Scott Brinker

Study reveals issues with search ads — trust and usefulness

November 2, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

A few weeks ago, I launched an informal survey to ask people what they thought of PPC search advertising, hoping to peel back a bit more of the curtain of their sentiments and beliefs. As promised, I’m happy to share the results with you. Well, maybe “happy” isn’t the right word. As you’ll see, the feedback about search advertising is not particularly positive — although on the bright side, it does leave considerable room for …

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Risk in PPC vs. social media marketing

October 26, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

There’s an argument that’s been circulating in social media marketing circles about how “dangerous” it can be for marketers to rely on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, as compared to more organic ways of building traffic. You know, social media doesn’t have to be positioned as the destructor of advertising to justify its existence. The gist of the argument: a deep-pocketed competitor can come along anytime, say flush with VC cash, and outspend you. One day you …

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What if advertising were dead? Really?

October 21, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Here’s a brain teaser for you: 1. Most people claim to dislike advertising on the web. I know, display advertising is probably despised more than less flamboyant search ads. But in my recent survey, 71.4% of the respondents who don’t work in marketing claim that they never or rarely look at the sponsored search ads on Google or Bing. (Interestingly enough, even 31.6% of the people who do work in marketing made the same claim.) …

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Marketing operations and the Predator — lessons for marketing technologists

October 18, 2009 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

How is marketing software like the military’s UAV (unmanned ariel vehicle) attack planes, such as the Predator? That’s what I was wondering when I attended a seminar last week by Professor Mary “Missy” Cummings, the director of the MIT Humans and Automation Lab. Previously, Missy was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots for 11 years, and then she went on to earn a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering. Her lab now studies challenges with …

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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 …

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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 …

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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,” …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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