABBA fan (what are the odds?), then your song of the day might as well be Under Attack. A recent ClickZ article, Branding Today: Why It’s Ineffective, Irrelevant, Irritating, and Impotent captures the backlash against old-school branding …

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Landing pages as atomic marketing

This is one of those rare, cross-over posts related to my work at ion, but the concept at play is something that I think you’ll find relevant in many contexts. The recent popularity of two posts of mine — 8 dimensions of excellent landing pages on Search Engine Land and the 7 levels of landing page optimization on ion’s own Post-Click Marketing Blog — made me realize a common theme between them: sophisticated marketing arising …

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Data web marketing and the law

In the future of online marketing, the biggest internal tug-of-war might not be between the marketing department and IT — I maintain the belief that marketing will subsume technology under its own management umbrella — so much as it will be between the marketing department and legal. As we enter the next era of the web — Web 3.0 or the web of data or the semantic web, whatever you prefer to call it — …

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5 marketing technology truisms

As a shorter and more light-hearted post for the holiday weekend, here are five truisms about technology in the marketing world that I’ve found as good rules of thumb — somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely: 1. The Great Paradox Software developers are usually bad at creative marketing. Creative marketers are usually bad at software development. Excellent digital marketing requires both. 2. The Shoemaker’s Children? If you’re considering buying online marketing software or services from a …

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Ultra-large-scale marketing operations

A couple of major trends in software development — in particular, open source collaboration and the design of social network/user-generated content platforms — may provide useful insight for the future of marketing management. After all, the increasing number of marketing channels and the increasing granularity of initiatives in them combine to form ultra-large-scale marketing environments that share similar properties to ultra-large-scale (ULS) software systems. It’s not coincidental that many of the leading web sites whose …

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Marketing more human, more computerized

Two powerful and parallel trends are underway in marketing. First, marketing is becoming more human. This is the social media revolution. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn groups, etc., are thriving with real dialogues, between real people in organizations and real constituents in the market. This pushes marketing as a whole to be more real — customers aren’t abstract models on a whiteboard, but splendidly diverse individuals with emotions, opinions, and microphones. What used to be a …

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Marketers: the web of data is inevitable

Flying home from the Semantic Technology Conference 2009 (#semtech2009 on Twitter), I have to confess that I’m drunk on the Kool-Aid. My presentation on marketing in the semantic web attracted a packed room, and feedback — from both technical and business attendees — was incredibly positive. But it was the sum of the rest of the conference that really inspired me to conclude: The semantic web — or web of data, web 3.0 if you …

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In search of computational marketing

Ever since reading that article in The New York Times about Wall Street-like data analysis being applied to Madison Avenue marketing — what I would call computational marketing, as a nod to computational finance — I’ve been searching for more stories about that idea. It turned into a bit of a nomenclature expedition. Computational Marketing A search for “computational marketing” in Google brings back ~1,000 results, with the first page being dominated by a single …

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Madison Avenue + Wall Street = Computational Marketing

This past Sunday in The New York Times, there was an interesting article talking about the elevation of data and number crunching in advertising: Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise. Written mostly from the perspective of ad agencies, advertising is portrayed as undergoing a seismic shift from Mad Men to a mixed mission with equal parts creatives and finance quants (Mad Money?). “Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, …

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Data web marketing presentation

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post on marketing in the semantic web (“semantic marketing”) that tackled the question of what marketing might be like in the semantic web. I should say that now, the semantic web is probably better thought of as a “web of data” — analogous to the existing web of human-readable content, but layered with structured and linked data that software can easily process. If you haven’t yet …

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