Scott Brinker

Pursuing computer science for marketing at Harvard

April 9, 2009 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 5 Comments

It never ceases to amaze me how much there is to learn out there. Okay, there’s obviously an infinite amount of stuff to learn. But even if you carve out just the choicest subset of what’s most interesting and relevant to your passions in work and life, there’s still many lifetimes worth of potential learning in front of each of us. Some people may get depressed or bored with that. I actually get turned on. …

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Beyond fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)

March 16, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

If you’ve been at the intersection of business and technology for a while, you’re probably familiar with fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). I’m not talking about the natural stress, worry and concern that everyone feels in the course of their work. Instead, FUD is an intentional “tactic of rhetoric and fallacy” that has been used in sales and marketing, particularly in high-technology, to dissuade customers from considering a competitor’s products. By many accounts FUD-as-strategy took …

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Twitter social cycle

February 27, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

You have to admit, the social dynamics of Twitter are worth a chuckle, especially when you try to explain them to people who aren’t into it: You overhear something someone says. For some random reason, it intrigues you. So you start following them. And listening in on their conversations. And repeating what they say, verbatim, to your friends. You even start following their friends too. Until some minor thing they do annoys you. (“Oh, come …

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5 new skills for the future of marketing

February 23, 2009 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 11 Comments

I’ve been thinking about quintessential marketing skills and how they’re evolving. Skills can be very specific, such as “mastery of ExactTarget for newsletter email marketing”. But I’m more interested in broader skills that transcend individual projects and programs. For instance, in marketing, I’ve found that the following skills have perpetual value: empathy with customers, seeing through their eyes; a good ear for authentic, persuasive language; a good eye for compelling visual design; open-minded creativity and …

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Creative technologists in brand advertising

February 15, 2009 / Agencies / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

I recently read an excellent post by Randall Rothenberg on the IAB blog, A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising. It’s a passionate argument for a renaissance of creativity in interactive advertising — especially in the agency world. Randall decries that online advertising, while pervasive, is rarely iconic. How many people have felt good about search ads or banners? In contrast to the great campaigns of TV and print, which have deeply affected people and culture — …

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Top 10 reasons the semantic web is a lot like love

February 11, 2009 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, I thought I’d wax a little poetic with my top 10 reasons why the semantic web is a lot like love: 10. It means different things to different people. 9. Those in it can bore everyone else to death talking about it. 8. Cynics insist there’s no such thing. 7. It’s straightforward in theory, messy in practice. 6. A few misinterpreted words can really screw things up. 5. You …

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The story of post-click marketing

February 5, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

If you’ll forgive me for a little promotion of my company — usually I try to keep my posts here as agnostic as possible — I’d like to share with you a book, a story, and a dream. If you’re a marketing technologist, I think you’ll find this relevant on a number of levels, especially if you have an entrepreneurial slant. Let’s start with the story. The Background Story My company, ion interactive, was launched …

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Twitter and semantic microblogging

February 2, 2009 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

“Life happens while you’re making other plans.” The same may be said about the semantic web. While waiting for mainstream adoption of proper semantic web standards — such as RDF metadata embedded in web pages — the drive for organized structure and meaning in the great sea of web content is being addressed in perhaps the most unexpected of places: Twitter. Technology adoption, like water, follows the path of least resistance. The explosion of hashtags …

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Hal Varian on flexible innovation

January 29, 2009 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

From a recent interview with Hal Varian, chief economist at Google and professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley: We’re in the middle of a period that I refer to as a period of “combinatorial innovation.” So if you look historically, you’ll find periods in history where there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions. In …

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The most important strategic choice in online marketing

January 28, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

At the most abstract level, your organization is a single entity. At the most detailed level, each of your customers is an individual, unique and special. Perhaps the greatest challenge in marketing is reconciling these two forces: the unity of your brand and the individuality of your audience. You want to speak to people as specifically as you can, addressing their particular wants and needs, related in a way that resonates best with their perspective …

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