Scott Brinker

Disruptive innovation in online advertising

November 8, 2008 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Are the creative capabilities of major advertising agencies really being disrupted by online marketing? Here’s one theory. Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of bestselling books such as The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, has a model for disruptive innovation. As a particular type of product or service improves over time, its “performance” — i.e., how powerful it is along a certain dimension of capability that buyers care about — eventually overshoots …

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Google and WPP marketing research awards

November 2, 2008 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

What do you get when you cross Ph.D.’s in marketing with Ph.D.’s in computer science? Hopefully a $50,000 grant from Google and WPP. The two companies recently announced the Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program to fund academic research in the following topics of interest: online and offline media interaction relevance and effectiveness measurement audience types and engagement Research questions to be studied might include: How does offline media affect search and vice versa? …

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Director of Marketing Technology job at a law firm (sample)

November 1, 2008 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Every so often, I do a search for phrases such as director of marketing technology to find companies that are embracing the marketing-technology hybrid model at relatively high levels in their management structure. Like the concept of a chief marketing technologist, these roles aren’t IT jobs with matrix responsibility for a few marketing systems, and they aren’t marketing positions with only superficial responsibility for sourcing related IT. These are equal weight — or much closer …

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Marketing incentives for semantic web adoption

October 19, 2008 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Last week, I commented on a post about the Web 3.0 Manifesto Published on ReadWriteWeb. Richard MacManus offered three free tickets to the Defrag Conference 2008 for commenters suggesting the best “web 3.0” apps. Incentives are good (more on that shortly), but it’s an irresistible topic to me regardless of a contest. I have to admit, I was tempted to make a snarky remark such as the Semantic App Generation Algorithm: pick any noun; put …

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Enterprise marketing management and the vastness of online marketing

October 14, 2008 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Enterprise marketing management (EMM) software is, to a marketer-technologist such as myself, the Holy Grail of 21st century marketing. Like enterprise resource planning (ERP) for operations, its aim is to provide a holistic, integrated view of an organization’s entire marketing universe — an overarching umbrella that enables everyone from the distributed front-line up to the CMO to manage and optimize hundreds or thousands of parallel marketing initiatives across all of the firm’s channels. It’s a …

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Semantic marketing podcast with Paul Miller

October 12, 2008 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Paul Miller of Talis, who also authors ZDNet’s Semantic Web blog, is one of the leading evangelists for semantic web technologies out there. He’s also the person who first inspired my musings on semantic marketing by asking, in an offhanded comment to one of my first posts, how exactly would I envision marketing and the semantic web working together? That brief remark has blossomed into a major theme for this blog, with posts on semantic …

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Marketing technology in a downturn

October 4, 2008 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Steve Rubel has a positive post titled The Collaboration Economy that encourages marketers to face the current economic downturn as an opportunity to become more efficient, open, and collaborative. Those drivers have the potential to usher in a new generation of marketing technology, especially geared towards optimizing the communication and coordination between agencies and in-house teams. Rubel talks about using wikis, internal blogs, and microblogs — which I agree are a great start — to …

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Social media management software

September 28, 2008 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

At the risk of being accused of falling off the Cluetrain, I find myself increasingly wondering how much of a need there is in the world for social media management as a discipline and social media management software as a tool? I know, social marketing (technically, social media marketing) is all about genuine, authentic, transparent, distributed conversations. And somehow the notion of explicitly managing that process — especially using software to systematize or optimize it …

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Semantic data in your web site now

September 24, 2008 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In my previous post, I gave a hypothetical example of how OpenCalais — the web service offered by Thompson Reuters that automatically annotates semantic metadata for regular HTML pages — might incorporate a kind of semantic advertising. However, unless you’ve personally integrated OpenCalais into your site or blog, it might have been a bit hard to visualize what exactly that semantic metadata could be. Sounds very geeky and abstract, and might leave the marketer in …

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Semantic advertising: 4 different kinds

September 13, 2008 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 14 Comments

What is "semantic advertising"? (Or, advertising encounters of a semantic kind.) The short answer: advertising that uses semantic web technology, of course. But as it turns out, that definition is highly dependent on how you define "advertising" and "semantic web". With a flurry of innovation happening in both these areas — and their intersection — there are now several different meanings for semantic advertising, depending on who you ask. Here are 4 distinct kinds of semantic advertising: #1: Contextual …

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