If I could pick one word to define the future of marketing, it would be agility. All the shifts in technology, media, channels, connections, and culture we’re experiencing have combined to accelerate the clockspeed of marketing. How rapidly can new ideas be tested? How quickly can successes be scaled? How swiftly can failures be caught and re-imagined? How close to instantaneous can reaction time be when opportunities or threats arise in the viral, global fabric …
The wonderful marketing folks at Eloqua, in collaboration with the amazingly creative team at JESS3, just released a gorgeous new infographic of blogs influencing the modern marketing space called The Blog Tree. It’s awesome. And I’m not just gushing because I’m on it. I’m gushing because I’m on it along with many of the blogs that I love and admire most. Seriously, this is a great list, beautifully visualized. Thanks, Eloqua and JESS3! P.S. As …
If ever you wanted evidence of just how sweeping and fragmented “marketing” is, try making a list of every kind of marketing out there. It starts simple enough, with search marketing, email marketing, product marketing, viral marketing — next thing you know, you have over a hundred terms! Inspired by a conversation with my friend Mark Kapij, I decided to put together such a list. To keep it somewhat manageable, I decided to only include …
Mary Meeker, the renowned Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley, just gave her presentation on Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit. Mary’s presentations are legendary because of the clear, data-driven insights she brings to what is a huge and highly chaotic market space. In this presentation, she posed 10 questions that Internet executives should ask and answer. The one I found most interesting was #4: Advertising. She advocates that advertising is still ripe for innovation …
50 billion reasons for marketing innovation Continue Reading »
“Shouldn’t all marketers be marketing technologists?” That’s a comment I’ve been hearing more frequently. One of the more interesting objections to my case for a chief marketing technologist is, “Shouldn’t the CMO be the chief marketing technologist?” I think there are two separate ideas being confounded here: 1. Marketers who are technology savvy. 2. Technologists who apply their skills in marketing. I know, that might sound like a subtle, nit-picky distinction. But there’s a big …
Caron Carlson, editor of FierceCIO, just posted Letting Marketing Handle Its IT, Part 2, continuing the discussion started last week. (See my post on governance vs. management in marketing technology.) Caron highlights some of the comments left by readers to part 1 and draws her conclusion in the last two paragraphs of this new editorial: A comment by CIO Christine W. sums it up well. In her company, she writes, all technologies require her approval …
IT dictators in an age of marketing democracy Continue Reading »
While reading MapMyFollowers is a Great Twitter Data Visualization on ReadWriteWeb this morning, I saw this ad for a new graduate program offered by Columbia University: I know, the fact that someone paid attention to an ad is almost newsworthy unto itself these days. But what a fascinating program! I’ve remarked before that journalism is one of the few professions that’s suffering more disruption than marketing (for many of the same reasons). Here’s an attempt …
Is this the future of marketing education? Continue Reading »
My recent article in InformationWeek — on why the marketing technology genie isn’t going back into the IT bottle — has stirred a few lively responses. Caron Carlson, editor of FierceCIO — got to love that name, especially walking into a debate about the future of marketing technology — responded with an editorial to her readers, Are you ready to let marketing handle its own IT? One of her concerns is my suggestion that, while …
Governance vs. management in marketing technology Continue Reading »
Search engines created a new ecosystem for consumers and marketers — and in the process made Google worth around $200 billion. If you put aside the hype, the core value proposition is simple: people go to Google looking for things, and marketers whose products or services are related to those things are thrilled to buy “sponsored answers” (i.e., ads) that show up with the results for those queries. While there’s a lot of chatter about …
Q&A threat to Google that marketers should watch Continue Reading »
InformationWeek just published a guest article of mine, Why Marketing Should Run Its Own Technology. While I’ve been advocating greater technology leadership to marketers for a while, this is my first attempt to “reach across the aisle” and make my case directly to the IT community. Always up for a lively conversation, I don’t pull any punches, describing three structural differences in this new era of technology-driven marketing that I believe will limit IT’s ability …
Why the marketing technology genie isn’t going back into the IT bottle Continue Reading »
