Marketing Management

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 »

Before I get an inbox full of angry emails from everyone who doesn’t work in the marketing department, let me disclaim that the above diagram was intended somewhat humorously. Hey, it’s Friday — lighten up! But the funny thing about humor is that it often contains a nugget of truth. Decades ago, David Packard — of Hewlett-Packard (HP) fame — declared, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” And although marketing …

The many marketing departments of tomorrow Continue Reading »

Yesterday, I had the privilege of presenting at the FWD:B2B Marketing and Technology Conference organized by Godfrey, one of the world’s leading B2B marketing agencies, along with several of my heroes in digital marketing, including Michael Brenner and Paul Gillin. My topic was “the epic collision of marketing and technology,” which is admittedly a hyperbolical title — the conference session equivalent of linkbait. But it is a collision, and in all seriousness, it is epic. …

The epic collision of marketing and technology Continue Reading »

CEOs have come to recognize, more than ever, that disruptive technology poses the single biggest existential threat to the future of their businesses. Or, on the optimistic side of that coin, it promises tremendous opportunity for them to capture new ground. IBM recently released their latest global C-suite study — The Customer-activated Enterprise — and I highly recommend downloading it. Their research was conducted by interviewing over 4,183 C-level executives from across 70 countries and …

CEOs look toward disruptive technology more than CMOs Continue Reading »

The funnel model of marketing and sales doesn’t reflect reality very well. We know this. Buyers don’t proceed in lock-step fashion down a pipeline. They never did, actually. But the wide-ranging journeys of exploration that buyers can take today on the web have only exacerbated the disparity between the model and reality. This more realistic diagram of the “funnel” by Lori Wizdo of Forrester Research brilliantly illustrates that point. The real funnel doesn’t look like …

Fire the funnel — 5 stages of the real buyer’s journey Continue Reading »

Bob Lord and Ray Velez, respectively the CEO and CTO of digital agency Razorfish, teamed up to write a book on the intertwining of marketing and technology. It’s called Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology. How could I not love such a book? Actually, Bob Lord is now the former CEO of Razorfish. He was recruited away for the job of CEO of AOL Networks earlier this summer by Tim Armstrong. …

Front row to the merging of marketing and technology Continue Reading »