Marc Andreessen had a great essay in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Why Software Is Eating the World. Remarking on the news from last week that Hewlett-Packard is looking to jettison its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, he makes the case this isn’t a tech bubble — this is the new normal: My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and …
I’m detecting an exciting shift in the marketing technology landscape — less of an emphasis on back-office analytics, and more of a focus on delivering compelling customer experiences in the front-office. To be sure, analytics support that mission; but they don’t dominate it. I think this is a really important step forward. Earlier this month, Brian Walker of Forrester released a report on The Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions that discusses some of the …
Amazing graphic of customer experience touchpoints Continue Reading »
UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available. When I first presented the Rise of the Marketing Technologist, my key exhibit was a kaleidoscope of over 100 logos of marketing technology companies — what better way to viscerally express the awe-inspiring explosion of software in marketing. Ever since then, I’ve itched to take that hot mess of a graphic and organize it, group the products into categories, and reveal some of the underlying structure …
Marketing Technology Landscape Infographic Continue Reading »
Popped into a session hosted by MITX yesterday morning, What Can Marketing Automation Do for You? The panelists were Jim Williams of Eloqua, Christopher O’Donnell of Hubspot, and Bill Stone of RenaissanceOPTI. Given my interview with Steven Woods last week on marketing automation as a solution to the explosion of marketing touchpoints — as well as Eric Wittlake’s thoughtful commentary, When Did Automated Dialogue Trump Real Conversation? — I was eager to hear other perspectives. …
What can marketing automation do for you? #MITX Continue Reading »
There’s a fascinating debate raging in the DigitalNext section of Ad Age that captures some of the current “culture wars” on Madison Avenue between marketers (“mad men”) and technologists (“math men”). A few weeks ago, Kendall Allen wrote a piece titled: The Dangers Of Online Advertising’s “Math State” that begins with this shot across the bow: Ever notice that in online advertising no one talks about the message? It’s all about the mechanics, how an …
Is marketing becoming a math state? Is that good? Continue Reading »
This weekend, I caught up on my reading, including a Forrester report on Marketing Technology Adoption 2011 that was sponsored by Unica/IBM. (You should be able to find a copy on Unica’s Interactive Marketing Journey microsite.) There are a number of interesting observations in the report, driven from a survey of 137 customer intelligence professionals from around the world. (By the way, if you want to read more about this emerging field in marketing, here’s …
Carpe marketing technology — seize the platform, boys Continue Reading »
Earlier this month, I attended eMetrics and Conversion Conference in San Francisco, part of a “data-driven business week” federation of related events. One of the highlights was a keynote by Tom Davenport — author of the bestseller Competing on Analytics — titled “The New Quantitative Era.” Tom started with the observation that analytics teams are blossoming like flowers in Springtime throughout organizations. Web analytics, marketing analytics, HR analytics, supply chain analytics, predictive analytics, even actuarial …
Making the rounds on Twitter is a hilarious “infographic” by smarter.org and byJess.net, Why Apples Are Better Than Oranges, satirizing half a dozen different ways in which data, statistics, and visualization can be — and often are — thoroughly abused. As the soft art of marketing has been juxtaposed with the mathematical precision of analytics, fascinating hybrids of evidence and imagination have proliferated — often wrapped in very pretty illustrations. Want to keep yourself and …
If it’s in an infographic, it must be true Continue Reading »
Wow. Yesterday, I saw a demo of Tableau, a software package for doing “visual analysis” of databases and other raw datasets. I was amazed. That is one of the coolest pieces of software I have ever seen. In a nutshell, Tableau makes it incredibly easy to visualize the patterns and relationships in just about any dataset you point it at. These visualizations are largely driven by drag-and-drop and let you quickly explore and analyze data …
Visualizing marketing analytics with Tableau Continue Reading »
Later this week, I’ll be publishing a marketing technologist interview with Cleve Gibbon, the CTO of Cognifide. As a sneak preview for that, I’d like to share with you Cleve’s presentation from last week at the Adobe Partner Community Day in Barcelona. Cleve’s presentation — building a marketing technology platform for engaging global brands — offers some excellent insights into a “platform” view of marketing technology, especially around going from content management to customer experience …
Thinking of marketing technology as a platform Continue Reading »
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