The Internet was supposed to be The Great Disintermediation Machine, collapsing the relationship between marketers and customers from this: To this: And indeed, that disintermediation has happened in many businesses. E-commerce is now over a trillion dollars a year. While some of that goes through Internet retailers like Amazon, much of it is direct with brands themselves. For pure digital businesses, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions — where the marketer and the customer are separated …

Software is the new channel middleman in marketing Continue Reading »

Looking at the latest marketing technology landscape, you might ask yourself, “How the heck do marketers make sense of all of this?” Increasingly, the answer is: they have a chief marketing technologist. A terrific new research report by Laura McLellan of Gartner, How the Presence of a Chief Marketing Technologist Impacts Marketing, confirms that this senior hybrid role — “part strategist, part creative and part technologist” and “broadly the equivalent of a CTO and a …

81% of big firms now have a chief marketing technologist Continue Reading »

Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose covered my latest marketing technology landscape as part of their PNR: This Old Marketing podcast this week. They start on this segment around the 24:49 mark, with a riff on the Saturday Night Live The Rent Is Too Damn High skit. “Digital marketing is too damn complicated!” It’s a terrific discussion about the interplay between marketing, technology, IT, strategy, and process. These were some of the points raised in their …

Strategy, marketing, and technology are all intertwined Continue Reading »

I recently contributed a chapter to a book called Multi-Channel Marketing Ecosystems, edited by Markus Stahlberg and Ville Maila. The book offers a variety of perspectives from 32 contributors on “the seismic shift from a single TV-centric path to a multichannel interactive ecosystem which puts digital technology at the heart of every campaign.” To promote the book, the publisher has agreed to let me distribute my chapter — Chapter 9: Software-driven marketing ROI — for …

Free chapter from Multi-Channel Marketing Ecosystems Continue Reading »

Today, I’m giving one of the opening keynotes at the Gilbane Conference, making the case for why marketing technologists are amazing, Neo-like characters in the marketing world equivalent of The Matrix. The attendees, a 50/50 mix of IT and marketing professionals, are collectively the ideal audience for this. It’s the combination of their talents — increasingly blended into hybrid roles such as marketing technologists, creative technologists, growth hackers, and data scientists — that represents the …

The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the Marketing Matrix Continue Reading »

The good folks at Godfrey have posted all the videos and presentation decks from their FWD:B2B Conference, which was held earlier this month at the beautiful Ware Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Here’s the video of my presentation on the epic collision of marketing and technology, which covers three major shifts in marketing that have rippled out from this cosmic event: From communications to experiences From art and copy to also code and data From rigid …

The epic collision of marketing and technology on video Continue Reading »