Scott Brinker

Social media marketing stole my woman and ravaged my cattle

October 10, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Forgive me, I was going to title this post something more subtle like, “Social media’s sin of omission,” but as a blogger shamelessly vying for your attention, I find myself succumbing to the very social media marketing arms race of “say what?!” that I want to push back on. I know, as a marketer, it’s politically incorrect to be anything less than doe-eyed ga-ga about the Wonder Bread that is social media. And to a …

Social media marketing stole my woman and ravaged my cattle Continue Reading »

Survey: what do you think of search advertising?

October 8, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

I have two favors to ask of you. (Is that a bad way to start a blog post?) I’m doing a small research project on what people think of search advertising — both marketers and non-marketers — as part of a graduate seminar at Harvard on intelligent interactive systems. There are some intriguing hypotheses I have around search advertising, which I promise to share soon… but I don’t want to influence your answers for a …

Survey: what do you think of search advertising? Continue Reading »

23 strategic factors in search marketing bids

September 26, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

As part of my adventure in academia at Harvard to explore new ideas in marketing technology, I’ve been taking a class on the intersection of economics and computer science. It’s an incredibly vibrant research area these days, particularly because online advertising auctions such as Google AdWords have provided a fruitful real-world application for software-driven market mechanism design. One of the topics that comes up a lot is the objective of making a system “incentive compatible,” …

23 strategic factors in search marketing bids Continue Reading »

The greenfield of marketing software

August 14, 2009 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 7 Comments

Yesterday, I had lunch with Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of Hubspot and a friend of mine from MIT. Since we both run software-as-a-service (SaaS) start-ups in the marketing space, I always enjoy catching up with him because, even though we’re pursuing different product visions, there’s a lot of overlap in the challenges and opportunities we face in the market. One of the observations that struck me in our latest discussion is how different software …

The greenfield of marketing software Continue Reading »

Branding is dead! Long live branding!

August 12, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

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 …

Branding is dead! Long live branding! Continue Reading »

Landing pages as atomic marketing

July 28, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

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 …

Landing pages as atomic marketing Continue Reading »

Data web marketing and the law

July 9, 2009 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

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 — …

Data web marketing and the law Continue Reading »

5 marketing technology truisms

July 1, 2009 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

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 …

5 marketing technology truisms Continue Reading »

Ultra-large-scale marketing operations

June 28, 2009 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

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 …

Ultra-large-scale marketing operations Continue Reading »

Marketing more human, more computerized

June 21, 2009 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

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 …

Marketing more human, more computerized Continue Reading »