I ran across a thought-provoking article earlier this week on GigaOm — Marketing is the next big money sector in technology — by Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures. It begins with the reference to the Gartner report from December the suggested by 2017, CMOs will have larger technology budgets than CIOs, which is a great place to start. Ajay predicts that a new wave of companies leveraging big data for the benefit of driving …

Why marketing software will never be like ERP Continue Reading »

I ran across an inspiring blog post this week by Jacques Spilka of Whatsnexx, titled Complexity killed marketing automation! (The if-it-bleeds-it-leads school of blog post headlines.) Jacques made two insightful points: 1. Marketing automation programming can get complicated fast First, he cut right to the quick of the challenge of marketing automation: for marketing automation to be really effective, it needs to be wielded by the marketer, not by the marketing automation expert. Most marketing …

Marketing as an object-oriented program? Continue Reading »

The title of an article in last week’s AdAge Digital was Tech-Consulting Giants Slide Closer to Creative-Shop Turf. The subhead read, “Deloitte, Accenture are among big IT players looking to learn digital biz of marketing brands to consumers.” You can almost hear the sound of cappuccino being sneezed out in a Madison Avenue office somewhere. Brian Whipple, the CEO of Accenture Interactive, was quoted as saying, “Clients, in my view, are finding it more credible …

The Marketing Technology Frenemy Triangle Continue Reading »

The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI), a leading investment bank in the marketing space, issued a report yesterday of 2011 M&A activity across media, information, marketing services and technology sectors. JEGI reports that those sectors “saw nearly 900 transactions in 2011 totaling $47 billion, a 9% rise over 2010.” From a marketing technology perspective, the marketing and interactive services sector is the most interesting, which had “291 transactions announced at a total value of $15.1 …

2011 was a big year for marketing technology Continue Reading »

“You are what you don’t automate,” one of ion’s engineers commented in a meeting the other day. It was in the context of a series of time consuming, manual steps that had to be done for a particular task. He attributed the adage to super-programmer Jeff Atwood, although I’ve not been able to find the reference. It struck me as a brilliant way to frame the challenge of marketing automation. See, in software engineering, most …

You are what you don’t automate Continue Reading »

If you work in marketing, you might want to learn a little computer programming. Buy a book. Watch a screencast. Check out Codeacademy. No, really. Suspend your incredulity for a minute. I’ll explain… It’s not because you should have to roll up your sleeves and start writing your own marketing software. I’m the first to acknowledge that not every marketer needs to become a technologist. However, I do believe that every marketer should develop a …

Why marketers should learn how to program Continue Reading »