Interviews

The roles of marketing technologists — including senior chief marketing technologists — still have high variance from one organization to another. In some, they are solo operators, serving as diplomats, translators, and expeditors between technical and marketing teams. In others, they run small teams under the label of something else, such as marketing operations or traditional IT. But increasingly, we’re seeing full-fledged marketing technology and innovation teams, recognized as their own function within marketing, with …

Aetna’s team of marketing technologists: don’t call them shadow IT Continue Reading »

Sheldon Monteiro, CTO of SapientNitro, is one of the sharpest people I have met in the marketing technology space. We were introduced by Mayur Gupta, the global head of marketing technology at Kimberly-Clark — and also a SapientNitro alum. Taking Mayur and Sheldon as two points on a line, you have to extrapolate that SapientNitro is kind of “stellar nursery” for producing amazing marketing technologists. Pretty much every conversation I’ve had with Sheldon has set …

Must-read interview on marketing technology leadership with the CTO of SapientNitro Continue Reading »

I’m incredibly excited to share with you the following Q&A with Bala Kudaravalli, a leading marketing technologist at Symantec. (With thanks to Scott Vaughan at Integrate for introducing us!) With Symantec’s permission, Bala was able to share some very helpful details about the marketing technology transformation effort that they have underway at the company — and the cross-departmental governance structure that they’re using to manage it. Given Symantec’s size, the scale and scope of this …

Symantec’s marketing technologist is an evangelist, an influencer, and a negotiator Continue Reading »

It’s fascinating to watch a new profession — marketing technologists — emerge from the digital star foundry. It’s a phenomenon that we should expect to see more frequently in The Second Machine Age. But while that’s thought-provoking at a theoretical level, it’s breathtaking to watch it actually happen with real people you know. It also reveals how much we rely on patterns from the past to determine what we believe about the future — unfortunately, …

More unicorns! LinkedIn’s head of marketing technology Continue Reading »

Jason Heller is the founder and CEO of Agiliti, a New York consultancy that specializes in digital transformation of marketing operations and strategy. I first became aware of Jason a few years ago through a series of columns he wrote for MediaPost, such as Achieving Simplicity From Complexity and Fostering Digital Innovation. We’ve had a number of chats since then, and I’m always impressed by the insight and passion he has for digital transformation in …

Jason Heller on a mission for the marketer of the future Continue Reading »

Okay, perhaps that headline sounds a tad too much like a salacious exposé, which this is not. This is, however, an enlightening Q&A with Jason Seeba, lead marketing technologist at BloomReach, a rapidly growing Silicon Valley company that creates big data marketing applications used by major Internet retailers such as Neiman Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, and Wine.com. Jason candidly answers several of the most common questions that arise around the role of a marketing technologist: What kind …

Secrets of a Silicon Valley marketing technologist Continue Reading »

While I don’t usually cover start-up launches on this blog — a space well-covered by TechCrunch and many others who are great at it — today’s Q&A with Jennifer Zeszut, CEO of Beckon, does correspond with the launch of their company yesterday out of “stealth mode.” Jennifer and I connected around a piece I wrote last year, 14 rules for data-driven, not data-deluded, marketing. I then found a brilliant Venn diagram she had on her …

Marketing’s intersection of complexity and accountability Continue Reading »

When I posted my presentation The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the Marketing Matrix a few months ago, one of the people who commented on it was Nancy Fessatidis, VP of Marketing Operations at SAP: Great post Scott. The CMT role has served us well at SAP. We call this our Business Information Officer (BIO). It’s a critical role not just in Marketing but in every key line of business — to help translate our business …

6 questions with SAP’s chief marketing technologist Continue Reading »

If I was going to recommend one book for an executive to read about the power of controlled experiments in business, it would be Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi. It’s impossible to read this book and not walk away enthused about the potential of testing and experimentation. Jim is the founder and chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), which bills itself as the world’s largest, purely …

Digital is easy. Try A/B testing in the real world. Continue Reading »

As marketers, we have more data at our disposal now than our predecessors could have imagined in their wildest dreams. However, this bounty of data is not without challenges. Two recent posts I wrote on these challenge — data is the most underutilized asset in marketing and strategic data vs. data theater — were inspired by some excellent research on data-driven marketing conducted by Teradata Applications (formerly known as Aprimo). In discussing their report with …

This CMO wrote the book on big data marketing, literally Continue Reading »