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Chief Marketing Technologist

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May 14, 2012
13:53
Engineers are becoming a lot like marketers too
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
I spend a lot of time thinking about how engineering culture and capabilities are seeping into marketing's ecosystem. Marketers are becoming more tech-savvy by the day, which is a fascinating transformation to behold.

But it struck me recently how much the inverse is happening too: many of the signature characteristics of marketing have now become a part of engineering culture. Engineers are becoming quite marketing-savvy in their trade. This isn't about engineers working in marketing (although that's what marketing technologists do). It's about engineers natively applying marketing principles in their own endeavors.

No offense is intended to engineers by this remark! I know the old-school clichés — engineers considered most marketing to be fluff and spin. In days past, that was sometimes a fair indictment too.

But new-school marketing is different. Content marketing, social media marketing, and customer experience marketing are intently focused on delivering real value to prospects and customers. New-school marketers probably have as much derision for fluff and spin as any cynical system administrator caricature ever did.

New-school engineering is different than its predecessor too. The old-school clichés of engineers as poor communicators, sequestered in back rooms, disconnected from the business and customers, are now laughable. Some might argue that we're suffering from the polar opposite of that archetype — CNN just ran an article bemoaning the rise of "brogrammer" culture. But even without that extreme, it's not hard to see that software engineering has shifted to a highly collaborative, customer-centric profession that has become quite adept at outward communications, promotion, and business strategy.

I believe that three forces have driven this transformation:
1. Open source software communities
2. Agile software development
3. Celebration of the engineer-entrepreneur
There are a lot of lessons that marketers can learn from these dynamics, so let's look at each.
Open source software communities as marketing organizations

Open source software has been tremendously successful: Linux as an operating system, MySQL as a database, Apache as a web server, and thousands and thousands of other great products and platforms. This success is certainly built on technical accomplishments — an extremely discerning kind of peer-reviewed ecosystem.

But open source success is also due to engineer-driven marketing. Open source projects exist in the marketplace of ideas, competing with each other for the precious commodities that marketers have always competed for — attention and adoption — and, even more ambitiously, participating contributors. The classic book The Cathedral & The Bazaar describes a number of the technical and marketing aspects of that competition from several early successful open source projects.

But since that book was written more than 10 years ago, the "marketing" aspects of open source seem to have only grown in popularity and sophistication — making them an integral part of engineering culture. Consider the following:
- Web sites for open source projects are increasingly well-designed and rich in content. Often this content includes social proof of well-known brands that have adopted the software and case studies of their implementations. They feature screencasts, presentations, and ebooks — deep, genuine materials that any content marketer would rightly envy.
- Great engineers and open source project advocates also use blogs prolifically to share ideas, persuade others to their point of view, and disseminate learning and knowledge related to their projects. The writing on many of these blogs is passionate and compelling, and in a very real sense helps build the brands of those individuals and their respective open source communities.
- Engineers engage in a highly effective kind of social media marketing through sites such as Stack Overflow, a Q&A site focused on technical topics. Projects and people earn credibility through the quality and quantity of answers to questions. A popular "tag" in Stack Overflow is a good sign of a thriving open source project. This is promotion through helping real customers with real solutions — fluff and spin are not tolerated — and it's impressively responsive.
- Personality has become a significant force in the promotion of many open source projects, where humor and wit combine with well-defined platform philosophies and "opinionated" software architecture. Exhibit A: the Ruby on Rails community and it's colorful founder David Heinemeier Hansson. These are brands that thrive on more than just their technical merits.
- Such open engagement in winning an audience is not restricted to online forums — engineers speak regularly at conferences, unconferences, meet-ups, workshops, hack-a-thons, and more. They invented many of these new event formats! From a marketing perspective, such events have been incredibly successful at building momentum for open source projects and communities. The quality of the presentations are often superb too, featured on SlideShare, and would make Garr Reynolds proud.
- Open source projects nurture loose and formal co-marketing relationships with each other. There are ecosystems of smaller developments that orbit larger open source platforms, such as the gems and plugins for Rails. There are also alliances of larger platforms that work well together, such as the popular LAMP stack bundle for web applications. Open source projects are often masterful at using APIs and data as a new kind of marketing to drive adoption.
There are more examples, but you get the point: open source software initiatives have become thriving ventures championed by engineer-led marketing. And for most engineers, since such marketing is genuine — developing meaningful connections with their audience — it's valued and respected. Say so long to the stereotypes of the last century.
Agile software development as a driver of engineering-marketing culture

Software development in the old days — like marketing in the old days — operated on long schedules of months or years, with the planning stage often separated from the implementation and delivery stages by huge gulfs of time. The process often isolated engineers from customer and market feedback along the way. And it all too frequently resulted in outcomes that made everyone unhappy. ("This isn't what I want!" "It's what you said you wanted 18 months ago!")

Seeking a better way, a group of pioneering engineers got together and penned the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The first principle: our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery.

Agile software development methodologies put the customer at the center of the development process, emphasize continuous interaction between engineers and customers (or their internal proxies), and take a more iterative approach to implementing large projects to have faster feedback loops and quick adaptation to change.

Agile has been widely embraced over the past decade, and its adoption has fostered principles of customer-centricity deep in engineering culture:
- Understanding what the customer truly wants and values is given top priority in the development process. Developers and customers (or product owners on their behalf) meet daily to evolve the product vision together. The iterative design and implementation process lets the best solution emerge organically from showing, discussing, and revising features.
- Faster speed to market and quicker responses to opportunities/threats are enabled by the rapid iteration of agile development. The capability to react quickly — and through that be more competitive in the market — is a badge of honor for agile practitioners. "Release early and release often."
- Usability and user experience (UX) design are now a core part of development. The customer-centric design process has caused engineers to appreciate and value good UX and strive to incorporate that into products from conception — not merely sprinkled on at the end. Non-designers eagerly seek the participation of designers or find other ways to leverage their contributions (see Twitter Bootstrap as an example of an open source design framework).
- A commitment to consistent quality as a key feature through continuous integration and test-driven development tactics. These "baked in" approaches to quality provide the flexibility to release software more quickly and fulfill customer expectations more reliably.
- Metrics are used to quantitatively measure improvement. Data on how customers use products is treasured, both to uncover new opportunities for improvement and to gauge the success of new changes released. This is often business data as much as it is technical data, under a mantra of "you optimize what you measure." A/B testing is now commonly applied in many web software applications, encouraging agile teams to achieve the best user experiences through real-world experiments.
When it comes to product management in an agile organization, the perspectives of engineering and marketing blend together harmoniously into a hybrid engineering-marketing culture. What's considered great engineering is also what's considered great marketing. That's an amazing achievement when you think about it.

Frankly, many marketing teams could actually improve their own customer-centricity in other aspects of their work by modeling themselves on the success of agile engineering teams — in fact, that's exactly what agile marketing is all about.
Celebration of the engineer-entrepreneur
Computer scientist Alan Kay famously remarked, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

While there have long been famous examples of engineers who became entrepreneurs — Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard and Bill Gates of Microsoft leap to mind — the correlation of those two callings has grown substantially in the Internet age. Consider some of the hottest Internet companies, all founded by software engineers:
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin who created Google
- Mark Zuckerberg who created Facebook
- Jack Dorsey who created Twitter and then Square
There are literally thousands of examples of engineer-entrepreneurs from the past ten years. Most recently in the news, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger who created Instagram, which Facebook just purchased for $1 billion. But even on a more modest scale, consider the hundreds of thousands of offerings in Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPad.

Part of the explosion of engineer-entrepreneurs is due to the structural changes in the software industry. It has never been easier or cheaper to build great software products — leveraging open source foundations and scalable cloud computing infrastructure — to launch a new idea. And, thanks to the reach and network dynamics of digital marketing, it's never been easier or cheaper to promote and distribute those products worldwide.

These have enabled the explosion of engineering-driven entrepreneurship, but there's something else that's helped motivate it.

Over the past 10 years, it has become cool in engineering circles to be an entrepreneur. Building something technically impressive still earns respect. But building something that is commercially successful also earns respect — even if its technical merits are minimal. It's not just about the money either. It's about the pride of making something that other people want and architecting ways to grow and sustain a business around them.

Engineer-entrepreneurs are celebrated among their peers and by the world at large, and it's fundamentally changed engineering culture.

Even engineers who aren't full-time entrepreneurs increasingly have small ventures on the side: a Web.20 application, an iPhone or iPad app, a project on Kickstarter, etc. This instinct to tinker with new ideas to open up business opportunities has become so powerful within engineering culture that even large companies are seeking to tap into it for intrapreneurship, such as Google's 20% time.

The result: engineers increasingly think about the marketing and business dynamics at play with their products, entwining those facets of a successful product with their technical design and implementation. The concept of growth hackers arises from this interplay of marketing and technology.

If you consider all the above factors together, it's easy to see that new-school engineers have both tech savvy and marketing savvy.

And that blurs the line with new-school marketers — who are increasingly adding tech savviness to their marketing skills.

The new school is a convergence of marketing and engineering. And that's pretty cool.
May 07, 2012
13:07
Marketing technologist: part optimist, part pessimist
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

I think a great marketing technologist should be part optimist, part pessimist.

The optimist needs to indulge his or her imagination to drive the organization forward. To wonder, "what if?" To keep an open mind about new technologies and processes. To engage in the sort of creative free association and collaborative brainstorming that leads to innovation. And, most importantly, to be fearless in diving into the implementation of those ideas, making them real.

The pessimist — or realist, some would say — needs to ask, "What can go wrong?" It's a different kind of imagination, anticipating the ways that things might not work as expected. Of course, to be useful and not annoying, it needs to be combined with solutions for plugging those holes, guarding against those contingencies, or calculating when certain risks are acceptable and not worth addressing.

Another way to think of it is as two sides of a game strategy: offense and defense.

The optimist without the pessimist builds spectacular skyscrapers that fall apart when the first woodpecker gives them a rap. The pessimist without the optimist may never conceive of the skyscraper in the first place.

The Zen of Marketing Technology exists in the balance between these two halves.
April 30, 2012
19:18
Silicon Valley Marketing Technologists: Growth Hackers
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Awesome little essay by Andrew Chen from last week: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. As far as I'm concerned, you can almost perfectly substitute "growth hacker" with "marketing technologist," as much of the rationale for this new breed of marketer is the same.

Here's his opening paragraph (emphasis added is my own):

The new job title of "Growth Hacker" is integrating itself into Silicon Valley's culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of "How do I get customers for my product?" and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what's already working.

At the end, he summarizes:
- For the first time ever, superplatforms like Facebook and Apple uniquely provde access to tens of millions of consumers
- The discipline of marketing is shifting from people-centric to API-centric activities
- Growth hackers embody the hybrid between marketer and coder needed to thrive in the age of platforms
Well worth reading the whole post.

P.S. Amazingly, "growth hacker" can't be generated by the marketing technologist job title automata. Will have to work on a patch.
April 27, 2012
18:53
The tech talent time bomb in marketing
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

One of the other points that leaped out at me in the Econsultancy/Adobe report I discussed earlier this week — Are agencies hopelessly screwed or on the verge of a spectacular Renaissance? — was the increasing challenges of finding good technical talent.

Under the heading "the tech talent time bomb," the report cites research from McKinsey that claims: "By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions."

The Econsultancy/Adobe report suggested that the shortage has already hit many agencies and marketing departments:

"Interviewees for this report mentioned how technologically savvy people are hard to come by. This shortage is apparent in both hard technical skill areas such as tech development, specific areas such as data analytics, and softer areas including the requirement for good digital generalists who can combine broad knowledge of digital channels with the ability to see things from the point of view of the consumer."

"Salary inflation, particularly for developers, is a reality and becoming a real issue for some areas of the industry."

So what's an agency or in-house marketing department to do? Three suggestions:

Readjust budgets and cost models to accurately reflect tech supply and demand. A small number of incredibly talented and highly paid innovators can be much more effective than larger teams of average paid average performers — especially at the intersection of technology and creative. Don't be penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Invest in building a culture that inspires and rewards technical talent. This runs the gamut of active tech participation in management and strategy, tech-friendly ergonomics, progressive HR policies, sweet computers and devices, support for open source initiatives. Give technical talent the opportunity to make a significant impact and to be recognized for their contributions. This isn't just IT plumbing — this is the building of a grand estate from concept-to-completion.

Grow your own marketing technologist "stellar nursery." Put in place good programs to hire interns and junior staff members and shape them into tech-savvy marketers (or marketing-savvy techs).

The smart kids already crave this kind of opportunity. Get them vendor training on marketing technology products. Have them learn how to program (yes, even if they're not engineers!). Send them to technical and digital marketing conferences. And then push them to apply that learning in meaningful ways. As stars emerge from this process, move quickly to promote and reward them (before someone else snatches them from you).

Parents: you can do your part by planting the seeds of this exciting career in the heads of your children now. Firefighter? Astronaut? Movie star? Pfff, not nearly as thrilling — or, ahem, as lucrative — as being a marketing technologist. Well, maybe not more than the movie star... ;-)
April 25, 2012
20:08
Are agencies hopelessly screwed or on the verge of a spectacular Renaissance?
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Maybe both.

It would be hard to overstate how thoroughly disrupted marketing has been by technology over the past 10 years — or how much disruption still awaits in the decade ahead. It's against that backdrop that the giants of the marketing industry — agencies and their conglomerate ecosystems — are increasingly wrestling with their evolving role in this new era.

Not unlike the struggle of marketing technology within client organizations — which is not only analogous, but directly intertwined into the agency question — everyone agrees that things have changed. But opinions run the gamut of how to strategically address that change. Is this about tacking the sailboat's course? Shedding weight and trimming the sails? Adding fancy new navigation equipment? Or is it more about abandoning the boat and going by airplane instead?

Econsultancy and Adobe just released a report, The Progression of Agency Value: Developing a Model for Agency Maturity in a Digital World, that looks at that debate from several angles. It contains a lot of great attributed (and unattributed) remarks from agency and brand executives, such as this gem from an anonymous strategy director:

"It's hard to know what the ad industry is any more, where it starts and stops."

Robin Bonn of Code Worldwide — a very different kind of firm in the agency ecosystem — is cited as saying, "Agencies still provide the magic of ideas, but technology will inevitably power most of the logic of implementation. Adapting to this sea-change in business model is proving very tough."

The Econsultancy/Adobe report frames this struggle according to the "progression of economic value" model that Joseph Pine and James Gilmore described as the foundation of the experience economy.

In the context of agencies, this report focuses on the "deliver services" stage on up. They characterize agency challenges with technology, big data, and the new skill sets required as a maturity model that advances from delivering services, to staging experiences, to guiding transformations:

In theory, it sounds promising.

But the rest of the world isn't necessarily holding their breath for that metamorphosis. As one director of digital marketing who was interviewed said (emphasis added is my own):

"In my opinion, companies who want to excel in the digital space need a strong internal team able to connect creativity and execution, possibly using different agencies to do that. At the end of the day, we don't need an agency to know what happens in the digital space: we all read the same articles and go to the same conferences. So we either need brilliant ideas or flawless execution from an agency."

An executive summary version of the report is available free from Adobe here.

P.S. On the marketing technology frenemy triangle, there's this quote in the report from a client-side global marketing leader:

"Traditional agencies that claim to have become digital or 'full service' are at risk of being put out of business by what we used to call systems integrations who have discovered that creating a pure digital marketing group (usually staffed by ex-digital agency people) and combining that with some really smart technical people (from the systems integration/technical delivery arm) makes for a very compelling offer in the digital age."
April 18, 2012
14:42
Brand impact or conversion rate? Both, please!
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

From my latest article on Search Engine Land, 5 Colorful Sketches on Conversion Optimization:

The accompanying write-up in the article:

There can be a perceived tension between conversion rate optimization and brand impact, which dates back to the early rivalries of direct marketing vs. brand marketing.

But it's a false choice: you can — and should — do great on both dimensions.

Sure, there are cheesy used car salesman type tactics that you can use to squeeze short-term bumps to your conversion rate. ("I promise you the world, just give me your email address and click 'Boom!'") But such chicanery costs you brand equity.

On the other hand, great brand-building content is often published without any direction towards a "next step." It leaves visitors dangling like a sailboat in the middle of a lake with no wind. Sure, they can paddle their way to a conversion step. But paddling is hard work.

The sweet spot is pushing the Pareto frontier of brand and conversion to achieve both. That's brilliant post-click marketing.

Click through for the other 4 sketches (although you've seen another one on this blog before)
April 06, 2012
12:55
The marketing technology ecosystem wheel
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Experian — another one of those multi-billion dollar companies engaged in enterprise marketing — released their 2012 Digital Marketer Trend and Benchmark Report earlier this week.

Right up in the front of this hefty 154-page report is a spread on understanding the marketing technology ecosystem — which is clearly the substrate upon which modern marketing is being built. Experian includes a couple of great infographics that help visualize all of the different pieces in that ecosystem:

Any CMO at this point should be able to look at this "wheel" and speak to the marketing technology capabilities that they have in place — or are putting into place — for each segment.

An excerpt from the report's text associated with these graphics:

Consider how marketers can create the infrastructure necessary to support all the above-mentioned activities. The easiest way to break this down is to deconstruct the marketing technology ecosystem "wheel" into a customer intelligence platform comprised of critical marketing information and key "hubs" of functionality.

Built on a foundation of data, this hosted, end-to-end marketing solution leverages a three-hub approach to capture and integrate data from across channels (integration), understand how to maximize customer value (intelligence), and optimize customer interactions with context and relevance (interaction).

Admittedly, that last bit sounds like a sales pitch for Experian's specific solution. But I think the concept they're illustrating is broadly applicable — a core "system of record" platform interconnected with multiple hubs of context-specific solutions. Almost all of the major marketing technologies that would fit into that ecosystem are provided as hosted software-as-a-service.
April 05, 2012
13:50
HubSpot's brilliant marketing organization structure
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Jonathon Colman, SEO marketer for REI, shared with me a deck he put together for ad:Tech, From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams, which has some great insights on agile marketing. Here's his deck:
From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams - adTech 2012 View more PowerPoint from Jonathon Colman
At the end, he included a number of links to other resources on agile marketing (including this blog, thank you!). As I browsed through them, I found a real gem that I hadn't seen before: Agile for Marketing, a SlideShare deck by the folks at HubSpot.

HubSpot has always been prolific at content marketing — they helped invent the field as one of the foundations of inbound marketing. This deck reveals how they've organized their marketing team to thrive using agile marketing. My favorite slide illustrates their team structure, built around the funnel:

It's clean, simple, logical — built from the ground up with the new marketing in mind.

They also have yet another term for marketing technologists: they call the role marketeering (marketing + engineering) to "build stuff (tools, apps, etc.) to support marketing goals."

Both decks — as well as the rest of Jonathon's reading list — are highly recommended.
April 02, 2012
9:56
Why landing pages are awesome (a Venn diagram)
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

I picked up the new 53 Paper app for the iPad this weekend. Really a beautiful piece of software for sketching ideas without having to be an Illustrator jockey.

Inspired me to share why I find landing pages (and microsites, conversion paths, and other kinds of post-click marketing) — the focus of my company, ion interactive — so fascinating and rich with possibilities:

The intersection of performance marketing, content marketing, and technical wizardry. What's not to love?
March 29, 2012
14:17
Techs hiring creatives to embrace the creative world
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

A big part of this blog is encouraging marketers to bring technologists fully into their teams as a way to grok the use of technology in modern marketing.

A couple of days ago, AdAge ran an article — Why Facebook Is Hiring Ad Agency Creatives — that illustrates an example of the inverse: a technology company hiring creatives to better embrace the possibilities with the creative community.

During a session at the 4A's Transformation Conference, Facebook's VP of Global Marketing Solutions, Carolyn Everson, answered questions on why Facebook was hiring several leading agency creatives, such as Mark D'Arcy.

It isn't because they're looking to start their own agency.

"Creatives like talking to creatives," Everson said. "We need enough people at Facebook who can sit across the table from a creative leader and engage in a conversation about what the possibilities are."

"Mark has hired a handful of people around the world so we can have a conversation with the Jeff Benjamins [chief creative officer of JWT] of the world and chief creative officers."

Given that Facebook is arguably the epitome of a modern tech company — Mark Zuckerberg is the champion of The Hacker Way — I find Facebook's approach here to be an admirable endorsement of (a) the differentiated value that tech and creative specialists each bring to the table and (b) the enormous potential from their integrated collaboration.

Everson urged the audience to look at how Facebook deals with developers to get a sense of how it would like to deal with ad agencies.

Does your marketing team have a vision of how to deal with technologies and technologists?

P.S. On the topic of creative and technical commingling, Tim Suther of Acxiom published an article on CMO.com earlier this week — Mad Men Meet Their Match: Math Men — that makes the case for the collaboration between left-brain (tech) and right-bain (creative) professionals. Includes plenty of clever nods to famous advertising slogans, such as:

"While diamonds are forever, mass advertising is not. Marketing science alone won't be its replacement. Combined, however, the art and science of marketing are 'two great tastes that taste great together.'"

Sounds g-r-r-r-eat!

P.P.S. Is the inverse of a marketing technologist a technology creative?
March 23, 2012
15:52
What do you call a marketing technologist?
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

There's a punchline in there somewhere, but I'm partially serious.

While everyone is coming around to the merging of marketing and technology/IT — and the value of hybrid roles to lead and operate at that intersection — the titles that people use for these roles vary tremendously.

I like the phrase chief marketing technologist (a biased choice, I admit). My annual survey of marketing technology memes for 2012 favored the titles director of marketing technology, marketing technology manager, and vice president of marketing technology. The agency world favors the term chief creative technologist. Forrester advocates for a chief marketing technology strategist.

Earlier this week, a vice president at Microsoft Advertising proposed another variation: Chief Information Marketing Officer (CIMO). From his blog post:

Lines between CIO and CMO are blurring. Today's CMO needs to view technology as both a delivery tool and as an analytics/measurement tool. The CIO needs to think about build-out Big Data and actionable analytics capabilities to support marketing. Technology is the bridge between the two functions — hence a new title: Chief Information Marketing Officer (CIMO).

Conceptually, that's right on. As far as titles go, I think four word titles have one word too many. But that's just personal preference. Choose title inspires you and your organization — it's the mission that matters, not the label.

But if you want to construct your own title, here's an automata diagram for generating one:

How many possible titles can this produce? Your choices: 7 rank qualifiers, 6 ranks, 3 rank conjunctions, 8 function adjectives, 11 functions, and 10 role nouns. Plus you could have multiple function adjectives and functions -- say two of each, so an extra 7 adjectives and 10 functions, plus 2 optional function conjunctions.

7 x 6 x 3 x 8 x 11 x 10 x 7 x 10 x 2 = 15,523,200 possible titles.

Want three functions adjectives and three functions? Multiply by another 6 x 9 x 2 for a total of 1,676,505,600. More than a billion.

Senior Vice President of Creative Technology and Computational Marketing Platforms? It's plausible.
March 22, 2012
1:23
Why marketing software will never be like ERP
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 marketing insights, "will create several multi-billion dollar winners. And a set of technology companies will emerge as the marketing equivalents of Salesforce and SAP."

Hurrah!

He takes a moment to point at several of Bain's investments in marketing technology ventures: BloomReach, CQuotient, HookLogic, and TellApart. (Hey, for all the benefits of big data marketing, a little PR is still in vogue.) Some very cool companies, actually. He then lays out two main points:
1. The multi-billion juggernauts of back-office enterprise software will have counterparts in the front-office worlds of sales and marketing (well, acknowledging that Salesforce.com, and Siebel before it, already achieved that status).
2. Much of the focus of marketing software has been focused on "process," but there's a huge new opportunity for a focus on "data" — and the web is an overflowing cornucopia of such data.
Here's Ajay's graphic of enterprise functions and some of their notable venture successes:

There's conspicuous white space at the bottom, no?

Ajay remarks, "Despite the last 15 years of automation of sales functions, marketing functions have been underserved and underpenetrated in terms of enterprise software. While the other corporate functions have all created multibillion-dollar software companies, the marketing function has only had one exit north of one billion (Omniture)."

At a high level, I vigorously agree with Ajay on both counts: there's a huge enterprise opportunity in marketing, and we've only begun to tap the potential of "big data" in this field.

But I think marketing may play out differently than those other enterprise functions before it. I'll explain why in a moment.
The missing billions in enterprise marketing successes
First, however, I do feel that there are several arguments for multi-billion dollar marketing businesses that aren't represented in the above chart. On the enterprise software angle, both Adobe and IBM have created huge ventures in the space — granted, by the aggregation of many acquisitions and good, old-fashioned organic growth. Teradata probably deserves a mention in this category too, especially with their acquisition of Aprimo. And ExactTarget is well on its way to a billion dollar IPO. Constant Contact has a near-billion market cap of $882 million.

There also an agency angle — I know, a different beast, but one that is increasingly engaged in coopetition with the likes of Adobe and IBM — Digitas was bought by Publicis for $1.3 billion. As for technology service providers focused on marketing, there's Axciom ($1.1 billion market cap), Accenture ($40 billion market cap), Sapient ($1.7 billion market cap).

But the most interesting angle for claiming that marketing has had some spectacular multi-billion dollar successes: Google and Facebook. They're not enterprise software providers, but the lion's share of their multi-billion dollar revenues comes purely from selling technology-powered advertising-as-a-service to marketers. You could argue that they're really media companies, but that's a straw man. Google and Facebook are letting marketers leverage their "big data" and algorithmic prowess to achieve very intimate customer interactions in ways that have innovated marketing far more than any enterprise software package.

(Also note that as a piece of that puzzle, DoubleClick and aQuantive were both multi-billion acquisitions by Google and Microsoft respectively.)

My point is simply that the marketing function hasn't been as anemic in big venture wins as that chart suggests. It's just that the nature of marketing successes has been very different than those in other corporate functions.
Why the marketing software space is structurally different
One of the strongest indicators to me that the marketing software space is fundamentally different than finance, manufacturing, or HR, is the vibrant and varied ecosystem of marketing technology providers:

The above graphic — which, from 6 months ago is already woefully out of date — is just a sample of about 250 companies out of thousands. Many are small, venture-financed start-ups. But many aren't so small either, representing revenues and valuations of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each. In aggregate, it's a multi-billion kaleidoscope.

There was never anything of this scale of diversity in software markets for other corporate functions. Why?

Two words: stability and standardization.

Finance, manufacturing, even the bulk of HR, may be complex functions, but for the most part, they're highly standardized. In the case of finance for public companies, it's downright regulated. GAAP is GAAP, no matter which finance software you've adopted. Getting creative with finance isn't just discouraged, it can get you thrown in jail. So even though different software packages might have better ways of organizing, visualizing, or managing these standardized processes, the core of what they do is the same.

This meant that there were only so many companies worth funding in those spaces in the first place. And as they matured, it was relatively easy for the biggest players to swallow smaller competitors in consolidation. In many cases, those weren't technology acquisitions — they were customer base acquisitions. They could even get away with discontinuing the acquired products and forcing customers over to their primary platform because they were essentially the same thing.

But not only are these functions relatively standardized — they're also highly stable. With a few subtle differences, finance is managed today the same way it has been for decades. Same for manufacturing. The global scale of manufacturing has expanded dramatically, which increases the complexity of supply chain management to be sure, but the fundamentals are the same as they ever were.

In other words, software providers in these other functions aren't frantically chasing a moving target. And that gives potential new entrants precious few opportunities upon which to mount an attack.

That's not to say that there haven't been a few big innovations. For instance, sales force automation and CRMs were pretty much locked up by the late 90's — until Salesforce.com seized the opportunity to provide them as software-as-a-service. It's still basically the same function, but delivered in a better way (less IT overhead). Manufacturing and other back-office departments may yet have their SaaS revolutions. But that won't necessarily change the fundamentals of those functions.

Admittedly, HR may be a growing exception to this rule. Why? Because companies are starting to make radical changes in how they manage an increasingly mobile and global workforce. Shifting attitudes and expectations about work, epitomized through the Millennial generation, are opening up opportunities for HR software that embraces The Cluetrain Manifesto. But as important as these changes are culturally, from a technical perspective, I suspect there are finitely limited ways by which software providers may reinvent the technology that powers them.

There will be some amazing HR software start-ups, but there won't be anywhere near the gargantuan surge we've seen in the marketing domain.
Stability and standardization do not characterize marketing today
The marketing software space could not be more structurally different than these other functions.

First and foremost, we must acknowledge: the entirety of marketing is in a perpetual state of disruptive innovation. Google changed everything. Then YouTube. Then Facebook. Then Twitter, Foursquare, Groupon, Quora. Apple has changed everything in mobile marketing and apps on our phones and tablets. My list of 131 different kinds of marketing offers a taste of the exponential explosion of new marketing approaches. And the pace of change only seems to be accelerating.

The modern marketing landscape is in constant flux: it is the antithesis of stability.

I'm not just talking about marketing software providers either. The very channels and vehicles they work on top of are still rapidly evolving, with new ones being invented every week. (Take Pinterest for example.) Like my examples of Google and Facebook above, you can revolutionize enterprise marketing without even being an enterprise marketing software provider.

It's a breathtaking whirlwind — so much opportunity for competitive advantage. But it's also dizzying and overwhelming. No one person, even no one organization, can keep on top of it all. Even trying to specialize in just one subfield, such as search engine marketing, is a high-speed roller coaster ride. Blink and you miss some huge development that changes the landscape.

This broadly disruptive environment is fertile ground for start-ups, who can see the potential of a new marketing mechanism and rise quickly with its success. Larger marketing software platforms seek to add support for these new mechanisms as features — sometimes just by acquiring one of those plucky start-ups — but they must continually battle inertia and bloat. The more add-ons you hurriedly slap on to your once sleek race car, the more it begins to maneuver like a Winnebago.

Until along comes a new platform provider that capitalizes on all the learning of how to connect the dots of those disparate marketing mechanisms into a better cohesive whole. Which is very exhilarating, of course, until the next series of innovations starts to drag their architecture in unexpected directions. And the cycle repeats.

But the dynamics of products vs. platforms vs. suites are something I'll save for a future post.

The other axis by which marketing software differs from other functions is in standardization — that is to say, marketing software has almost no industry-wide standardization. Part of that is due to the lack of stability; it's hard to standardize when the ground keeps shifting under your feet. (The only things that are standardized are the APIs that big channels like Google and Facebook enforce to a standard. And those standards evolve darn fast.) But there's a deeper force working against standardization that emanates from the very soul of marketing: the Holy Grail of differentiation.

Marketers don't want their customer experiences to be standardized against their competitors. They want their brands to be unique and beautiful snowflakes.

That drives a constant demand for creative new ways to stand out from the competition, "think different." And the digital environment is infinitely malleable in this regard, far more easily plied by imagination than physical reality. The most common limitations? The architecture, features, and philosophy of the software you've adopted.

Because there is no GAAP equivalent standard in social media marketing — GASP (Generally Accepted Social Practices)? — for how to universally interface with customers on Facebook or Twitter, marketers and marketing software providers are free to experiment with a wide range of different approaches. You can have two diametrically opposed solutions that are both successful in different contexts. One that works great for one brand might be a train wreck for another.

So marketing software providers themselves are differentiated by the approaches they embody in their products, which guide and influence the strategies and tactics that marketers design and execute with them. As I wrote in a previous post, for marketers, you are the software you use.

But there's one more way in which marketing software differs from other enterprise functions: process.
Process in marketing is simultaneously important and impossible
Let's step back for a moment to acknowledge that life is process. Things move forward in organizations via processes — whether those processes are formal or informal, planned or improvised, optimal or dysfunctional. It may be a messy process, but there is one. Process is how strategy materializes, for better or worse.

And a huge portion of the value of enterprise software for other corporate functions has been the systemization of processes it enables and enforces — the grand-daddy of which is enterprise resource planning (ERP), the broad umbrella of Oracle and SAP.

See, while human beings struggle with process on their own — remember all the exact steps to take, at the right time, in the right order, in coordination with everyone else involved in the process — software is ideal for such precision synchronization. That was a big part of the value that software in these other enterprise functions was able to deliver. Automated and semi-automated processes can be incredibly efficient.

But here's the key difference: to a very high degree, businesses can control their processes for finance, manufacturing, and HR. You can bend all of the participants to your will. "This is the process. Follow it." Employees, distributors, vendors, contractors, subcontractors — if they want their checks, they bow to the process. Wal-Mart's supply chain is the epitome of this for an extended enterprise.

It's worth nothing that, along these lines, sales force automation was about automating salespeople, not sales. Important distinction, and confusing the two can lead to delusions of automation. ("Press this button and sales just flow in!")

Marketing is made up of processes too. But the problem, like sales, is that there are two very different worlds of process that marketing faces:
1. Processes within the marketing department (and its various collaborators).
2. Processes that prospects and customers follow to engage with the business.
While processes within the marketing department are as scriptable as any other enterprise function — e.g., here are the steps you must follow to execute an approved campaign-specific special offer — you can't dictate process to your prospects and customers. Or, more accurately, you can try to dictate process to them, but they can choose not to follow it. After all, your customers are primarily beholden to the processes of their own organizations. When there's a conflict, their process wins, not yours.

And this is why marketing software will never be like ERP — we can't dictate the process end-to-end.

Marketing is — or should be — obsessed with their customers' processes. How do we optimize the experiences we deliver to flow smoothly and successfully with their processes? If we're going to suggest that they follow our processes, at least in some circumstances, how do we make that enticing and rewarding? Since there's almost always tremendous variation among customers, this is very tricky. One size doesn't fit all.

You could take some comfort in the the notion that at least processes internal to the marketing department should be able to be systematized by software. And some can be. But here's the rub: even internal marketing processes become entangled in addressing customer processes. Many of marketing's processes are inherently about acting on or reacting to customers.

This is why marketing automation is so damn difficult.

It's not that marketing automation software sucks. It's that its mission is impossible to achieve perfectly. The best we can do is systematize pieces of our marketing ecosystem, carefully interweaving what we automate, what we semi-automate, and what we leave under manual control.

The balance is never perfect — but we can always asymptotically improve it. Of course, with the caveat that because marketing is neither stable nor standardized, so that balance is constantly changing. But when we get it even approximately right, the payoff can be huge — which is why I say that process in marketing is both important and impossible.

Which leads me back to Ajay's article, where he proposes that a new generation of marketing software can be more focused on data than process — as a way of overcoming the limitations of the process-driven approach of current marketing automation solutions.

I do agree that more data can help us make better decisions in a number of marketing processes. Yet I still think that process design and management will be the overarching challenge for marketers (and the software platforms that serve them). Better data and smarter use of that data will enable major advancements in marketing's capabilities. But I'm skeptical of the ability for data to self-generate process — at least outside of very specific contexts. Data is potential; process is activation of potential.

So software that takes a hybrid approach to process and big data strikes me as the most promising.

Still, no solution will be perfect. Machine learning, as powerful as it is, is a statistical method — there's always a margin of error. And if you apply machine learning to the wrong data, or extrapolate its conclusions into unjustified territory, or even just foul up the presentation layer of what it outputs, you can end up with a big flopping sound.
Modern marketing software won't be perfect, but it will be amazing

I have no doubt that the years ahead will have several billion-dollar exits in enterprise marketing software. The mostly likely candidates will be platforms that can serve as a backbone for core marketing processes and data repositories, your marketing "systems of record." Arguably, Salesforce.com is one example of this, since the CRM is increasingly owned by marketing. Adobe, Eloqua, IBM, Aprimo, Hubspot, IgnitionOne, Neolane, Pardot, ExactTarget, and many others are all competing to be the skeletal structure of marketing's IT. New entrants will arrive for sure.

But unlike other enterprise functions, where a single platform such as SAP or Oracle pretty much covers everything, I don't believe that backbone marketing systems will be complete one-stop shops for the entirety of the marketing department.

Instead, I think such primary systems will be complemented by a wide variety of so-called "point solutions." Almost all of them will interface to backbone systems, but their specialization will be the key to addressing the instability challenge — and differentiation dream — of marketing for the foreseeable future. (The big backbone winners will be those who make such interactions with other software especially easy.)

The particular combination of backbone systems and point solutions will vary dramatically from company to company, depending on context, industry, vision, brand. The unique fabric of any one particular company's marketing software mix will be a big part of their competitive differentiation.

As a result, this ecosystem will continue to support a tremendous number of smaller ventures, with many more waves of new marketing software start-ups every year. These will result in a number of exits at tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. In aggregate, these will represent multiple billion-dollar subfields within marketing.

Rather than fantasize of "one platform to rule them all," marketers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists should embrace the complex, heterogeneous environment of modern marketing. There's no precedent for it in the history of enterprise software. But frankly, there's no precedent for any of the amazing revolutions that are erupting in marketing writ large.

It's also a great time for marketing technologists and a move towards agile marketing management. But I'll close this post here.

Agree? Disagree? Share your perspective in the comments.
February 27, 2012

Permalink for 'State of the Marketing Technologist 2012'

12:47

State of the Marketing Technologist 2012

» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

February 17, 2012
12:38
Digital marketing matures beyond "best practices"
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
My latest article on Search Engine Land, Landing Pages 3.0, makes the case that landing pages and conversion optimization are moving beyond the era of "best practices."

But I actually believe this is a representative sign of digital marketing maturing more broadly.

Consider this excerpt from the article:

Whereas the height of Landing Pages 2.0 was an ever-expanding list of rules and rubrics for implementing good landing pages, marketers who have graduated to a Landing Pages 3.0 mindset have outgrown such checklists and cheat sheets.

Instead, they're now driving conversion programs from a higher set of principles:

Deliver meaningful, context-relevant content

Present that content with an engaging, affective design

Offer a compelling, but not coercive, "next step" to take

Like an architect who has completed his or her basic design studio courses, practiced and perfected the fundamentals, who is now ready to start breaking the cookie-cutter "rules" in pursuit of more impressive and imaginative ideas. Or like a musician who has mastered scales, riffs, and progressions — hours and hours of the mechanics of their instrument — who is now ready to improvise and jam with the pros.

Landing Page 3.0 marketers have studied best practices, absorbed them into their thinking, but they're now ready to synthesize new creative ideas of their own — unafraid to break the "rules" to deliver remarkable experiences to their audience.

Now substitute "landing pages" with any of a number of other subdisciplines in modern marketing: marketing automation, demand generation, email marketing (!), social media marketing, etc.

It's the confidence and wisdom to favor what's "best" over what's "best practice."
February 03, 2012
11:50
3-minute interview: why marketing technologists now
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Bertil Snel, who arranged for me to present on the marketing technologist role at last year's Adobe Partner Day, just posted a follow-up — the marketer of the future is a "techy" — including a post-event video interview we did backstage.

His post is in Dutch, but thanks to the miracle of Google Translate, I'm pretty sure that he's not making fun of my exaggerated hand waving. But judge for yourself. Here's the 3-minute "short version" of the marketing technologist pitch:
February 02, 2012
12:16
Marketing as an object-oriented program?
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 automation packages require fairly extensive setup and configuration, frequently done by high-priced consultants. (It's no accident of strategy that IBM, arguably primarily a technology services company, acquired enterprise marketing software provider Unica.)

"The purpose of automation is to simplify and speed up processes — not complicate things!" writes Jacques. But as marketing automation providers continually add new and disparate features, such as merging in more social media capabilities, the "automated" solution can unintentionally become more complicated to wield than the processes that you originally wanted to automate in the first place.

This complexity can dampen the actual adoption of automation — even if a company has installed an amazing marketing automation platform, they may only be leveraging a small sliver of its capabilities.

Of course, Whatsnexx offers its own marketing automation solution that proposes to address this challenge, so Jacques does have an ulterior motive for making this point. But the statement of the problem they're trying to solve rings true.
2. If marketing is being programmed, can we use an object-oriented paradigm?
Jacques describes their solution as customer state marketing. (Akin Arikan did a nice post on them last year.) If you have some software engineering background, your synapses may already be firing associations with state machines, and that seems to be part of Whatsnexx's intention.

According to Jacques, the key benefits of their approach are:
1. Scenarios display the characteristics of object-oriented programming
2. Scenario programming is procedural
Whoa. Let me do a double take.

We're reading a blog by a marketing solutions provider — selling to marketers — that is touting the characteristics of object-oriented programming as one of the benefits it provides customers. That's pretty bold. I mean, I just recently wrote that marketers should learn how to program, but to have a marketing technology company trying to sell a "better" programming paradigm to marketers is kind of striking.

Yet it resonated with me instantly. (And apparently with Akin too.)

To quote a bit from Jacques's post:

For programmers, [the above two benefits] are significant. For everyone else this sounds like some foreign language — definitely very obscure. Let me put it another way:

1) Scenarios are self-contained. They know how to behave in response to external stimulus (i.e., an event). This stimulus occurs randomly, and the scenarios will automatically respond to the event according to the rules contained in the scenario itself. The scenario only knows what it needs to know in order to respond to the stimulus, and contains all of the information necessary in order to carry out its functions properly (i.e., actions), such as sending the appropriate email.

2) Scenarios follow simple rules, and have a simple program flow and limited branching options. This makes it easy to design state-based event/action program flows that govern how and when a scenario responds to a random customer event.

If that's not pitching to a new generation of marketers — and marketing technologists — I don't know what is.

Even if the net functionality that Whatsnexx delivers is similar to traditional marketing automation systems, the power of a paradigm can't be denied.

Thinking about the modern marketing function as a large-scale object-oriented program stirs the imagination — at least it does for me — and suggests a number of intriguing new ways to organize and coordinate the multitude of moving parts in marketing's environment.

Just as object-oriented programming dramatically changed the development of software — without directly changing what that software was able to do — such object orientation could have a big impact in the way that marketing automation processes are conceived, implemented, and maintained.

Following the object-oriented train of thought, I can't help but ruminate about how object-oriented design patterns might be adapted in the context of marketing-as-a-system. Maybe there are marketing analogs to Adapter, Decorator, Singleton, and Strategy patterns. Or maybe there are entirely different pattern concepts — but patterns nonetheless — that can help structure and standardize this space.

It is unlikely a panacea for marketing complexity, but it could be a better architecture for managing such complexity. I don't know if Whatsnexx actually delivers on this promise — I've only read a few of their blog posts and browsed their web site — but I give them full props for promoting a brilliant way to frame "programmable" marketing.
January 24, 2012
15:19
CMOs to agencies: adapt or die
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
The CMO Council released their latest report on client/agency effectiveness this week. (You can download a free executive summary from that link, or spring $199 for the full report.)

Out of the myriad of survey-driven stats from 6,000 corporate marketers across a wide range of major brands, one figure stands out as particularly striking: only 9% of senior marketers believe traditional ad agencies are doing a good job of evolving and extending their service capabilities in the digital age.

When 91% of your customers think you're a dinosaur, that can't be good.

From the CMO Council's press release:

"There's an underlying level of frustration among senior corporate marketers worldwide when it comes to agency contributions to business value creation, strategic thinking, and digital marketing development," noted Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, whose members control more than $300 billion in aggregated marketing spend each year. "Our members report quite a bit of switching of digital marketing resources, as well as a view that big, global agencies don't have a truly integrated offering and capacity to execute in an effective, localized way in emerging markets.

So what are marketers doing about this dissatisfaction?
- 49% are planning to change or consolidate agency rosters within the next 12 months (another 15% are considering it)
- 48% are hiring specialized digital marketing solution and service providers to implement new social, mobile, and interactive strategies
- 47% plan to build internal capabilities and use incumbent agency services less
- 45% are bringing in outside consultants to help set up and structure digital programs
Ring. Ring. "Hello, managing director, it's Charles Darwin on line 1."
January 23, 2012
15:05
The Marketing Technology Frenemy Triangle
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 to reach into marketing from technology" rather than the other way around. Why? Because web sites and online advertising now require complex data analysis, customization, and global management. So now he has CMOs, not just his usual CIO clients, knocking on his door.

But don't worry, Madison Avenue. Whipple stresses that Accenture Interactive's relationship with agencies is "complementary, not competitive." They're working together with agencies to pitch new business. For now.

Meanwhile, creative agencies are becoming more tech savvy. Razorfish and SapientNitro would no doubt both claim that they can match Accenture Interactive's technology chops when it comes to digital marketing apps, web sites, and advertising. Omnicom has its creative technology venture, Code Worldwide. Fabric Worldwide, backed by WPP, touts their new "marketing operating system."

Then you have marketing software vendors, such as IBM, Aprimo, and ExactTarget, who are more than happy to provide integration and technical advisory services — encroaching on the domain of tech consulting shops. One could argue that IBM is more of a technology services firm than it is a software vendor.

Which is okay, because many of those tech consulting firms now have their own marketing software products. Accenture Interactive promotes six of their own marketing software products. Deloitte has alliances with other software companies, such as IBM — but for mobile applications they have Übermind.

It's a fluid mix of competition and cooperation. Coopetition. To visualize it:

To complicate the field further, for many of their respective customers, there's still an ongoing push-and-pull between the marketing department and the IT department over who has what responsibilities (and budget) in this new era. In some cases, CIOs and CMOs are the proxies for these frenemic giants.

But there are some upsides to this frothy mingling:

Creative agencies can use this as an opportunity to shift their revenue models to engagement fees and "subscriptions," like their new coopetitors, and break free of dependency on media buying inefficiencies — which are quickly becoming quite efficient.

Software vendors can take advantage of the deeper relationships with clients that services afford them to better inform their product development. The closer software engineers are to the actual problems that need to be solved, the more innovative their solutions will inevitably be.

And technology consultancies can piggyback on their marketing services mission to develop stronger relationships across the C-Suite — not just the CIO anymore, but the CMO and possibly the CEO — which can save them from the era of shrinking IT authority.

Best of all, these new kinds of competition can benefit CMOs most. It will give them more choices. It will give them more leverage to push their providers to innovate. And it makes the role of the CMO, as the conductor orchestrating the intermingling of these different participants, more valuable than ever.
January 05, 2012
14:25
2011 was a big year for marketing technology
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 billion in 2011, up 17% and 33%, respectively, over 2010."

Some of the notable Q4 transactions in marketing technology included:
- Oracle's acquisition of RightNow Technologies for $1.5 billion
- Oracle's acquisition of Endeca Technologies for $1.1 billion
- Neustar's acquisition of TARGUSInfo for $650 million
- Adobe's acquisition of Efficient Frontier for $400 million
- Yahoo's acquisition of interCLICK for $251 million
- SDL's acquisition of Alterian for $104 million
I'd also add that 2011 was a particularly big year for investment — or planned public investment — in marketing automation. In August, Eloqua filed to go public. In November, ExactTarget filed to go public, and Marketo raised an additional $50 million (a grand total of $107 million raised so far). Back in March, HubSpot raised an additional $32 million (a grand total of $65 million raised).

What does 2012 have in store?

According to JEGI, "The media and technology markets continue to evolve at a torrid pace, and companies are increasingly seeking assets to drive growth and provide new revenue streams. JEGI expects that a diverse and active pool of buyers, including both strategic companies and private equity firms, both of which have access to capital and will benefit from a steadily improving debt financing market, will drive vigorous M&A activity in the year ahead."

Add in the Eloqua and ExactTarget public offerings early in 2012, and I think it's safe to say that 2012 is going to be an exciting year for the marketing technology ecosystem.

Looks like I'm going to have to update my Marketing Technology Landscape Infographic soon.
December 19, 2011
20:51
You are what you don't automate
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

"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 developers feel that time spent doing anything other than designing and coding great software is, well, kind of a drag.

So they try to automate as many of the boring processes of assembling, testing, deploying, operating, and debugging their software as possible. When they find themselves doing a rote task, the machinery in their heads starts whirling: is there any way to write a script so I don't have to do this by hand again?

To engineers, "you are what you don't automate" is a chiding remark: don't have you something better to do with your time than type that same sequence of commands over and over again?

Automation is about eliminating mindless busywork to make more room for creative and meaningful work. More time for distinctly human contributions.

In marketing automation, however, I often hear people talk about automating some of the most human aspects of their jobs: segmenting customers, judging opportunities, designing truly delightful customer experiences. Not surprisingly, such visions for automating that which humans do best often run into trouble.

Marketers should automate their own mindless tasks — things that take up their precious time that don't require thought. Many marketers I know still get bogged down in a lot of busywork of this kind, so there's clearly plenty of opportunity for automation to help.

But don't be quick to blindly surrender what your insight and instinct serve best.

"You are what you don't automate" can also be a badge of honor. What are you? The quintessential, best parts. Don't automate that.
December 16, 2011
12:08
Why marketers should learn how to program
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 comfort with technology. And, over time, advance from comfort to understanding to intuition.

It's this intuition about how software works — call it "software thinking" — that is of immense value to modern marketers.

There are three reasons for this:

First, marketers are now flooded with an ever expanding array of marketing software to achieve their objectives, stay competitive, and keep up with the expectations of increasingly tech-savvy customers. But to non-programmers, software can seem like a black box. Learning how to program helps make that box more translucent. It moves from the Dark Ages of software superstitions to the Enlightenment of software reasoning. Knowing first-hand how software works give you confidence to wield it wisely and decisively.

Second, the cast of players in marketing's universe now includes a wide range of technical professionals: IT staff, software vendors, technical consultants, creative technology agencies, and — increasingly — marketing technologists within the marketing department. Learning a little programming makes you better able to communicate with technologists in their native tongue. It reduces the risk of critical details being lost in translation. It gives you first-hand insight into the concepts and concerns that drive your new technical collaborators.

Third — and by far the most important — learning to program builds up process design skills. Previously, marketers didn't have to do a lot of process design. But today, so much of the power of marketing software is its capability to systematize aspects of customer experiences and internal marketing operations, delivering more tailored marketing at scale. But it requires you to map out and implement ever more advanced processes that get "coded" and configured in such software.

For instance, consider this screenshot from a marketing automation platform (in this case, Eloqua):

This is marketing. It's a layout of a marketing process that a marketer has created — a flow of steps and decisions to deliver the right experience to a prospect and route them to the appropriate stage in the marketing-sales funnel. When constructed well, such automated flows can have a significant impact on your brand and marketing effectiveness.

This is also programming. It's presented in a visual manner, but the process implemented here is structured and behaves as a computer program: if X do Y, else do Z. It's the same kind of thinking that software developers apply in their craft.

Processes like this are springing up all over marketing — not just with marketing automation software. There are processes for managing your content marketing pipeline, running your conversion optimization experiments, handling your social media engagements, and so on.

Sometimes such process configuration is contained in a single software platform. In other cases, you have to design processes that cross multiple software products and define critical human touchpoints — when does a marketer or salesperson intervene, who specifically is that, what do they do, and how does the opportunity progress from there. Even if you just sketch such processes on a whiteboard, you are, in a very real sense, "programming" your organization.

It may sound straightforward at first. But as you invent more sophisticated processes, as you seek to make them more efficient and robust, and as you start to encounter interaction effects between different processes, it quickly gets challenging.

Learning a little computer programming arms you with core concepts and skills for tackling these challenges. You develop a better sense of how to structure processes with maintainability and adaptability in mind. How and why to do refactoring. How to debug a broken process in a systematic way. How to anticipate and handle exceptions. How to use software engineering approaches such as encapsulation and loose coupling.

More than anything, playing around with computer programming — outside the context of an actual do-or-die project at work — is a great way to get practice translating abstract ideas into concrete processes. It builds and tones your "software thinking" skills.

Even if you never write a line of raw software code in your professional capacity, your new strength in software thinking will prove invaluable to your marketing mission.
December 12, 2011
13:02
Follow the money from IT to marketing
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Enclosure: [download]

Gartner recently released its report on IT predictions for 2012. The subhead of their press release boldly calls out their most stunning conclusion: predictions show IT budgets are moving out of the control of IT departments.

Garner predicts that by 2015, 35% of enterprise IT expenditures will be managed outside of the IT department's budget. Let that sink in for a moment.

"The continued trend toward consumerization and cloud computing highlight the movement of certain former IT responsibilities into the hands of others," said Daryl Plummer, managing VP and Gartner fellow. "As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the last few years."

The Gartner announcement includes this brief analysis with their prediction (emphasis is mine):

Next generation digital enterprises are being driven by a new wave of business managers and individual employees who no longer need technology to be contextualized for them by an IT department. These people are demanding control over the IT expenditure required to evolve the organization within the confines of their roles and responsibilities. CIOs will see some of their current budget simply reallocated to other areas of the business. In other cases, IT projects will be redefined as business projects with line-of-business managers in control.

This proclamation has naturally stirred up much commentary in the IT community — great articles on Wired (2012 Will Be the Year of Apocalyptic Reckoning for CIOs) and ZDNet (Line-of-business tech budgets may soon top IT department budgets) — focused on how the IT department can evolve to become more of a broker of services and a coordinator of distributed activities. "The IT organization of the future must coordinate those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data, and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT," said Plummer.

Big changes for IT and CIOs ahead. But consider the other side of this equation — where the money and responsibility are migrating to. As Plummer remarked in an accompanying audio interview, "CMOs, or chief marketing officers, may end up having larger IT budgets than CIOs."

Every CMO should be asking themselves if they're ready to inherit this mantle of marketing IT leadership.

A good place to start would be examining Forrester's recommendation from earlier this year to establish an office of marketing technology. And if you don't already have a good intuition for the staff who will make up this new technology-in-marketing function, here's a write-up on the marketing technologist revolution (and a video presentation of it as well).
December 09, 2011
1:16
A brief, hand-wavy history of marketing fragmentation
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Earlier this year, I gave a presentation at Search Insider Summit on the topic of marketing mash-ups. It was a whirlwind tour of how marketing started from a single discipline and, over the years, fragmented into a dizzying array of specialties and subspecialties.

It also offers a few ideas for how we can turn this fragmented landscape into a source of new cross-speciality creativity — and maybe, just maybe, unify marketing once again.

Someone just showed me that the video recording of that session is available online, so if you can stomach a frenetic amount of hand waving, you might enjoy this:
November 16, 2011
20:55
The Evergreen Laws of Marketing (techs take note!)
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

I've shared the laws of technology for marketers. But what about laws of marketing for technologists?

The single most insightful marketing book I've ever read was published nearly 20 years ago, before the Web was anything more than an academic experiment: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Marketers of the Internet Generation can be forgiven if they haven't read it. After all, it doesn't invent entirely new tactical dynamics of online marketing, such as Permission Marketing, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, and Content Rules have. But the strategic truths that it reveals are timeless.

A few of the laws are:

The Law of Leadership
It's better to be first than it is to be "better" — the leading brand in almost any category is the one that embedded itself first in the neural pathways of its prospects. In the best cases, the name may even become generic: Kleenex. Coke. FedEx. Or, a more contemporary example, Google. (A subsequent Law of the Mind notes, "Being first in the mind is everything in marketing. Being first in the marketplace is important only to the extent that it allows you to get in the mind first.")

The Law of the Category
If you can't be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in. "Forget the brand. Think categories. Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands. Everyone talks about why their brand is better. But prospects have an open mind when it comes to categories. Everyone is interested in what's new."

The Law of Focus
The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect's mind. "The most effective words are simple and benefit oriented. No matter how complicated the product, no matter how complicated the needs of the market, it's always better to focus on one word or benefit rather than two or three or four." Overnight = FedEx. Safety = Volvo. Cola = Coke.

The Law of Attributes
For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute. If you're not the leader in your market, it's futile to try to own their word. "It's much better to search for an opposite attribute that will allow you to play off against the leader. The key word here is opposite — similar won't do.

I'd list the other 18 — they're all great — but it would border on copyright infringement.
Think it doesn't apply today? Think again.
I've seen several blog posts by digital marketing gurus who claim those "laws" no longer apply. I'd like to push back on that.

Admittedly, it's easy to poke holes in something written 20 years ago. There are numerous examples in the book that time has worn away — e.g., IBM for being the leader in computers, even though "computer" today is arguably owned by Dell and IBM has moved on to "technology consulting." Atari used to own "video games." Today it's owned by Sony with Playstation. [Edit: Jim Ewel in the comments below points out that HP and Lenovo may have claim to "computer" by sheer volume, and that Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox are on top of "video games" today. Which leads to my next point...]

But nothing lasts forever. The laws of marketing that are focused on owning a particular word aren't a guarantee of eternal permanence. But within the scope of a reasonable competitive battlefield — 5 years, 10 years, maybe more — it's absolutely the benchmark of victory. And while some of the victors from yesteryear have gone away, many others have persisted (e.g., Hertz for car rentals), and still others (e.g., Apple) have evolved to own entirely new categories.

Google owns "search." Facebook owns "social network." It's one of the reasons why Twitter is trying to position itself as something other than a social network. People say that Yahoo! used to own search, but truthfully, they owned "Internet directory." And, unfortunately, Internet directories ended up being a temporary blip in the history of the Web.

(Yahoo! now seems to want to own "display advertising" — but that's not a value proposition for users.)

Another law, The Law of Exclusivity — two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect's mind — is one of the reasons Google is struggling so much with its social networking attempts. Its best bet, which they seem to be pursuing, is to play up social dynamics as a part of "search," the word they do own. But they've got their work cut out for them.

Bing has been desperately trying to compete for "search" — they even tried to own the word "decide," but it seems that consumers today are more interested in searching than deciding. (It's no good owning a word if prospects don't latch on to it.) Microsoft has spent a fortune on trying to dislodge the equation of "search" with Google in people's minds. It's nearly impossible to do.

I acknowledge that the Law of Leadership can be hard to perceive in the early stage of technological innovation — there are many examples of the first entrant to a market losing out to someone else shortly thereafter. But to reiterate Ries' & Trout's main point: being first in the market isn't as important as being first in the mind. The Altair was the first home computer, but the Apple II ended up owning that space by being the first in more people's minds. (Shortly afterwards, IBM owned the "PC" in people's minds — a personal computer that was more serious than a mere home computer.)

So, even though Apple wasn't the first MP3 player, Google wasn't the first search engine, and Facebook wasn't the first social network, in the rapid evolution of new technology — whole new markets emerging from the ether — those companies ended up grabbing the leadership positions after a little early stage jostling. And they're now darn hard to dislodge.

(Another law, The Law of the Opposite — number two players in a market need to turn the leader's strength into a weakness — is at play in how Android is being positioned as "open" vs. the iPhone's "closed" product philosophy.)

Some may argue that this philosophy of owning words, mindshare, and leadership positions was more feasible in the age of mass media. Once you picked your "word," with enough money, you could hammer it into people's brains with TV ads on all three channels — ABC, NBC, CBS. In our current age of infinitely fragmenting media, that option is going away.

But don't confuse the phenomenon of leadership positioning with its distribution.

Businesses that succeed must still own a well-defined position in people's minds. It's just that they're winning those positions through different tactics and channels — meaningful content marketing, targeted search marketing, consistent word-of-mouth in social media. Advertising still plays an important role, but its dynamics and ecosystem are radically different than 20 years ago — you can't dominate all media, but you can laser target specific media to specific audiences.

When I saw Seth Godin speak a few weeks ago, he emphasized the incredible potential of entrepreneurial thinking, how "linchpins" can change the world in narrow markets in ways that the big giants can't. Some might interpret that as another death knell for these old-school marketing laws, but I view it as more of a powerful shift in scale.

You still want to own a word in a prospect's mind. But now, instead of blanketing an entire mass audience — an option that was never available to smaller businesses or more niche markets — you can focus on owning a very specific word for a very specific audience segment. For instance, a small but brilliant team may own "UX design" in the minds of the Boston software start-up community. That can be a highly valuable position.

Larger businesses may own a collection of related-but-different words for related-but-different audience segments. (Starting to sound like an AdWords portfolio strategy? That's no coincidence.)

For another contemporary example, read venture capitalist Scott Maxwell's post from just yesterday, The Easiest Way to Fail in Business: Lack of Market Clarity, and you will see the essence of Ries' & Trout's laws peeking through.

Anyway, if you're a technologist and you want to grok the underlying gestalt of marketing, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing should be on the top of your reading list. You'll have to provide your own interpretation for our digital landscape, but I think you'll be amazed at how the core concepts are as applicable to modern marketing as they ever were.

P.S. Totally wacky side note. I was flipping through my old copy of the book to select a few excerpts, and I happened to notice this endorsement (written in 1993):

"Powerful marketing concepts with practical evidence galore! These concepts are especially relevant to current economic and competitive conditions." – Herman Cain, President and CEO, Godfather's Pizza

Well, as they say, don't judge a book by its cover. ;-)
November 10, 2011
14:46
MarketingProfs podcast on the marketing technologist
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Yesterday, MarketingProfs published a podcast interview between me and Matthew Grant on the topic of Why You Need a Marketing Technologist.

We started by talking about what Matt calls the "technologization" of marketing:

"So much of the information that marketers have about who their audience is, what that audience is reacting to, is seen through the filter of software. For instance, you look at your analytics to determine what people are doing on your web site. But you're not really observing those customers directly. [Ed: Analytics are not truly the "voice of the customer."] Depending on how your software is configured, what sort of features it has, the default reports it shows you... it's becoming your eyes and ears to what your audience is doing."

We touched on the tension between marketing automation and qualitative human insight:

"People have used the phrase marketing automation a lot, and I think it's a bit of an unfortunate term, I almost feel like it's an oxymoron. I think there's tremendous opportunity for what I'd call semi-automation of marketing. Which is to say, okay, there are certain tasks that we are doing that are repetitive, or there are certain pattern detection approaches that it would be better to have the software look for -- great, let's set it loose. But to still have the human brain guiding the creative, guiding the meta-process of what's happening."

And we also covered content marketing, customer experience, marketing's evolving relationship with IT, the "community" transformation of marketing, technology governance, even the history of bulletin board systems that prefigured social media 10 years before the web took off.

Click here to read Matt's accompanying post and take a listen.
November 02, 2011
11:57
The Book of Marketing Technology on Broadway
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Last week, I spoke at Adobe's Enterprise Partner Community Day in NYC on the Rise of the Marketing Technologist (and What It Means for Agencies). Adobe has now posted the video of that session — click the image below to open a full window and see the video and slides synchronized:

The event was a mix of presentations by Adobe representatives on their particular technologies and partner programs and a few presentations by "external" speakers, such as myself — and Seth Godin (!!). I've been a fan of Seth's writing for years, but this was the first time I heard him speak. To hear him speak at an event called "Rise of the Marketing Technologist" and then give my presentation was kind of cool.

Seth's presentation was drawn from themes discussed in his most recent books, Linchpin and We Are All Weird. He was a firehose of insights — starting by admonishing the audience of agency executives that the advertising world as they knew it (repetitive ads on broad reach media) was dead, even if it was still walking in zombie mode at the moment. Good morning, and welcome to the end of the world!

Three other remarks he made that stuck with me:

Under capitalism, real wealth has always gone to those who own the means of production. The factory worker or the coal miner never got rich, but the factory owner and the mine owner did. It was very expensive to build or buy a means of production. But today, the means of production is the laptop. It can be claimed by anyone who has the courage to decide to become an "owner" of your own production, rather than just a worker in somebody else's machine.

The main point of We Are All Weird is that the normal bell curve, which has dominated the economics of product development for centuries — selling average products to the bulk of average consumers — is being destroyed by the new explosive wealth of choice enabled by the Internet. So-called Long Tail dynamics are invading more and more industries and markets. This is the underlying force that is changing the nature of marketing, because the way you reach and engage those "tribes" out on the edge of the curve — and for larger organizations, how you achieve that at scale — it is very different than the repetitive ads on broad reach media approach. (It's more than just repetitive ads on narrow reach media too.)

Finally, he said at one point, "Every time I listen to the lizard brain and do the exact opposite of what makes it feel safe and comfortable, the more remarkable I become." And being remarkable, with your own means of production, serving unique submarkets in the Long Tail that deeply appreciate what makes you remarkable, is the key to prosperity in this new world.

P.S. For some added ambiance, the event was held at the Hudson Theater on Broadway. The video above never pans out, but the presentations were given on the stage — the first ever Broadway performance of The Book of Marketing Technology. ;-) The photo below is a view of the theater, where performers such as Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, and Barbara Streisand all appeared.
October 26, 2011
10:09
Agencies and the marketing technologist revolution
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Today I'm presenting at Adobe's Partner Community Day in New York City on the topic of the rise of marketing technologist.

This is an updated and extended version of talks I gave last year at Search Insider Summit and Pivot. Since a large number of agencies will be in the audience, I'll also discuss what this marketing technologist revolution means for them.

Here are the slides:
Rise of the Marketing Technologist (And What It Means For Agencies) View more presentations from Scott Brinker
And here's an essay version of my talk:
Rise of the Marketing Technologist (and What It Means for Agencies)
Greetings! It helps to know a little about who's making proclamations. As a brief introduction, I've been a hybrid software developer and marketer since the early days of the Web. For the past four years, I've been blogging about the intersection of these two disciplines and how technology is changing the practice and management of marketing. In 1998, I co-founded an interactive agency that survived and thrived through the first dot-com bubble. About 5 years ago, we transformed that agency into a specialized marketing technology vendor, ion interactive, with customers such as Dell, DHL, General Mills, Intuit. I've had the privilege of seeing the evolution of marketing technology from several perspectives.

So what's a marketing technologist, anyway? Is it just another label for a digital strategist? A creative technologist? Something else?

First, a word on digital. Using highly advanced predictive analytics, I think we can call this fight: digital has won. Sure, there might be a few skirmishes out there, but the writing is on the Facebook wall. For a few points on the curve, consider the stats published by AdAge in July showing how jobs growth is skyrocketing in Internet media — even through our pseudo-recession — while jobs have been stagnating or shrinking in traditional media. Or the latest STRATA survey of agency executives showing digital now on par with TV as the medium of choice.

But probably the best evidence of digital's supremacy is the Apple Store. Laptops, smartphones, tablets — these are the devices that now serve as the interface between customers and companies, especially in the crucial "getting to know you" stage.

All this is to say that digital strategy and marketing strategy must be one and the same.

Given that, it's no surprise that digital strategists have been fruitful and multiplied in agencies. In fact, most agencies are now on the second generation of digital strategists, where the role has forked to encompass digitally-savvy account planners and a bevy of digital marketing specialists for search engine optimization, paid search marketing, social media, display advertising, content marketing, mobile, and more.

It almost goes without saying: a digital strategist must be fluent in using technology. Actually, we can revise that more broadly: pretty much every modern marketer needs to be fluent in using technology.

But not necessarily building it.
Enter the creative technologist...

In agencies, this is where the creative technologist has emerged. What's a creative technologist? Well, consider their anatomy: a great creative technologist has the brain of a software developer and the heart of an artist. Ideally, the eye of an interface designer. And often the balls of a hacker (figuratively speaking). The best creative technologists are fearless about tinkering, experimenting, pushing the envelope.

More formally, a creative technologist builds the technology for creative digital campaigns. (Obviously, right?) They're the ones who work with HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, APIs, MVC frameworks, Facebook apps, iOS, Android, games, dynamic ads, and more. If you work in an agency and spend a lot of time on Facebook's developers site, you're probably a creative technologist.

This has led to the modern creative triumvirate: an art director, a copywriter, and a creative technologist — images, words, and code. And not just in some disconnected pipeline. This is a collaborative unit, with the technologists at the table from the beginning, brainstorming original creative concepts.

Skittles' Experience The Rainbow. Nissan's My Versa Road Trip. Even Adobe's The Expressive Web, serving more of a B2P market. These are all terrific examples of the work produced with creative technologists. Really awesome stuff. And under the hood, pretty technically advanced.

Agencies are becoming more and more technically sophisticated — granted, some still faster than others. The digital strategist, in all its different incarnations, and the creative technologist are key roles. But they are primarily agency roles.

Something else is happening, across the agency-client client divide... a fundamental shift is underway in most marketing departments, from being technology adverse — to technology savvy.
The ZMOT changes everything
"I feel more like a CIO than a CMO! I have marketing automation, CRM, listening platforms — I'm up to my eyeballs in technology." This is a quote from an exasperated CMO at the Forrester CIO-CMO Forum last month, and I think it perfectly sums up the magnitude of the transformation underway in marketing.

But let's start with the root cause.

Not too long ago, marketing flowed like this:
- Consumers were exposed to a stimulus, such as advertising.
- Later, at the store, they would choose which product to buy — the "first moment of truth."
- When they actually used the product at home, they would decide if they liked it — the second moment of truth.
This model is for consumer packaged goods, but there are analogies for more considered purchases and B2B. It enabled a nice division of labor. In this model, the stimulus was the agency's responsibility. The product, the second moment of truth, was the marketer's responsibility. And depending on the product and its distribution channels, they met somewhere in the middle at the first moment of truth.

But over recent years, that nice, simple model has been thoroughly disrupted by what Google calls the zero moment of truth, the ZMOT. After being exposed to a stimulus, prospects go online to learn about the product, the company, the category. Most importantly they go to get a sense of what real customers — people who have experienced that second moment of truth — have to say.

The ZMOT is a flurry of activity. Prospects query search engines, visit your web site, read educational content, follow related accounts on Twitter, visitor competitors' sites, read reviews, discuss with friends, check online communities, comparison shop, etc. And it's in this expansive and frenetic zero moment of truth that customers are now frequently won or lost.

This is the root cause of marketing's disruption. And it's worth digging deeper into what I see as the 5 killer properties of the ZMOT. They're "killer" in the 80's hyperbolic sense that they're amazing — but also because, well, they can kill you (professionally speaking).

First, the ZMOT is almost entirely digital or digital-ish — even real world events, calls to call centers, visits with a sales rep, coupons from the store, discussions with friends sent via email or remarked on Facebook, etc., have a tendency to end up echoing somewhere in the digital domain.

Second, the ZMOT is not a single instant — it's a whole stream of touchpoints. Google researched ZMOT activity for consumers in different categories and showed that, for instance, the typical automobile shopper acquires input from 18.2 different sources in considering a purchase — and over 97% of those shoppers are influenced at the ZMOT.

Third, the ZMOT is shaped by real-time dynamics. The FMOT lasts 7 seconds. But prospects live in the ZMOT for anywhere from a few hours to weeks or months, depending on the product category. A prospect's perspective and interest evolves over this time period, and there's a tremendous opportunity for marketing to adapt with them — and with respect to their digital vapor trail and external events. This includes personalization and retargeting, but it's more than that.

Fourth, the ZMOT shatters boundaries between prospects, marketers, customers, competitors. Prospects don't proceed neatly, lockstep through a funnel — they zoom in and out, up and down. Forrester published a terrific diagram of these cross-touchpoint customer experiences that reveal the cycles prospects go through — discover, search, research, compare, decide — leveraging the web, mobile, physical stores, call centers, and social media.

Which leads to the fifth, the ZMOT experience now defines brands. What used to be separate — your marketing/advertising, your product/service, your new prospects, your existing customers — is now being mashed together in the ZMOT. Everything intermingles, and from the first touchpoint onward, this whole enchilada is the new customer experience. And its feedback loop, like it or not, defines your brand.
Software to the rescue!
To sum up the impact of the ZMOT on marketing: it's #$@%* complex!

In a recent study IBM did with hundreds of CMOs, 79% of them expect a high or very high level of complexity over the next five years. But only 48% of them feel prepared for that complexity. And I'd bet that at least half of those who think they are prepared are blissfully delusional. Because this world of the ZMOT customer experience is ridiculously complex.

Oh, and it's hard to outsource. At least it's hard to outsource wholesale. Because ultimately, the brand must own the customer experience. ("CX" for those in the know.)

So what do we do? How do we get control of this complexity?

The answer is contained in the problem: digital. Digital has some really wonderful properties. It's measurable. It's scalable. It's malleable, much easier to alter bits than atoms. It's frictionless. It's fast. But most importantly...

It's programmable by software.

And thanks to Moore's Law, cloud computing and SaaS models, open source and expert communities, and a wealth of new languages and frameworks, it's never been easier or faster to build great software. This huge opportunity for disruptive innovation in marketing combined with the fluidity of creating new software has triggered one of the greatest explosions in the history of commercial software: the expansive new field of marketing technology.

A couple of months ago, I took at pass at sketching this marketing technology landscape in an infographic. It's terribly incomplete, with only a representative sample of 250 companies out of the thousands of specialized marketing technology vendors out there. But it gives you a flavor of the incredible scale and scope of marketing software.

Technology for promotion: the whole display advertising ecosystem, search ad management, social media marketing management, mobile marketing, SEO tools. Technology for the customer experience: core website platforms, e-commerce, landing pages and microsites, testing and optimization, video content, email marketing. Technology for the new marketing management: marketing resource management, web analytics, customer analytics, CRM, business intelligence, marketing automation, digital asset management.

My friends, we are in The Golden Age of Marketing Software.

This fountain of innovation is what gives us hope that the complexity of the ZMOT will be conquered. But in harnessing such technology, the nature of marketing shifts. I've written before that you are the software you use. Software is now the interface by which marketing sees and touches the world:
- Analytics shapes our perceptions of our audience
- Automation guides the processes we put in place
- Optimization encourages us to hone tactics in particular ways
- Listening platforms lead us to our choices of social engagements
- Targeting software defines our audience segments
- CRM platforms structure our relationships with customers
Software doesn't just help marketers manage the new customer experience. It increasingly defines the customer experience. If you've ever spent time in a marketing automation platform such as Eloqua, you know what I mean — those flows and rules being arranged are mapping out touchpoints and experiences. It's kind of surreal.

But all this potential wizardry raises a question... who's choreographing this marketing technology ballet in your organization? Or is it more of a mosh pit?
IT vs. Marketing
In the "old days" — you know, a couple of years ago — marketing would simply hand off tech requests to the IT department. It wasn't particularly fast or fun, but it kind of worked on a small scale. But as marketing became more and more overwhelmed with technical needs, the volume and velocity of those requests increased. And the IT/marketing relationship began to feel more and more strained.

It often became a tug of war. IT had its objectives, approaches, and rationale. Marketing often had a different set. It's not that one was right and the other was wrong. But organizationally, IT and marketing became diametrically opposed. This has been the source of more than a few cultural challenges.

Earlier this year, Forrester Research did a survey of marketers and IT professionals, asking them their perceptions of the other department. Marketing's perceptions of IT were:
- IT is the department of "no"
- IT doesn't speak marketing's language
- IT doesn't understand the need for speed
- IT isn't concerned with the customer
A little harsh, maybe. On the other hand, IT's perceptions of marketing boiled down to two:
- Marketing is spin
- Marketers don't care about integration
Even at the CIO and CMO level, where executives in theory should be aligned on the same overarching goals, there's a significant divergence in their priorities: the CIO wants to maintain control of technology costs, minimize and control risk, prove the value of IT; the CMO wants to create the new brand experience, organize for adaptability, prove the value of marketing. How do we reconcile this?

Well, there's always a committee. Just kidding. I actually think the nine most terrifying words in business are, "We're forming a committee, and we're going to decide." Real action is required for four cataclysmic forces reshaping marketing today:
1. The new ZMOT customer and the new customer experience.
2. The marketing technology explosion of this "golden age."
3. The new clockspeed of marketing and its demand for more marketing agility.
4. The new performance culture of marketing and new accountability.
Collectively, these forces demand a fundamental shift in marketing culture, structure, and operations. The foundation of that shift must be this affirmation: marketing must lead its own technology. Marketing is now a technology-powered discipline.
The new marketing technology team
A new kind of marketing professional is emerging in this environment, a technical/marketing hybrid — the marketing technologist.

Marketing technologists are somewhat analogous to creative technologists at agencies, but different. They're less about building stimulus "creative." They're more about building the extended customer experience and the new marketing operations.

They cover a wide swath of technical skills, from wrangling data and analytics, authoring lightweight web features, synchronizing disparate marketing software platforms, SEO, web APIs. They're a cross between an entrepreneurial marketer and an enterprise IT manager — and with pretty good web coding chops. Think of a great technical Web 2.0 entrepreneur, and you've got a pretty good estimate of a marketing technologist.

So where should these marketing technologists live in the organization?

Originally, in the "traditional" org structure, marketing and IT were cleanly split, with marketing sending technical requests to IT. One of the problems with this model, however, was that IT didn't have much perspective or appreciation of marketing; and vice versa, marketing had little perspective or appreciation for technology management. Sometimes this would result in an "estranged" organization, where IT and marketing hardly talked at all.

Today, possibly the greatest mistake is to believe that marketing technology could be split, King Solomon style, with the marketing handled by one team and the technology handled by another. Not a good idea. It misses the very nature of what marketing technology is. Marketing technology is more of a new kind of marketing than a new kind of technology.

Marketing technology needs a team that will provide an integrated, holistic view of its possibilities and operation. A marketing technologist team, a single unit, should both understand good IT practices and understand good marketing practices. Most importantly, they should think natively in the combined domain of marketing technology.

I've studied a number of marketing technology organizational models, and there are four emerging ones that I think do a progressively better job of harnessing the potential here:
- Practice Center — where IT dedicates a specific team to marketing technology, with cross-disciplinary team members who can appreciate marketing's mission. They serve marketing, but they reside in IT and report to the CIO.
- Colocated — where that IT-originated team of marketing technologists are physically colocated in the marketing department, every day collaborating side-by-side with marketers; they work with the CMO, but they still report to the CIO.
- Joint Venture — marketing and IT each contribute staff and resources to a new marketing technology team; it has its own leader who reports jointly to the CIO and the CMO.
- Embedded — in my opinion, the highest evolution is achieved when the marketing technology team resides fully in marketing. It becomes a native part of what marketing is. The team reports to the CMO, but it's still accountable to IT for adhering to the company's broader technology governance. (This is not shadow IT.)
The chief marketing technologist
This marketing technology team should be led by a chief marketing technologist. Or whatever title you prefer, director or VP, of marketing technology, marketing operations, customer intelligence. Maybe marketing CTO? The title is not important, but the role is — and we can define it with five missions.

Mission #1: Build and lead a superb team of marketing technologists. The key here is finding and nurturing the right kind of people with solid tech experience and marketing passion. They should be self-learners (think: constant change) and highly collaborative. The phrase "T-shaped" often applies — strong in a few areas, but versatile in many.

Forrester Research, which recently released a report on Investing in Marketing's Technology Future that recommends setting up a marketing technology office describes the team this way: "Not simply a collection of design-savvy developers. To meet the explosion in channels, devices, and touchpoints, build a team that blends skills in analysis, programming, and user experience."

Mission #2: Help the CMO translate strategy into technology (and vice versa). The CMO doesn't have to be a technologist, but he or she needs a right-hand who is. The chief marketing technology should help drive technical innovation in marketing, work with the CMO to roadmap the intersection of the technology and the business, and determine the necessary investments to make it happen.

Mission #3: Choreograph data and technology across the marketing organization. Select and manage vendors. Integrate and operate marketing technology systems. Interface to agencies. Champion data quality and consistency in marketing. And balance the cost/value trade-off with new technologies.

That last point is crucial. There's a yin-and-yang to good technology management. IT likes to emphasize standardization — for cost and technical stability objectives, that's best. But marketing likes to experiment, keeping the company out in front of the market and new customers. Both poles have benefit (and strong magnetic pull). The marketing technology team must tackle the mission of balancing these two goals, continually cycling between experimenting with new ideas, standardizing the ones the works, and then disrupting them with new experiments as the opportunities arise.

Mission #4: Fuse technology into the DNA of marketing — practices, people, and culture. Marketing technologists, working side-by-side with other marketers, can raise the technology quotient of the entire department, teaching their peers, illuminating the possibilities, providing tech transparency, and cross-pollinating new ideas.

One of these cross-pollinated ideas is adapting the agile development methodology — originally conceived to produce better software in rapid cycles of iteration — for agile marketing. Software developers who are familiar with Scrum and Lean can be a tremendously valuable in helping marketing implements its own agile methodology.

Mission #5: Enforce and inform IT policy and governance for all marketing technology. Just because marketing should control its own technological destiny doesn't mean it's an island in the enterprise. The marketing technology team should take responsibility for security and regulatory compliance of its application — such as adherence to a clear privacy policy — according to IT standards. I think of IT as having a governance role, whereas the marketing technology team has a management role. Where feasible, they should coordinate with IT on sharing common infrastructure. Ideally, the marketing technology team should be a group that the CIO can have confidence in — not be a thorn in his or her side.

In the words of Seth Godin, the chief marketing technologist should be a linchpin. He'd definitely call them weird (in a good way).

No doubt, this is a major transformation for marketing. Forrester's latest report, Three Approaches to the Marketing Technology Office, sums it up nicely though:

"Splintering touchpoints and the growing torrent of data force marketers to build up investments in technology to keep up with customers. To manage and direct the increasingly complex marketing technology stack, Forrester recommends that organizations create a marketing technology office." Marketing technology management and leadership is no longer an option for the marketing department.

Or, consider this metaphor. A marketer is like a skydiver, leaping out into the wide open sky of the market. Marketing technology is the parachute. Who's packing your parachute?
So what does this mean for agencies?
Technology is disrupting numerous facets of the agency world. Some of these disruptions have great potential. Others may bring the sundown of some cherished cash cows.

For instance, advertising automation and optimization will continue to accelerate — although it will increasingly need to integrate with the client more deeply. This is a fascinating area of innovation, computational advertising, but unfortunately, I believe that the value of this service will eventually be eroded by software and network synchronization.

However, creative technology will continue to grow and thrive. New technologies will open new doors, and there will be more and more demand for impactful creative that harnesses them. But these productions will increasingly need to integrate with the client more deeply as well. I believe that the value of creative technology services will actually increase. It's magical work, and it's hard to commoditize without losing the magic. Agencies that have the right teams and process for this will be in high demand.

Even more so, there will be new demand for designing and building other customer experience elements. Think IDEO in the digital sphere. With marketing and customer experience blending, this is a natural evolution for agencies to think more broadly about impacting customers at deeper touchpoints in the ZMOT. It's a powerful opportunity to leverage their creative technology capabilities. But by being part of the customer experience, it inherently must integrate deeply with the client. This can be a very high value service — and it may be necessary to attract and retain clients in that not-too-distant future. You'll be competing with agencies who will embrace this opportunity.

There's a pattern here. Certainly creative technology will be more and more of a core agency asset. But it's not enough. Agencies will need to integrate more deeply with marketing operations and technology on the client side. Meaningful, accurate, secure, real-time data exchange will be the clearest objective. This will require more "marketing technologist" skills within the firm, not just "creative technologist" skills — they're related, but different.

Account managers too must learn to work with more technical stakeholders on the client's team. This will take time, training, and the infusion of some more technical members on to the account team.

But here's the key idea I want to seed into your thinking: a client-side marketing technology team should be your new best friend. Having a technically-capable team on the client's side that is able — and eager — to facilitate the integration of data and systems between the marketing department and your creative technology productions will be priceless. Without them, you're likely to either be woefully constrained in what you can execute, or it will take far more blood, sweat, and tears than you would want to expend.

Smooth integration: profitable. Difficult integration: disastrous.

So my advice is to nurture such fledging marketing technology teams at your clients. Bring them to the table. Get to know them. Help them to achieve early wins with you. Because in the not too distant future, they may be tremendously influential at your review.

Which leads to one more possible business opportunity. With the advantage of perspective across many clients making this transformation, agencies have the potential to become curators of "best practices" for the future of marketing technology. This too can be a high value service — as folks such as IBM, McKinsey, and Forrester know well.

Something to think about.
October 25, 2011
0:43
Forrester recommends a Marketing Technology Office
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
"Marketing must control its own technological destiny."

Not too long ago, that was a radical proposition. (In some IT quarters, it might still be.)

But today, the esteemed enterprise analysts at Forrester released two new reports that take that proposition mainstream: Investing In Marketing's Technology Future and Three Approaches To The Marketing Technology Office. $499 each, but worth it for executive-level discussions.

To give you a flavor of the first report, and why it has me dancing in my chair, consider these first few subheads in the document:
- Customer obsession requires that marketing up its technology quotient.
- Marketing loses potency by denying its technology dependency.
- How marketing can transform technology from overhead to differentiator.
Yes! Yes! And yes!!

There's another subhead later — turning technology into a touchstone for creativity — that I love almost as much.

Forrester's recommendation is to establish a marketing technology office that reports to the CMO (or the VP of customer intelligence, if such a role exists in your organization, who then reports to the CMO). There's dotted line accountability to the CIO too — this is not shadow IT, it's shining in the light of day.

Their proposed org structure looks like this:

An excerpt of their raison d'être for this new structure:

"For marketing to build a technology strategy, implement and develop those technologies, and better integrate and act on the customer data it captures, marketing resources must be organized within a central framework that can act at the speed that marketing requires. We call this framework the marketing technology office (MTO), defined as: A center of excellence that leads technology strategy, develops marketing technologies, and evangelizes innovative uses throughout the marketing department."

Well said!

My only beef with the report is that it suggests the person running the marketing technology office should have the title of "chief marketing technology strategist." That's a mouthful — just feels like one word too many. How about "chief marketing technologist" instead? ;-)
October 21, 2011
10:16
The popularity contest between digital and TV
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Sometimes it feels like the future takes a long time to arrive. While most of you reading this blog have likely been focused on digital marketing as the "hot spot" in marketing for a while, it's always been surprising to me how long it's taken legacy marketing institutions — the classic big agencies of Madison Avenue — to truly embrace that opportunity.

I know, change is hard. Disruptive innovation works this way. But still, in the future... any agency that wants to remain great, must surely embrace digital with genuine creative love. How far off could that future be?

Indeed, the future may finally be here now. The above chart was produced by Strata Marketing, a media data processing giant that services approximately half of all ad agencies in the U.S. A few years ago, they started a survey where they asked agency executives what was their number one medium of choice.

TV had always been in the lead. Real creative was 30-second spots.

But in this quarters' results, the gap between TV and digital narrowed to a single percentage point: 35% still identified TV as the most important medium, but 34% chose digital instead. Maybe that's not earth shattering to us in marketing technology, but in the culture of ad land, that's a revolution.

As a related point on the battleline between TV and digital — at least until the two become one — a story in AdAge earlier this month revealed that growth in jobs in Internet media businesses were skyrocketing (even in the recession), in contrast to shrinking jobs in traditional media:

Again, probably not a huge surprise here. But this is more evidence that the future we've seen coming has truly arrived.

Cool.
October 20, 2011
11:25
More insight, less rhetoric in politics and marketing
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

If you haven't already seen Jess Bachman's brilliant "1-page book," Death & Taxes, you've got to check this out (click to enlarge):

It's a superb example of what Edward R. Tufte calls a "supergraphic." (For more on the art and science behind such supergraphics, grab a copy of Tufte's latest book, Beautiful Evidence.)

Seth Godin, whose new publishing venture The Domino Project published Death & Taxes, wrote this in a post on the power of visualization: "Data is not useful until it becomes information, and that's because data is hard for human beings to digest."

The U.S. budget, in its raw form, is a classic example of undigestible data. Jess Bachman has transformed it into something that anyone can digest as useful information.

"It is not possible to spend less than 10 minutes looking at this, and more probably, you'll be engaged for much longer. And it's definitely not possible to walk away from it unchanged. That's a lot to ask for a single sheet of paper, but that's the power of visualizing data and turning it into information."

My takeaway, in the context of U.S. politics, is that it's a relief to have some actual concrete, digestible information to inspire meaningful discussion and insight, instead of the endless unsubstantiated rhetoric from most politicians and the media that love them. But don't worry, this isn't becoming a political rant blog.

Rather, for marketing technologists, this is the bar that should be set for marketing analytics.

While many people are talking about the power of "big data" — a hot topic in marketing, as according to IBM's latest CMO study, over 71% of CMOs surveyed now feel painfully underprepared to handle the explosion of data under their roof — there probably isn't enough emphasis on the visualization of data.

Not just visualization for the sake of eliciting "ooo's" and "ahh's." But visualization that genuinely reveals meaningful information, generates useful insights.

Because if there's a runner-up for a profession that could benefit from more insight, less rhetoric, marketing would certainly qualify. The transformation from (merely) impassioned rhetoric to (also) information-driven insight, is a big part of the core of the new marketing.

In related news, Visual.ly — a new web start-up focused on letting people create amazing infographics — has just raised $2 million in seed funding.
October 14, 2011
0:31
Marketing technologists mourn Dennis Ritchie
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Marketers are paying tribute to Steve Jobs.

But marketing technologists should pay tribute to Dennis Ritchie (standing in above photo, next to Ken Thompson), who sadly passed away this past weekend.

As a great article in Wired points out, Jobs stood on the shoulders of Ritchie. See, Ritchie invented the C programming language, which he and Ken Thompson then used to build the UNIX operating system — which is the foundation of Apple's OS, and so much more.

As one famous programmer, Rob Pike, said to Wired, "Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C."

"It's really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did."

On a personal note, C was my first love (as a programming language).

Read the full story on Wired.com.
October 11, 2011

Google Search	February 2008	February 2011	February 2012
chief marketing technologist	320	320,000	265,000	↓ 17%
director of marketing technology	7,520	847,000	1,670,000	↑ 97%
marketing technology		625,000	2,670,000	↑ 327%
marketing technologist		109,000	203,000	↑ 86%
marketing technology manager		340,000	748,000	↑ 131%
VP marketing technology		194,000	684,000	↑ 253%
vice president marketing technology		232,000	694,000	↑ 199%
creative technologist		103,000	247,000	↑ 140%
geek marketer		9,830	22,300	↑ 127%

Permalink for '14 marketing technology organizational models'

19:03

14 marketing technology organizational models

» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

The good news is that, at last, everyone agrees:

Marketing technology is now a major dimension of marketing.
The marketing department and the IT department must collaborate.

The challenge, however, is that beyond those two principles, there is a stunning diversity of opinions for how marketing technology should be managed and exactly what the new collaboration between marketing and IT should look like. I've heard from many different companies that are addressing this in very different ways.

At this stage, I actually think that's fine. Different organizational structures should reflect different strategies and cultures — and often the individual leaders at the helm. What works great for one company might be a train wreck in another. What's important, however, is that there is clear governance driving the choices in each particular company.

Are you consciously making your marketing-IT organizational decisions? Or do they just happen by "accident?" Of course, it helps to know what your choices are. With that in mind, I thought I'd try to assemble a list of the different marketing technology organizational models that I've encountered:

Here are brief descriptions of these models:

Model	Description
Traditional	Marketing makes requests to IT, IT implements and manages overall technology strategy; funded via chargebacks to marketing and primary IT budget. Overall cycle speed usually slowed with overhead, differing priorities. Marketing unlikely to develop much technical savvy in this structure.
Committee	IT and marketing leaders, often including the CIO and CMO, participate in a committee to make joint decisions about marketing technology investments and governance. Usually IT handles implementation. Committees are rarely "agile," but may provide good guidance. Committee members may become fluent in marketing-technology synergy.
Co-located	An IT team is dedicated to marketing technology and is physically co-located with the marketing team. Day-to-day execution is done collaboratively with marketing staff, but IT group still reports primarily to IT management (maybe dotted line to CMO). Helps exchange marketing and tech savvy across both departments.
Liaison	Similar to Committee structure, but an individual person provides coordination between IT and marketing, reporting jointly to CMO and CIO. Can be more agile. Role may be "Chief Marketing Technologist." IT still handles most implementation, although outside vendors may be arranged by the liaison.
Embedded	A dedicated marketing technology team based in the marketing department — but unlike Co-located, reports to (and funded by) the CMO, not the CIO. Led by a Chief Marketing Technologist. Should still adhere to IT governance, may have dotted line accountability to CIO. May wear "marketing operations" label. Marketing becomes very tech savvy.
Direct Report	The IT department directly reports to the CMO. I've heard of a case of this with a major retailer. May work if marketing charter is broad enough to address the total customer experience. Seems tricky for non-marketing IT responsibilities.
Independent	An independent marketing technology team is assembled that lives outside of the traditional marketing and IT departments, although its chief reports to both the CIO and the CMO. Independence may enable agility, but possibly at the expense of alignment with the core departments from which it came.
Outsourced (Mktg)	The majority of marketing technology strategy and implementation is outsourced to one or more third-party vendors, but primarily under the direction of the CMO. Sidesteps as much IT implementation as possible with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and standardized APIs and data formats. Alignment concerns if third-parties are too strong relative to marketing's own technical savvy.
Joint Venture	IT and marketing both contribute staff and resources to a joint "marketing technology" team, but the participants remain rooted in their origin department (unlike Independent). Can be quite agile and can cross-pollinate tech and marketing savvy across both departments. Requires good CIO-CMO synergy to work well.
Outsourced (IT)	Again, the majority of marketing technology strategy and implementation is outsourced to a third-party — but in this model, that's done primarily under the leadership of the CIO. May be a different set of vendors than when outsourced from the marketing department. Runs the risk of diverging from core marketing vision.
Practice Center	IT creates a marketing technology "practice center" within its department to specialize in the growing tech needs of the marketing department. Possibly a dotted line report to the CMO. Can be quite agile. With the right dedicated hires and good communication with marketing can be a very marketing-savvy IT team.
Outsourced Triangle	Significant portions of marketing technology strategy and implementation are outsourced, but the outsourcing is jointly led by the CIO and the CMO. Requires good synergy between CIO and CMO to work. Growing number of agencies adept at this structure. Runs risk of not having marketing technology as an in-house core competency.
Hostile	The IT department and the marketing department are at best not speaking, at worst engaged in intracompany warfare. This is not a model anyone would want to adopt, but unfortunately it does accurately describe the state of some organizations. This is a terminal disease if it isn't cured.
Merged	Some visionaries have suggested that IT and marketing should fully merge, more integrated than a Joint Venture or a Direct Report relationship. Loses independent IT governance. Mini-mergers with other departments, an IT diaspora? Viability depends on post-merger internal structure.

Which organizational structure is right for your company? It depends.

Generally, I think that most companies should develop marketing technology competency internally — even if they choose to outsource certain pieces — and that marketing needs to become more technically savvy in order to properly lead the vision of customer experience and brand development in a digital world.

Many of the above models can accomplish those goals, although I think Embedded, Joint Venture, and Co-located (or Merged, if you believe that's feasible) address those objectives better than the other configurations.

What do you think? What model is being used at your company? Are there other organizational structures that I should add to this list?

October 10, 2011
13:24
Photo: make a difference by thinking differently
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

We were in New York this weekend, and we walked by the Apple Store on 5th Avenue. A large crowd of people had gathered around an impromptu memorial to Steve Jobs — made of post-it notes, messages on MacBook and iPad boxes, printouts of "Think Different" ads, flowers, apples.

I found it touching and inspiring:

A series of post-it notes spelled out this famous Apple advertisement:

Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently — they're not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

It's a ridiculously high bar that Steve Jobs set, but there's a calling here:

What will you do with your life — and this applies to marketing and product development as much as anything — to touch and inspire the world around you?
September 25, 2011
18:26
Book Review: Balancing the Demand Equation
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Although the purpose of marketing is the same as it ever was — connecting a company with its customers — the actual engine of marketing is in the process of being rebuilt from the ground up.

Same shiny, red car on the outside, but a radically new engine under the hood, running at a different speed, on different fuel.

So how exactly do you rebuild that engine in your organization?

If you're a B2B marketer, Adam Needles has just published the manual you'll want to have in your shop, Balancing the Demand Equation: The Elements of a Successful, Modern B2B Demand Generation Model.

I've been a fan of Adam's for many years with his Propelling Brands blog, covering marketing innovation and demand generation. He's also the Chief Strategy Officer at Left Brain DGA, a demand generation agency, and was previously the Director of Field Marketing for Silverpop. In other words, he's a master mechanic of modern marketing engines. (Have I taken this metaphor too far?)

The book has two main sections:

First, a (re)orientation for marketers who need to understand the dynamics of the new era of B2B marketing that revolves around "Buyer 2.0." (For more on this, see my interview with Steve Woods of Eloqua on his latest book, Revenue Engine.)

Second, a blueprint for managing this new kind of marketing within your organization. Adam emphasizes two shifts required in marketing management: (1) a focus on "educating" prospects, rather than "selling" to them; and (2) adopting an "operations mindset" in the structure and flow of these reframed customer interactions — with particular consideration paid to the middle-of-the-funnel.

That first shift is the foundation of content marketing. But the second, which has received far less attention than it deserves, is the heart of the new wave of marketing operations.

For the mere price of a book, it's a bargain to tap into Adam's experienced and inspiring thinking on these topics.
September 23, 2011
14:00
Top 10 Memorable Quotes from the CIO-CMO Forum
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Yesterday, I attended Forrester's inaugural CIO-CMO Forum. Sharyn Leaver, one of the hosts from Forrester, kicked off the event by saying, "This is the first time we've brought CIOs and CMOs together in the same room — hope everyone comes out alive."

Nervous laughter.

And so began a fascinating day of joint CIO-CMO sessions, with more than its fair share of jokes about IT and marketing stereotypes: marketing is nothing but spin and fluff, and IT is a bunch of obstinate snails.

At least I think they were joking.

Forrester's motivation for bringing these two houses, alike in dignity, together — yes, reference was made to Montagues and Capulets — is what they see as a singular, critical inflection point in business: we have officially entered the Age of the Customer.

Only organizations that are customer-obsessed will lead in this next era, with a blend of marketing and technology that must be seamless to the outside world.

There were many great presentations at the event, and even more interesting conversations on the side. I think the best way to summarize the event is to share with you my list of top 10 memorable quotes — from the stage and from the bleachers — that convey much of the story-in-progress in marketing and IT:

1. "I feel more like a CIO than a CMO! I have marketing automation, CRM, listening platforms — I'm up to my eyeballs in technology."

This quote from a CMO pretty much sums up the state of modern marketing — and both the excitement and frustration it engenders. Marketing is now effectively a technology-powered discipline, but for many marketing leaders and their departments, it still feels like they're strangers in a strange land.

2. "Our marketing automation vendor really gets what we do, talks our language about lead flow, nurturing pipeline, campaign analysis. IT just doesn't get that."

So when it comes to marketing technology, who you goin' call? According to Forrester, if you're a marketing executive, you're likely to turn to your interactive agency (49%) or a marketing software provider (44%), not just your company's IT department (55%).

One CMO of a large technology company summed up this dynamic with the quote above — the vendor talks his language, addresses his needs, services him like a prized customer. Because to them, he is a prized customer — and that's not the kind of love he feels from IT.

3. "If I'm the CMO, and I can get a SaaS product for $100K, but the CIO wants me to 'buy' a solution from IT for $300K, what gives?"

But it's not just language and love that pushes CMOs to look beyond IT. In organizations where chargebacks from IT to the business exist in some form or another — and if they didn't, how else would you know how to prioritize the unlimited demand for features? — marketing often finds that they can get better prices from outside vendors. "It's not personal, it's business."

Of course, IT counters that sometimes those outside prices are so low because they fail to provide the nice-to-haves — you know, like redundancy, data security, disaster recovery, uptime, etc.

But other times the cloud is both cheaper and better, thanks to economies of scale and specialization. And, as one marketer characterized the chargebacks from IT, "We need to add a single field to a database, and we're told it's going to be $90K, which we know is bull$%*#!" As marketers become more savvy buyers of technology, both internally and externally, these arguments will eventually reduce to real cost-benefit analysis — which is where they should be.

4. "I'm building my own pseudo-IT organization in marketing. I call it 'marketing operations.'"

So confessed one CMO, "It's what I need to do to get things done." Depending on who you talked with at the CIO-CMO forum, this was either a progressive move forward with the new reality of marketing or a blatant example of shadow IT. Probably both.

There seemed to be universal consensus that organizations need marketing-savvy people in IT and technology-savvy people in marketing, who the CIO from Aetna referred to as "professional collaborators." But when you dig into the nitty-gritty of who does what in marketing, in IT, or in some third hybrid group, opinions still run the gamut.

5. "We propose that you need to merge IT and marketing. Have we got your attention?"

Two of my favorite analysts, Luca Paderni (CMO practice) and Nigel Fenwick (CIO practice), launched their afternoon keynote with that bold proclamation. Talk about a great way to shake that audience out of a post-lunch lull.

Actually, it turns out the full-blown merger suggestion was mostly for shock value — although, in my opinion, it may have been the most prescient remark of the day — but they did propose making real, structural changes to enable marketing and IT to collaborate.

They shared a case study from Supervalu, where IT and marketing formed a joint team, staffed it with people who understood both technology and marketing, co-located, shared budget responsibility, and adopted matrix reporting back up to both the CIO and CMO.

Earlier this week, analyst Rob Brosnan presented at IBM's Smarter Commerce Global Summit on the topic of the rise of the chief marketing technologist (how could I not love that?), recommending that companies form a centralized office of marketing technology to effectively achieve just such a "merger." Now we're talking...

6. "IT has been increasingly embracing agile methodologies, and now we're seeing marketing adopt agile practices too."

Luca and Nigel continued their presentation by emphasizing agility as the key shift in process required. The part of this that I found most interesting was the nod to agile marketing — running the marketing organization using an adapted agile methodology.

They described a case study where IT and marketing jointly agreed that any proposed project needed to be able to generate value within a 90 day horizon. Projects larger than that were broken up into smaller steps, no more than 90 days each. This encouraged much more rapid feedback cycles, productive tests and prototypes, and generally facilitated much greater innovation between the teams. No more death marches on multi-year projects that end up being DOA.

Their advice in short: "Use Agile for speed. Rethink governance. Plan for fast failure."

7. "Technology is not an expense, it is a capability for competitive advantage."

The next CMO up on stage made this remark, and I thought it brilliantly framed why marketing is — and should be — inexorably bound up in technology. It's not because marketing wants IT's job. It's because in a world where digital experiences define the majority of touchpoints businesses now have with customers, to win and retain them, to differentiate from the competition, marketing must wield these new capabilities deftly and creatively.

In Sharyn's opening remarks, she suggested that in this new Age of the Customer, the companies who are setting the bar are Facebook, IBM, Apple. "Customers are much more tech-savvy, complex, and empowered." Is your marketing ready to compete at that level?

8. "I will never be as fast as my CMO would like..."

So said the CIO who was on stage with the CMO who made the previous remark. But his point was this: if he were able to easily meet all of the CMO's demands, then the CMO probably wasn't being visionary enough.

The digital landscape of customer experiences is evolving at a break-neck pace. A big part of the governance of marketing and technology is balancing two truths: (a) there are always new innovations we should be pushing to test and adopt; (b) we can't do everything, so we have to make strategic choices about what to prioritize. We have to be comfortable managing this dynamic at the redline.

9. "We don't know what will make a better customer experience, but we're data-driven: we constantly test, learn, improve, refine."

An audience member asked that CMO and CIO duo how they knew what would make a better customer experience. The CMO replied with the above quote.

Experimentation, innovation, iteration, agile practices... these concepts kept recurring throughout the day, from one speaker to the next. The cheaper, faster, easier it can be to prototype ideas and turn to the outside world of the customer for validation (rather than the inside world of the HiPPO), the better companies will be able to thrive in this new Age of the Customer.

Don't guess, test.

10. "Previously, we had not considered marketing to be an enterprise process, like supply chain management..."

Jeanette Horan, VP and CIO of IBM, made this remark, talking about how their company had turned marketing into a service, similar to how IT is a service in many other organizations. Their realization was that there are a tremendous number of "operations" patterns emerging in the dynamics of the new marketing.

I think this is a stand-alone justification for marketing operations — not as a euphemism for a shadowy pseudo-IT team, but as a key function of modern marketing. The fact that it is technology-powered shouldn't overshadow the main point that it's marketing operations — the technology is a means, not an end unto itself. But to try to artificially divide the technology from the process seems like trying to deconstruct a cake: the stand-alone eggs, flour, and sugar arranged on a plate just aren't as appetizing.
September 19, 2011
12:23
The new three-way: CIO, CMO & Agency
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Good article on AdAge this morning, Friends With (Digital) Benefits: CMOs Link With CIOs.

The article includes several great anecdotes, from both agencies and brands, talking about the increased frequency of three-way meetings — the CMO, the CIO, and the agency — all collaborating together:

Agencies, especially those involved with digital work, say they're increasingly taking meetings with both the CIO and CMO. Marketers in retail, financial services and media have been among the first to liaise with their technology teams, agencies say, and the result has been more useful customer data and innovative campaigns.

There's also some insightful commentary from Luca Paderni, a leading Forrester analyst focused on marketing leadership. (I'm looking forward to hearing Luca present on this topic at Forrester's CIO-CMO Forum here in Boston this Thursday.)

"At this point," remarks Luca, "Even the marketer that would like to go it alone is realizing the level of complexity and data management is too big to manage alone."

However, there's a hidden logic in this story that I'd like to dig up.

The article recommends CIOs and CMOs work together. Check, couldn't agree more. The article also shows that in that mode, CIOs are becoming "at peace" with having external agencies implement marketing-related tech work. Check, again. This is arguably one of the success drivers of new tech-savvy agencies such as SapientNitro.

If I paraphrase that:

1. IT is providing high-level consulting and governance to marketing missions.

2. People other than IT staff are doing some or all of the actual implementation.

In other words, if IT is comfortable providing advisory and governance services while another group actually implements marketing technology, should it matter whether that other group is a third-party agency or the marketing department itself?

Of course, in all fairness, not all marketing technology is created equal. The more embedded a technology proposes to be in a company's operations — even if it's primarily marketing operations, such as with marketing automation platforms — the more IT might feel that is infringing upon their traditional domain.

So-called "creative technology" — such as an app implemented on Facebook or the iPhone — feels easier to relinquish because IT rarely had that kind of stuff under its control previously.

Still, the lines are blurring, and this open three-way collaboration is an important step in the right direction. It's like watching a genetic algorithm unfold before our eyes, the DNA of marketing and IT entwining and evolving:

While many companies will be hammering out this relationship in the months and years to come, a hybrid exec is already beginning to emerge. Take, for example, Eric Pearson, chief marketing officer for the Americas division of InterContinental Hotels Group. He started out at IHG as senior director-emerging technologies, before moving into e-commerce and then marketing. That kind of cross-pollination — "geeks" heading to the marketing department and vice versa — will be a boon for the C-suite, Mr. Paderni said.

"Technology is becoming critical to marketing," said Mr. Pearson, who has a degree in electrical engineering. "The next generation of CMOs will be a blend."
September 14, 2011
12:15
3 takeaways on advertising and trust from Nielsen
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Dave Chaffey curated a great graphic from Nielsen's most recent report on Trends in Advertising Spend and Effectiveness:

As a visualization of Nielsen's Global Online Survey of U.S. Internet consumers from Q1, there's a lot of insight embedded here.

Of course, recommendations from people I know leads by a mile — 76% of people trust those kind of "earned ads." Word-of-mouth and referrals remain the bedrock of building a brand.

And as Dave rightly pointed out, the high trust for consumer opinions posted online (49% trust them at least somewhat) is clear motivation for "social proof" — including recommendations and testimonials in your online advertising and post-click marketing.

But here are a few other remarkable takeaways:

40% of people trust emails they signed up for as compared to only 36% who trust editorial content such as newspaper articles. Permission marketing FTW. Email marketing may not be the sexiest tool in the marketing box, but it remains one of the most effective.

29% of people trust ads on TV, a considerably higher percentage than most online advertising (which range from 13% to 21%). Funny, because the phrase You can't trust everything you hear on TV predated You can't trust everything you read on the Internet. Some possible reasons for this relative abundance of trust worth thinking about:
- TV has been around longer
- TV is more expensive, and ad spend is a signal of credibility
- TV ads tend to be more successful at repeat exposures (in the absence of retargeting data)
- TV ads have more bandwidth — a full 30 seconds — to make their point than non-video ads
- TV watching is more frequently a "shared" experience than web surfing, offering an opportunity for immediate social feedback loops — if my wife likes an ad, I give it more attention
- and — perhaps a controversial hypothesis — TV ads tend to have better creative concepts and execution than most online advertising?
What can digital marketing learn from those dynamics?

But what I found most interesting...

On average, 50% of people neither trust nor distrust advertising regardless of the media/vehicle — search ads, banner ads, TV ads, radio ads, magazine ads, ads on social networks, online video ads, etc. These neutral responses all hover between 45% and 53%. On the Nielsen visualization above, the green circles dominate.

One has to be careful not to confound "trust" and "interest" in these results, but I interpret this as a motivating opportunity. Advertising is not how we win customers. But it is a way to introduce ourselves to them, from a largely neutral starting point — and it's the experiences we deliver after the ad that build trust.

For many consumer products, this is a function of the second moment of truth, how much they actually like the experience of using the product after they but it. But for more considered purchases, aspirational products, and possibly even B2B products and services, this may be much more of the Zero Moment of Truth achieved with great content marketing.

Marketing technologists: this post-ad digital experience is your opportunity to shine.
September 06, 2011
16:20
Marketing lessons from the CrunchFund controversy
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

This may be inside baseball, but I am mesmerized by the drama playing out at TechCrunch right now — and I can't help but see a metaphor for the shift of marketing within it.

The short version: TechCrunch is world's most popular tech blog, acquired last year by AOL/Huffington Post, but largely permitted to retain its editorial independence. Founder Michael Arrington, a larger-than-life character on the tech scene, stayed on. However, Mike recently announced he would be running a new tech VC fund ("CrunchFund"), with significant funding from AOL, and the entire rest of the business tech press exploded in conflict-of-interest mania.

The New York Times. Reuters. The Wall Street Journal's All Things D. AdWeek. Business Insider. Holy hand grenade, batman.

Mostly predictable, and in my humble opinion, mostly fair objections. I do think Mike should have stepped down with this announcement.

But it's been the response of the TechCrunch writers that I've found most interesting. Paul Carr's original retort to AOL's CEO Tim Armstrong, as well as his rebuttal to the NYT article by David Carr (no relation). MG Siegler's "the end is near" post, as well as a more revealing post about the internals of TechCrunch editorial operations on his own blog. Pretty ballsy commentary by employees of an organization — yet completely in character with what makes TechCrunch so good.

Now, I always have a soft spot for people who are passionate about what they do — and that shines through here. But that last post by MG is the most fascinating to me, as it reverberates with the echos of the broader content marketing and social media marketing revolution underway.

If you take MG at his word, TechCrunch is a highly distributed publishing ecosystem, with individual writers given enormous liberty to write what they want, when they want, without having to submit stories for approval to an editor, without having to coordinate through daily or weekly editorial agenda meetings. According to MG, this is what gives TechCrunch its authenticity and its agility — and has enabled them to "scoop" the mainstream business tech press time and time again.

It's no doubt anathema to traditional press — just as the social media wildfire has been an unpleasant conflagration for many traditional marketing hierarchies. But according to MG, TechCrunch "works because instead of a reliance on top-down management and editing, the emphasis is on hiring the right people."

There has never been anyone with ultimate power running the show — at least not in my nearly three years with TechCrunch.

Mike certainly could have that power if he wanted it. Again, he is the creator and the driving force behind the site. But he's smart enough to know that the site wouldn't function as well that way.

Instead, he sits back and lets the rest of us do what we do. Again, he's hired extremely well. He knows we'll kick ass without any oversight from him. In fact — and I think he'd be the first to admit this — sometimes any guidance from him can be a distraction. "Hey did we hear about this?" "Yes, Mike, we covered that two weeks ago." "Oh. Okay. Carry on."

To me, that may be the epitome of great content marketing management.

If you view TechCrunch through the lens of content marketing — and I know, that's not really what they are, but stick with me — it's hard not to see them as one of the best on the planet at it. They consistently produce content that their audience finds incredibly compelling, at a pace and scale that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Which is MG's final point:

But ultimately there is only one thing that matters: information. People don't care how they get it, just that they get it. If they don't think they can trust it from one source, they'll find another way to get it. It really is that simple. The market will decide. All this back-and-forth is meaningless.

Don't believe me? A day after half of the web was ready to start boycotting TechCrunch last week, I broke the news about Amazon's Kindle tablet. The result was TechCrunch seeing visiting patterns decidedly opposite of a boycott.

Information is all that matters. All the rest is bullshit.

It is TechCrunch's structure and culture that has delivered these goods, and I believe that marketing leaders could learn a lot from Mike Arrington's success (well, up to the current CrunchFund debacle, of course). Who knows exactly how this will end, or if TechCrunch will lose its mojo in the process. But in the absence of this controversy, the real story to me is the reinvention of tech publishing that TechCrunch has pioneered and what that prefigures for the rest of us content producers.

Can your content marketing be this independent, authentic and engaging? Should it be?
September 01, 2011
13:02
Computational science/computational marketing
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

This morning I was reading a transcript of a talk the late Jim Gray gave a few years back on eScience: A Transformed Scientific Method, and I was struck by the parallels in our current transformation of marketing.

This terrific slide from Jim's talk sums up the evolution of the paradigms of science:

Although the purpose of science has remained constant — just as the purpose of marketing is indifferent to the digital revolution that has engulfed it — the day-to-day work in pursuit of that goal has changed radically. Jim remarked:

People now do not actually look through telescopes. Instead, they are "looking" through large-scale, complex instruments which relay data to data centers, and only then do they look at the information on their computers.

The world of science has changed, and there is no question about this. The new model is for the data to be captured by instruments or generated by simulations before being processed by software and for the resulting information or knowledge to be stored in computers. Scientists only get to look at their data fairly late in this pipeline.

Sound eerily familiar?

Later in his talk, he notes that experimental budgets in major science projects are becoming 1/4 to 1/2 software. "Even in the 'small data' sciences, you see people collecting information and then having to put a lot more energy into the analysis of the information than they have done in getting the information in the first place."

The challenges this presents, in Jim's list of "generic problems" (slide below), are nearly equivalent in science and marketing:

We are seeing the evolution of two branches of every discipline, as shown in the next slide [Figure 2]. If you look at ecology, there is now both computational ecology, which is to do with simulating ecologies, and eco-informatics, which is to do with collecting and analyzing ecological information. Similarly, there is bioinformatics, which collects and analyzes information from many different experiments, and there is computational biology, which simulates how biological systems work.

Marketing informatics and computational marketing, anyone?

Jim's suggestion? A renewed focus on tools to make X-informatics and computational-X more efficient and effective. Or, in our world, the marketing technology landscape.
August 29, 2011
21:32
7 Laws of Technology for Marketers
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Not every marketer needs to be a technologist. But given how deeply technology is now entwined in modern marketing, every marketer should be familiar with the essential laws of technology that effect your strategies and operations.

Here are seven laws of technology that every marketer should know — along with a few nuggets of techno-culture that make for great beer conversation with the IT department:
1. Moore's Law

The most famous technology law of all time: the performance of hardware doubles about every 2 years. Named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore who first predicted this trend in the 1960's. That such exponential growth in computing power has continued unabated for nearly 50 years is pretty miraculous. Witness the Osborne computer from 30 years ago next to a circa-2009 iPhone — the iPhone is 100 times faster and almost 500 times smaller. (Photo by Casey Fleser.)

Moore's prediction was originally about the number of transistors on a microchip. However, the trend of exponential improvements to hardware has appeared elsewhere: growth in hard disk capacity, growth in network capacity, growth in biotechnology, growth in pixels (relative to cost) of digital cameras and LCD screens, etc. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has actually generalized this as The Law of Accelerating Returns.

Why should you care? This law drives what's possible with your products and your marketing — the key lesson is that the frontier of what's possible keeps moving fast. Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation, recently said in a VentureBeat interview, "If you're a CEO of a company and you're not aware of where these technologies are going, they can literally put you out of business in a snap of a finger. Or you can use them to leapfrog your competition."
2. Wirth's Law
The ironic corollary to Moore's Law, Wirth's Law states: software gets slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. Computer scientist Niklaus Wirth made this observation in 1995, in a plea for lean software. It's also known as Gates' Law (after Bill Gates of Microsoft) and Page's Law (after Larry Page of Google), who have both "discovered" this dynamic in their own businesses.

This is why the latest version of Microsoft Office running on a new computer seems to run about the same speed as an older version of Office running on an older machine. The blame for this seeming negation of Moore's Law is often placed on software bloat resulting from unending feature creep, lazy code cruft, or poor engineering management. But more broadly, it's simply a variation of Parkinson's Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Why should you care? Note well: expectations from technology keep rising! Rather than cut costs as a given level of hardware performance becomes cheaper over time, many businesses take the additional performance at the same cost and apply it to even greater capabilities — or find a different technology in which to leverage that investment. Cloud computing has greatly reduced the friction of this constant "trading up" phenomenon. In economics this is known as the Jevons Paradox.

Still, keep in mind this adage of product/project management: feature requests are always infinite, while resources are always finite. Choose wisely.
3. Brooks' Law

A technology law that has been the bane of managers for decades, Brooks' Law says: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. It is humorously summed up in the remark, "Nine women can't make a baby in one month."

Fred Brooks, who coined this law in his classic book on software engineering and management, The Mythical Man-Month, claims that there are two reasons why this is generally true:
1. It takes some time for new people added to a project to become productive ("ramp up time"), which sucks time away from the existing team members to educate them.
2. Communication overhead increases as the number of people increases.
Experiences such as Brooks' eventually inspired a new approach to building software, agile development methodologies, which generally move away from big, fixed specifications to more flexible, "iterative" implementations, with smaller teams and shorter, fixed time windows. Agile teams are typically only 5-9 people, to simplify team communication and collaboration.

Why should you care? Marketing is increasingly hip-deep — sometimes neck-deep — in development of its own software, especially web and mobile apps, as well as the technical configuration and customization of off-the-shelf platforms, such as marketing automation. In other words, marketing now involves engineering management, so it's worth knowing its hard-learned dynamics rather than having to painfully "rediscover" them.

Bonus tip. For hiring (or contracting) technical talent, keep in mind one of Brooks' other enduring insights: "good" programmers are generally 5 to 10 times as productive as mediocre ones.
4. Hofstadter's Law

Related to Brooks' Law is the lovely paradox of Hofstadter's Law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. It's a recursive statement on the difficulty of accurately estimating the time to complete tasks of any substantial complexity.

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter stated this law in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach — affectionately known as "GEB." The self-referential loop in the law's definition is one of the recurring themes of GEB. Such appreciation for recursion, and humorous witticisms based on recursion, is one of the foundations of tech culture — such as recursive acronyms.

Why should you care? Although Hofstadter's Law is clearly tongue-in-cheek, there's an important lesson here: it's hard to predict complex outcomes accurately — and the state of marketing technology is complex enough to qualify. The solution is to expect the unexpected, and adopt management approaches that work well under such uncertainty. Great examples include agile marketing, based on the principles of agile software development, and test-driven marketing, which embraces continuous experimentation.
5. Segal's Law
Short but sweet, Segal's Law is relevant for anyone involved in marketing measurement (i.e., everyone in marketing): a man with a watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.

If you've ever spent time trying to get two different web analytics packages to report the same numbers, you already have a deep appreciation for this law. Because there is so much overlap of data from different systems in the marketing domain, it can be an unending quagmire to try to get all the numbers to line up perfectly.

Why should you care? Marketing is awash in measurement and metrics — which, for the most part, is a good thing. But it's important to focus on meaningful signals and trends revealed by these numbers, rather than becoming obsessed with margin-of-error accuracy. Tom Davenport, arguably the world's leading advocate for business analytics, has said: "Analytics shouldn't be about the math. It should be used to tell stories, frame decisions, and find the courage to stand firm on consenting opinions from the status quo."

Put another way: it doesn't matter so much "what time it is," as much as it matters "what are we going to productively do with the next hour."
6. Conway's Law
Conway's Law is my favorite: any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. Melvin Conway made this sociological observation in 1968, later affirmed by a Harvard Business School study, and it wasn't intended as humor (although it does unintentionally satirize design by committee).

I actually subscribe to a broader interpretation of this law: that software — and other complex systems, such as web sites and marketing operations processes — reflect both the structure and culture of the organizations that create them.

This is why there is so much opportunity for differentiation for innovative products and services, even in crowded markets. For example, personal finance was a pretty mature category when Mint.com launched in 2007. Yet their fresh ideas, intuitive UX design, and simple workflow won them millions of users. The behemoth Intuit tried but couldn't match their approach — and ended up acquiring them instead.

Why should you care? You shouldn't be too worried about competitors reverse engineering what you do. You should, however, be very concerned about the structure and culture of your team — is your marketing department designed to inspire and enable the kinds of innovative products, marketing campaigns, and customer experiences that will amaze and delight your market? Not to sound like a broken record, but this is another good reason for adopting more agile management practices.

This is one of the key reasons that I advocate for marketing technologists based in the marketing department, rather than across the aisle in IT. Splitting creative and technological collaboration across two departments will inevitably be reflected in what gets produced.
7. Metcalfe's Law

Saving the best for last, Metcalfe's Law states: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, first formulated this law to characterize the benefits of having compatible communications devices — e.g., computer networks, fax machines, etc. — adopted by a growing number of people.

This exponential increase in value emerges because of the number of pair connections within a group of N people is equal to (N)(N-1)/2 — which is approximately N². Or, put more simply, a network's value grows exponentially. At least up to any human limit to take advantage of these interconnections.

With the rise of social media, this law has been frequently cited in social networking dynamics, one of the forces behind so-called dominant exchanges. You're on Twitter and Facebook because everyone else is on Twitter and Facebook. A variation known as Reed's Law speaks specifically to the utility obtained from scaling social networks.

Why should you care? Since social networks are infused into modern marketing, it's good to have this model in mind — the incentives for growing your own sub-communities within Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as your own proprietary customer networks. Find ways for participants to benefit from relationships with each other — not just with you — to tap into those powerful exponential dynamics.
August 25, 2011
12:47
Eloqua files for IPO, new bellwether for marketing tech
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
While much of the marketing world was caught up in the announcement of Steve Jobs' resignation as the CEO of Apple, e.g., The Meaning of Steve, a much happier piece of marketing news slipped through the commotion: the marketing technology company Eloqua filed to go public with a $100 million IPO.

As disclosure, my company, ion interactive, is an Eloqua customer, and many of our customers are also Eloqua customers — we've found great synergy between our post-click marketing software and Eloqua's platform.

But what really excites me about this news is that it would be the first of a new generation of marketing technology companies to go public — and has the potential to serve as a bellwether for the state of the new marketing and the public market's assessment of that opportunity.

Sure, there are other public companies adjacent to this space. Salesforce.com is the big one — certainly similar in terms of being a SaaS that has been adopted by sales and marketing alike. But Salesforce didn't represent a new way of doing sales, simply a (much) better way to provide CRM technology. Similarly, Unica was a public marketing technology company before IBM acquired them, but their foundation was on technology that powered the previous generation of marketing operations. Constant Contact is a successful public email service provider, but they've been more of a champion for the broad adoption of email marketing, part of the first generation of Internet marketing technology.

Eloqua represents a huge wave of companies that are defining the new marketing operations. Many of the players included on the marketing technology landscape infographic I published earlier this month fall into this category. There's been huge investment in this sector over the past 5 years. Eloqua's IPO will be an important test of how ready that investment is to mature.

Given the overall market's current ups-and-downs, this may be a bumpy ride. But if Eloqua breaks through under these conditions — and I hope they do — it will be a referendum on the potential of this space in spite of (and maybe even because of) an uncertain economic climate.

The following are excerpts from Eloqua's S-1 registration statement, where I've highlighted some of the information that I found most interesting. They did, however, fail to state an essential piece of information: it's pronounced EL-oh-kwa (like eloquent), not eh-LOW-kwa.
On customers and market opportunity...
Our solutions are particularly suited to modeling and supporting the complex sales processes of both business to business, or B2B, sales and high-value business to consumer, or B2C, sales. As of June 30, 2011, we had over 1,000 customers, encompassing a wide spectrum of industries, including the technology, financial services, entertainment, manufacturing, business services and telecommunications industries. Our customers include Adobe Systems, American Express, Cummins Power Generation, Dell, The McGraw-Hill Companies, the Miami Heat, National Instruments, Nestle S.A., Siemens AG, Standard & Poor's, VMware and Wells Fargo. Our ten largest customers accounted in the aggregate for less than 12% of our total revenue in each of 2010 and the six months ended June 30, 2011, and no single customer accounted for more than 3% of our total revenue during either of those periods.
On market opportunity...
Forrester Research, Inc. predicts that spending on interactive marketing in the United States will increase from $34 billion in 2011, or 18% of overall U.S. marketing expenditures, to $77 billion in 2016, or 35% of overall U.S. marketing expenditures. Within this category, spending on email, mobile and social media marketing is projected to grow from $4.7 billion in 2011 to nearly $15.7 billion in 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, of 27%. Business spending on automating, analyzing and optimizing marketing and sales functions is also projected to increase. International Data Corporation, or IDC, predicts that the marketing automation market will grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $4.8 billion in 2015, while the CRM analytics market, which includes marketing and sales analytics, is projected to grow from $2.2 billion in 2010 to $3.4 billion in 2015.

The significant increase in online activity by prospective buyers has led to a corresponding increase in the amount of prospect-related digital data. If appropriately analyzed, a prospect's Digital Body Language provides marketing and sales professionals with valuable information about a prospect's progress through the sales funnel. We believe enterprises are increasingly realizing that effective sales execution is dependent upon leveraging the vast quantities of available data to enable the delivery of a precise, targeted and timely message that caters to a prospective buyer’s unique concerns and desires at each stage of the buying process.

Marketing executives are increasingly confronted with managing complex constituencies, including internal and outsourced marketing groups, direct and indirect sales channels and traditional and online prospective buyers. At the same time, marketing and sales teams are being asked to demonstrate their direct impact on revenue generation to justify the value of marketing and sales expenditures. In many cases, marketing and sales teams continue to compete within organizations for resources and recognition, resulting in a lack of coordination between the two departments. Businesses are increasingly recognizing that this divide is counterproductive and that a company’s marketing and sales functions need to be tightly coordinated and aligned around the same goal of growing revenue.
On revenue...
We derive most of our revenue from subscriptions to our on-demand software and related subscription-based services. Subscription and support revenue accounted for 86.6%, 91.7%, 93.0% and 91.1% of our total revenue during the years ended December 31, 2008, 2009 and 2010 and the six months ended June 30, 2011, respectively. Subscription and support revenue is driven primarily by the number of customers we have, the number of prospective buyer profiles our customers manage with the Eloqua Platform, and the levels of service for which they contract.

Professional services revenue accounted for 13.4%, 8.3%, 7.0% and 8.9% of our total revenue during the years ended December 31, 2008, 2009 and 2010 and the six months ended June 30, 2011, respectively. We derive our professional services revenue primarily from services provided in connection with the onboarding of new customers onto the Eloqua Platform, including implementation and integration with our customers' sales automation and other marketing systems, as well as educating the customer on optimal use of our solutions.

On competition...
The services we provide are also offered by others and in the future may be offered by an increasing number of parties. The market for marketing automation and RPM software is evolving, highly competitive and significantly fragmented, and we expect competition to continue to increase in the future. With the introduction of new technologies and the influx of new entrants to the market, we expect competition to persist and intensify in the future, which could harm our ability to increase sales and maintain our prices. We face intense competition from software companies that develop marketing technologies and from marketing services companies that provide interactive marketing services.

Our competitors vary with each challenge that our solutions address, but some of these providers include:
- plan and spend management software vendors, such as Oracle Corporation and SAP AG;
- workflow, project management and brand management vendors, such as marketing agencies who develop custom systems for their clients;
- email marketing software vendors, including Responsys, Inc., ExactTarget, Inc., Constant Contact, Inc. and numerous other email marketing companies;
- campaign management software vendors, such as Oracle Corporation, SAS Institute Inc., Aprimo, Inc. (a division of Teradata Corporation), and Unica Corporation (a division of International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM); and
- lead management software vendors, such as Oracle Corporation, Genius.com, Incorporated, Marketo, Inc., Neolane Inc., Pardot LLC, SilverPop Systems, Inc., and smartFOCUS Group plc.
We expect to face additional competition with the continued development and expansion of the RPM and marketing automation software markets. We also expect competition to increase as a result of software industry consolidation, including through possible mergers or partnerships of two or more of our competitors or the acquisition of our competitors by larger and better-funded companies. For instance, in December 2010, Teradata completed its acquisition of Aprimo and in October 2010, IBM completed its acquisition of Unica.
August 21, 2011
20:21
Why Software Is Eating Marketing
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

There are two forces driving this, the first being near complete saturation on online connectivity. Andreessen expects that within the next 10 years, effectively everyone on the planet will own a smartphone, "giving everyone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day."

The second is the capability for entrepreneurs to develop applications for that audience with unprecedented ease:

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month. Running that same application today in Amazon's cloud costs about $1,500 a month.

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

He goes on to give a bevy of examples of software powering industry domination:
- Amazon, the world's largest bookstore, has software as its core capability
- Netflix, an online service, as today's largest video service by subscribers
- Apple's iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora as the world's dominant music companies
- Pixar, a software company, as the best new movie production company in many decades
- online social game-maker Zynga as the fastest growing videogame company in the world
- Wal-Mart using software to power logistics and distribution capabilities
- Oil and gas companies using supercomputing and data visualization
Including, of course:

Today's largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it's been joined by Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only two years.

How is your company doing in adapting to his new digitally-dominated landscape? How is your marketing department doing in leading the way?
August 18, 2011
17:11
Amazing graphic of customer experience touchpoints
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 dynamics of this shift.

What struck me most from the report, however, was this terrific graphic that does a beautiful job of visualizing the different touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle, along with some of the communications vehicles that play a role at each point:

Forrester defines a customer experience management (CXM) solution this way:

"CXM solutions are the technology solutions that allow businesses to manage and optimize the customer experience through content management, customer targeting, analytics, personalization, and optimization capabilities across customer touchpoints — online, through mobile devices, through Internet-connected interfaces, and through digitally support customer interactions such as contact centers and in-store or branch interfaces."

I'm slightly skeptical on the breadth of the category for labeling a specific set of software solutions — many, many categories of marketing technology feed into this — but as a management approach, I couldn't agree more with an emphasis on customer experience.

It does, however, let us say things like: the CMO wants ROI from our SaaS CXM, especially SEO and PPC initiatives driving to our LPO programs. That's kind of fun.
August 11, 2011
14:36
Forrester CIO report recommends marketing-IT hybrids
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Several people have alerted me to a great new Forrester report, Mastering Customer Data — a CIO Imperative ($499), by Nigel Fenwick. Nigel primarily serves the IT community, but his recent research and blog posts have focused intensely on IT's evolving role with marketing.

From what I've heard, his recommendation to CIOs are exactly in line with the conclusions we've reached from the marketing side on the value of hybrid marketing technologists and an evolving role for IT from full control to distributed governance.

Here's an excerpt from the CIO.com Australia write-up on the report, Dawn of the Hybrid CIO (emphasis added is my own):

The study suggests that CIOs hire staff with marketing expertise to work alongside the marketing team.

"You need to look for a person in IT who understands the sales and marketing process, and marketing needs to put someone on their team who understands technology to work alongside them," another CIO said.

Implicit in this is the necessity of developing new IT processes to support proactive marketing collaboration. According to the study, IT must move beyond what it calls its "one-size-fits-all approach to IT process and governance" to deliver more flexibility and responsiveness, and when necessary react to changes in the market in real-time.

Although it might be a hard pill to swallow, the report argues that IT has to let go of control of technology.

"With the adoption of software-as-a-service and managed digital strategy platforms, it is important for CIOs to let go of control of the the tools and instead focus on standards and guidelines for marketing," it says.

The article concludes with as resounding of an endorsement for marketing technologist as I can imagine:

"Such a close alignment of IT and marketing will require the introduction of hybrid marketing and IT professionals: specialists in their primary field who are fully versed in how to operate in the other field," it states.

"By collaborating with marketing, CIOs shift the IT discussion away from the unrelenting drive to reduce the cost of IT and instead can focus on how to use technology to increase revenue and competitive advantage."

Are the two worlds of IT and marketing finally ready to converge?
August 07, 2011
13:46
We're all CMOs and CIOs today...
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Last month, CMO.com published a terrific interview with Lisa Arthur, the CMO of marketing technology firm Aprimo, "We're All CMOs and CIOs."

Here are a couple of excerpts (emphasis added is my own):

"The first truth is that most global companies express their fundamental business strategy through IT, and customer experience falls into that," stated Lisa. "At the same time, business success today is more about marketing than ever before. And marketing is executed through IT more than ever before."

"One provocative idea is that we're all CMOs and CIOs today," she added. "IT needs to work with marketers, and marketers need to be in touch with technology. CMOs must understand how to use technology to innovate, do more with less, to be more accountable, and to get the investment they need."

It wasn't always this way.

"From my purview over the past 30 years, there has been a clear distinction between the CIO and CMO," noted Lisa. "And in many regards it has been an arm wrestle of a relationship. I'm in my fourth gig as a CMO; in the past, the requests and requirements that marketing has for technology have fallen very far down the list from the requests of sales and finance and other functions seen as revenue-critical. At the same time, marketing was very stove-piped, and collaboration with IT was nonexistent."

But it's a whole new world today. "What's interesting is that I have met several CMOs today who also function as CIOs. We're seeing the emergence of bringing marketing and IT together from that title perspective, or through marketers having IT expertise within their teams. Cloud computing is another example. Many marketers are turning to cloud and software-as-a-service options because there's less dependency on IT to get things done."

Many more great insights — read the full interview.
August 03, 2011
15:49
Marketing Technology Landscape Infographic
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 of this diverse marketing technology ecosystem. After an ungodly amount of tweaking, I've decided to adopt an agile approach and "ship" this first version — as imperfect as it is — and iterate and improve it with your feedback:

The categories are defined with the rounded boxes, containing logos of representative companies. In turn, these categories are grouped into three meta-categories — the orange, blue and green colors of the boxes:
- External promotion (orange) such as advertising and social media marketing
- Customer experience (blue) that you operate and control, such as your website
- Marketing management (green) that runs the organization behind the scenes
Many of the challenges I faced in assembling this infographic felt like a metaphor for what marketing technologists wrestle with every day — given time and space constraints, I could only address a subset of possible categories, and in each category, I could only include a fraction of the vendors offering solutions in that space.

First and foremost, there is way more marketing software than what is represented here. This is just a subjective sampling, of primarily web-based, SaaS, and digital-centric applications. I apologize if I didn't include your favorite — feel free to tell me about it in the comments. New marketing technologies are being released every week, so any static snapshot like this is bound to be out of date the moment it is published.

There are more categories of marketing software, but I strived to capture the major ones that would be applicable to the largest number of B2B and B2C marketers. I have not done justice to the technologies used by agencies or publishers. I did, however, include not only off-the-shelf products, but also some technologies used by marketers to build their own applications (e.g., the categories for Custom Web Apps, Mobile Apps, and Custom Databases).

The names of categories are squishy, as the definitions are constantly changing. I tried to choose the most commonly known names for categories. However, Eloqua might make the case that they should be in a Revenue Performance Management category instead of Marketing Automation. My own company, ion interactive — disclaimer, I included us in this diagram — is in the Landing Pages & Microsites and Web Testing & Optimization categories, even though I would prefer a separate Post-Click Marketing category.

As an inevitable corollary, many companies cross multiple categories. Some entire categories are intermingling, such as Search Ad Management and Social Media Ad Management, which I indicated with adjacency and occasionally small arrows. Alas, some cross-pollination defied my ability to show it cleanly in two dimensions, such as the intersection of CRM and Social Media Marketing Management into a new generation of social CRMs. Robust M&A activity has complicated categorization too. For most hybrid companies, I placed them in what I perceived as their primary category, although I put a few in multiple for clarity. If you disagree with my categorization, please share your rationale for a rearrangement.

Some categories are incredibly diverse. For instance, Integrated Suites includes both Hubspot and Unica (now a part of IBM), which serve two very different extremes, from SMBs to large-scale enterprises. I also included related technologies in categories that I thought were relevant — such as Zemanta in Blogs and Hadoop in Business Intelligence — even though they're qualitatively different than their "peers." I have a couple of catch-all categories — notably Widgets/Plug-ins, whose only common thread is that they provide capabilities that can be plugged into existing web properties.

Note: slight variations in the size of logos doesn't mean that I prefer one over another, or that one is a larger company than the other; more mundanely, it was simply a little aesthetic license to squeeze things in. I chose logos over a list of names because I felt it was a better reflection of their respective differentiation.

Finally, I must give a nod to Terence Kawaja of LUMA Partners, whose LUMAscapes gave me inspiration for how to arrange this landscape. Terence's graphics are much more complete than mine, especially because each focuses on a more narrow slice of the industry.

What do you think? What should I fix in the next version?
July 29, 2011
12:29
What can marketing automation do for you? #MITX
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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.

Bill kicked it off by reminding the audience of the underlying disruption motivating marketing automation: as buyers have gravitated to self-service information gathering on the web, salespeople have become increasingly disenfranchised as a company's "ears to the ground."

No offense to the sales profession, but most folks don't want to talk with salespeople, especially early in their consideration process — the web has given them an alternative channel that they control at their pace, on their agenda.

So if you want to learn about your prospects and what interests them, what you're doing right (or not), then you need to listen to their digital body language that dominates the majority of the modern sales and marketing funnel. And that — along with mechanisms to respond to such signals — is the heart of marketing automation.
When is marketing automation appropriate?
Jim remarked that he is often asked, "Is personalization the opposite of automation?" In some abstract sense, being more automated sounds like it would be inherently less personal.

"The inverse is true," he insists. "The more data you collect, the better job you can do." The caveat is that you have to actually do something intelligent with that data. The onus is on you, the marketer, to take those signals of interest and use them to present prospects with more relevant and timely information and offers.

The bar is being raised on customer expectations in this regard.

People don't want fake personalization, inauthentic or creepy emails with, "Hi, [first name]. How's the [hot/cold/rainy/sunny] weather in [city] this [morning|evening]? How 'bout them [local sports team]?" Instead, they want more meaningful communications that are relevant to their expressed interest and needs. A useful white paper or research study. An insightful article. A case study to which they can relate.
Carpe content, boys...
If you lean in and listen to your web analytics, like the class of Dead Poets Society, you can hear echos of your prospects whispering, "I want to carpe content, seize the content. I want to self-service my purchases as much as possible. Make my experience extraordinary..."

With that in mind, Christopher offered two requirements for marketing automation to be "appropriate:"
1. You need data by which to segment your audience — in particular behavioral data about the choices individual prospects have made to express their true interests, rather than traditional demographic segmentation data.
2. You need energy and creativity to have a message for these segments — if you don't have a better message for a segment than your generic baseline, then the effort on segmentation is wasted.
It's this second point that led the panel to emphasize the huge opportunity for agencies in the marketing automation era, as there is often a dearth of compelling segment-specific content. If agencies could extend their vision and domain beyond the realm of awareness and early-funnel interest generation into deeper engagement and nurturing stages of the buying cycle, they could inject much needed creativity into the middle of the funnel.
You must give in order to receive
Jim and Christopher both agreed that the best nurturing strategy is giving: offering people lots of great content, at many different points in time — and for each prospect, keeping track of which content they choose to consume.

Avoid asking people for information in forms. What's your budget? What's your timeframe? Do you have purchase authority? Sales, and its earlier funnel brethren marketing, no longer has the leverage to interrogate prospects this way.

Instead, take a more passive approach to progressive profiling, by being clever in what you offer people. There are two ways that you can structure this to reveal segmentation insight:
1. Send many different individual content offers, new things every week, via email and social channels, where each offer emphasizes different characteristics — different pain points, appropriateness for different buying stages and roles, etc.
2. Embed choices into each particular content offer, such as a choice of a comparative buyer's guide of marketing automation platforms versus a high-level thought leadership piece on why someone should even consider marketing automation.
In both of these scenarios, the choices prospects make — which content offers to respond to, which alternatives within those offers they pick (or pick first) — reveals fuzzy but powerful segmentation cues. This behavioral segmentation technique can be used effectively with multi-step landing pages and more creative and robust post-click marketing experiences. (What my company enables.)
The evolution of the marketing organization
"Time is the marketing department's scarcest resource," said Christopher.

Given the segment-centric content marketing mission described above, the key to successful marketing automation is to invest wisely in identifying segments, understanding what they want, and testing what compels them to engage and take action.

"You want to develop content that has repeat uses," he advised. "If your team gathers together every week to come up with the weekly email, a one-shot deal that is specific to that week, gets blasted to everyone, and is never sent again, then you're doing it wrong." Instead, work to create a terrific piece of content for a specific segment, and then re-use that content for that segment for weeks or months ahead; meanwhile, you move on to develop the next amazing piece of content for another segment, and so on.

This emphasis on segments, over particular media channels or tactics, suggests a reconfiguration of the marketing organization — taken to its extreme, perhaps something like this:

Overall, it was a great discussion. Any thoughts you would add?
July 27, 2011
0:19
Marketing technology as your ZMOT engine of war
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
I finally got around to reading ZMOT: Winning The Zero Moment of Truth by Jim Lecinski, published by Google. If you haven't read it yet, go grab a copy — it's free.

It's actually a brilliant example of content marketing by Google — a company not exactly renown for their own content marketing (despite enabling it for the rest of us!). As I mentioned in my Search Engine Land column earlier this month, 3 Dead Excuses for Badly Designed Landing Pages, Google has really been stepping up the creativity of its own marketing. But I digress...

Jim defines ZMOT as "that moment when you grab your laptop, mobile phone or some other wired device and start learning about a product or service (or potential boyfriend) you're thinking about trying or buying."

This is in contrast to the First Moment of Truth (FMOT) and Second Moment of Truth (SMOT), coined by Procter & Gamble's A.G. Lafley this way, "The best brands consistently win two moments of truth. The first moment occurs at the store shelf, when a consumer decides whether to buy one brand or another. The second occurs at home, when she uses the brand — and is delighted, or isn't."

The book delves into some terrific research and insight into this new moment of truth, which consists of activities such as:
- Searching online, using search engines
- Talking with friends/family about a product
- Comparison shopping products online
- Seeking information from a product brand/manufacturer's website
- Reading product reviews or endorsements online
- Reading comments following an article/opinion piece online
- Becoming a friend/follower/"liking" a brand
According to Google's research, 84% of shoppers said that these ZMOT activities shape their decisions. Of course, all of this supports Google's underlying value proposition around search and display advertising, Google-inspired SEO, and the new social mechanisms of Google+. But that doesn't change that fact that it's manifestly true.

It also underscore the importance of marketing technology.

Almost all of these ZMOT activities are taking place in digital environments that are directly powered by — or at least indirectly influenced by — the growing collection of marketing technologies for search and social PPC ad management, SEO management, web experience management, social media monitoring and management, customer relationship management, marketing automation, and — my favorite — post-click marketing management.

If you accept the ZMOT as the new battleground for marketing, then marketing technologies are your weapons of war. And marketing technologists, rising in popularity, are your artillery units, your fighter pilots, your aircraft carrier navigators.

At the risk of taking this analogy way too far, ask yourself: are you only standing in this maelstrom with a pocket knife and a stern grimace?
July 24, 2011
21:29
How ad tech is disrupting the media buying world
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

The above diagram is from Clay Christensen's web site with the definition of disruptive innovation.

Ari Paparo, a senior VP at Appnexus, had a terrific article published in Ad Age last week, Don't Look Now: Classic Disruption Is Taking Place In Advertising, describing the phenomenon of such disruptive technology on agencies and media buying in digital advertising.

(Thanks to my co-founder at ion, Justin Talerico, for forwarding it to me while he was on vacation.)

Ari's article begins...

Real Time Bidding is the hottest technology in online advertising, and with good reason. By connecting buyers and sellers in real-time, on an impression basis, RTB has enabled an explosion of technology, experimentation, and measurement, resulting in improved results for buyers and yield for sellers. But even with the hype cycle in full force and growth in a hockey-stick patterns, the importance of RTB as a disruptive innovation is largely underestimated.

Clayton Christensen first identified the concept of the disruptive innovation in the Innovator's Dilemma. The basic idea is this: a new technology slowly undermines an existing, dominant technology, by starting out cheaper and "worse," then slowly improving until it is a full replacement for the dominant one, but with newer, more flexible capabilities, and usually a lower cost basis. Classic examples of disruptive technologies include the PC (which disrupted mainframes and minicomputers) and desktop publishing (which disrupted the print industry).

He goes on to explain that so-called ad exchange technologies were originally such a low-end innovation, considered worse than traditional display buying by interactive agencies. But as these exchanges started to grow — what he labels the second phase of ad exchanges — "RTB-powered buying and selling grew like weeds, rapidly displacing most non-RTB, and simultaneously exchange buying displaced a significant portion of direct remnant sales to ad networks."

"But even today," he notes, "the consensus remains that RTB is a great remnant technology, and will never seriously challenge the world of three-martini lunches, faxed IOs, relationships and homepage takeovers. Simply put, it remains 'worse' than the incumbent ways of doing business."

I highly recommend that every marketing technologist read his entire article — both for the story playing out in online advertising, but also as an allegory of other disruptive innovation in marketing.

"The fact that RTB is quickly taking over remnant inventory is, in fact, the first step in a major disruption to the entire online display ecosystem," he concludes. "The new technology stack will replace, in full, the current way of doing things, and sooner than many may expect.

As a companion piece to Ari's article, consider this post I wrote a while ago on disruptive innovation in advertising creative.

I made the case that online display advertising had started to disrupt the high-end creative of traditional advertising... and in turn, it was disrupted by even less creative search advertising... which itself has been disrupted by the almost total absence of advertiser-produced "creative" in social media marketing.

Interesting to think of the intersection of these two trends.
July 18, 2011
12:51
Insights from the explosion of marketing touchpoints
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

At the Online Marketing Summit here in Boston last week, I caught up with Steven Woods, co-founder and CTO of Eloqua.

I've been a fan of Steven's since his first book on the transformation of sales and marketing, Digital Body Language. He now has a new book — Revenue Engine: Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage — that continues this discussion on the new marketing.

So I took advantage of our rendezvous to ask him a few questions...
What makes this new marketing different?
According to Steven, we're on the tail end of a decade long transformation of buyers owning access to sales information, controlling their destiny in the sales process. A buyer can go where they want, at any point in the so-called sales lifecycle — ask a question on Quora, follow accounts on Twitter, chat with friends on Facebook, visit your web site, your competitors' web sites, read an analyst's blog, a customer's blog, etc. Buyers decide what they want, when, and from whom.

"Where you need to be to interact with buyers is not in marketing's control," insists Steven. "You have to be where the buyers go."

The overwhelming difficulty with that today, however, is that there has been an explosion in the number of outposts where buyers go. "This can be a little chaotic," Steven admits. "But we have one advantage. Because so many of these outposts are digital, we can instrument what the buyer does, who they are, what they interact with."

In Steven's view, what makes marketing so different today isn't just the number of new outposts or the operational challenges that presents. Says Steven, "The new part of today's marketing is bringing all those pieces of insights on the buyers together."

"So many of the individual clues are small — really small," he points out. Any one follow on Twitter or visit on your web site doesn't — and shouldn't — register on marketing's Richter scale. "Any one thing does not a buyer maker. They're only relevant in the aggregate."

Digital Body Language was about buyers moving online. Revenue Engine is about harnessing the digital clues of those buyers in aggregate.
What does this aggregate view look like?
Although a linear pipeline — the classic sales/marketing funnel — doesn't perfectly define reality for any one prospect, it continues to be a pretty good model for managing the flow of prospects to customers in aggregate.

"It's important to look at the overall funnel," says Steven. "From early-stage marketing to late-stage selling."

According to Steven, there are five dimensions of this funnel that are important to understand:

1. Value. "What is the economic value in the funnel right now, from earliest stage of awareness through education and investment? How big is that total pipeline, even 6 or 8 quarters out, and how big is each stage?"

2. Reach. "At each stage of the funnel, how many folks — not the size of the deal, which is the value metric above — am I able to engage? This is about uncovering where the choke points are, identifying gaps."

3. Conversion. "What percentage make it from one stage of the funnel to the next? What are the fall off points?"

4. Velocity. "The speed at which deals move through the stages of the pipeline — but specifically the speed from each stage to the next, identifying the points of slowdown. Each one can be affected with different levers, but you need to understand the metrics before you apply the lever."

5. Return. "Dollars in, dollars out — how efficient is this total pipeline?"

Steven believes that this total pipeline, with these dimensions transparently in view, is the key to sales and marketing alignment. "Sales people see one quarter out from their pipeline. Marketing generally sees not the current quarter, but two or three quarters out. The challenge is tying those two things together into a unified view with a longer time horizon and understanding the process governing that flow.

This shared, holistic view enables better conversations and coordination between sales and marketing. "Fuzzier things that marketing used to say, such as, 'We need to do some branding,'" explains Steven, "Now means, 'We need broader reach at the earliest end of the funnel.' Organizations can have intelligent discussions about branding. 'We're in tough economic times, so we can cut back on branding now, but we will take a hit 6 quarters out.'"
What is the role of software, technology in this transformation?
"The technical challenge of modern marketing is that explosion of smaller touchpoints," replied Steven. "The marketing team is tasked with understanding all of these touchpoints, but each individual touch point is too small to care about. You can't put the human effort to personally respond, 'Oh, look, a Facebook fan!'"

"Marketing must aggregate these touchpoints — they're small, but relevant in aggregate. Such aggregate analysis can only be done with technology. Minimalist technology, such as Excel spreadsheets, is not sufficient to tease out the insight."

But are marketing departments ready to manage such technology?

"It's a hard transition, but marketing departments have been wrestling with this transformation for 10 years," notes Steven. "In the last two years, it has become the norm. Marketing operations, marketing processes, the analytics — this technology is now the norm."

Do marketers need a different set of skills for this?

"You need people in place who are a little better about numbers, metrics, analytics, operations — all of the little details that need to be mapped out on a whiteboard, such as figuring out the exceptions when buyers jump in and out of your pipeline. This is less of a creative discipline, more of an analytic discipline.

What about the IT department?

"The group that is having to reinvent itself more than marketing is IT," remarks Steven. "IT, historically, was all about servers, networks, wiring, software patches. Now with SaaS, that wiring challenge has been placed back on the vendor. Forward-leaning IT organizations are now taking on the 'whiteboarding challenge' — understanding the data, how we're going to track things, how these five or six systems are going to talk to each other."

"Quite technical marketers or business-savvy IT folks, comfortable talking line of business — you'll see organizations structured both ways."

Thanks, Steven!
12:51
Insights from the explosion of marketing touchpoints
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

At the Online Marketing Summit here in Boston last week, I caught up with Steven Woods, co-founder and CTO of Eloqua.

I've been a fan of Steven's since his first book on the transformation of sales and marketing, Digital Body Language. He now has a new book — Revenue Engine: Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage — that continues this discussion on the new marketing.

So I took advantage of our rendezvous to ask him a few questions...
What makes this new marketing different?
According to Steven, we're on the tail end of a decade long transformation of buyers owning access to sales information, controlling their destiny in the sales process. A buyer can go where they want, at any point in the so-called sales lifecycle — ask a question on Quora, follow accounts on Twitter, chat with friends on Facebook, visit your web site, your competitors' web sites, read an analyst's blog, a customer's blog, etc. Buyers decide what they want, when, and from whom.

"Where you need to be to interact with buyers is not in marketing's control," insists Steven. "You have to be where the buyers go."

The overwhelming difficulty with that today, however, is that there has been an explosion in the number of outposts where buyers go. "This can be a little chaotic," Steven admits. "But we have one advantage. Because so many of these outposts are digital, we can instrument what the buyer does, who they are, what they interact with."

In Steven's view, what makes marketing so different today isn't just the number of new outposts or the operational challenges that presents. Says Steven, "The new part of today's marketing is bringing all those pieces of insights on the buyers together."

"So many of the individual clues are small — really small," he points out. Any one follow on Twitter or visit on your web site doesn't — and shouldn't — register on marketing's Richter scale. "Any one thing does not a buyer maker. They're only relevant in the aggregate."

Digital Body Language was about buyers moving online. Revenue Engine is about harnessing the digital clues of those buyers in aggregate.
What does this aggregate view look like?
Although a linear pipeline — the classic sales/marketing funnel — doesn't perfectly define reality for any one prospect, it continues to be a pretty good model for managing the flow of prospects to customers in aggregate.

"It's important to look at the overall funnel," says Steven. "From early-stage marketing to late-stage selling."

According to Steven, there are five dimensions of this funnel that are important to understand:

1. Value. "What is the economic value in the funnel right now, from earliest stage of awareness through education and investment? How big is that total pipeline, even 6 or 8 quarters out, and how big is each stage?"

2. Reach. "At each stage of the funnel, how many folks — not the size of the deal, which is the value metric above — am I able to engage? This is about uncovering where the choke points are, identifying gaps."

3. Conversion. "What percentage make it from one stage of the funnel to the next? What are the fall off points?"

4. Velocity. "The speed at which deals move through the stages of the pipeline — but specifically the speed from each stage to the next, identifying the points of slowdown. Each one can be affected with different levers, but you need to understand the metrics before you apply the lever."

5. Return. "Dollars in, dollars out — how efficient is this total pipeline?"

Steven believes that this total pipeline, with these dimensions transparently in view, is the key to sales and marketing alignment. "Sales people see on quarter out from their pipeline. Marketing generally sees not the current quarter, but two or three quarters out. The challenge is tying those two things together into a unified view with a longer time horizon and understanding the process governing that flow.

This shared, holistic view enables better conversations and coordination between sales and marketing. "Fuzzier things that marketing used to say, such as, 'We need to do some branding,'" explains Steven, "Now means, 'We need broader reach at the earliest end of the funnel.' Organizations can have intelligent discussions about branding. 'We're in tough economic times, so we can cut back on branding now, but we will take a hit 6 quarters out.'"
What is the role of software, technology in this transformation?
"The technical challenge of modern marketing is that explosion of smaller touchpoints," replied Steven. "The marketing team is tasked with understanding all of these touchpoints, but each individual touch point is too small to care about. You can't put the human effort to personally respond, 'Oh, look, a Facebook fan!'"

"Marketing must aggregate these touchpoints — they're small, but relevant in aggregate. Such aggregate analysis can only be done with technology. Minimalist technology, such as Excel spreadsheets, is not sufficient to tease out the insight."

But are marketing departments ready to manage such technology?

"It's a hard transition, but marketing departments have been wrestling with this transformation for 10 years," notes Steven. "In the last two years, it has become the norm. Marketing operations, marketing processes, the analytics — this technology is now the norm."

Do marketers need a different set of skills for this?

"You need people in place who are a little better about numbers, metrics, analytics, operations — all of the little details that need to be mapped out on a whiteboard, such as figuring out the exceptions when buyers jump in and out of your pipeline. This is less of a creative discipline, more of an analytic discipline.

What about the IT department?

"The group that is having to reinvent itself more than marketing is IT," remarks Steven. "IT, historically, was all about servers, networks, wiring, software patches. Now with SaaS, that wiring challenge has been placed back on the vendor. Forward-leaning IT organizations are now taking on the 'whiteboarding challenge' — understanding the data, how we're going to track things, how these five or six systems are going to talk to each other."

"Quite technical marketers or business-savvy IT folks, comfortable talking line of business — you'll see organizations structured both ways."

Thanks, Steven!
July 12, 2011
12:17
Chief Content Officer meets marketing technologist
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

The latest issue of Chief Content Officer magazine has just been published, featuring an article by yours truly: Rise of the Marketing Technologist.

Although the gist of the piece is already well-known by readers of this blog — from posts such as my marketing technologist presentation at Search Insider Summit last year — the story of how marketing's DNA is changing continues to be refined and expanded. I was thrilled that CCO magazine felt that this dimension of marketing's evolution is as important to content marketers as much as anyone.

What words do you associate with marketing? Branding. Positioning. Advertising. No doubt, these are classic foundations of our field.

But increasingly, marketing has some new — and very different — word associations. Configuring. Coding. Computing.

At first, these words seem foreign. Isn't the IT department set up for all that tech stuff? Not long ago, software of any kind was clearly the domain of IT. Marketing had neither the inclination nor expertise to get in the weeds of technical implementations.

But take a good look around, and you're likely to be surprised at all the technology that's entwined in marketing today. Web analytics. Bid management. Marketing automation. CRMs. Content management. Post-click marketing platforms. SEO auditing. Social media monitoring. Attribution management. Digital asset management. And so on.

There are now thousands of software applications available for marketers, underpinning nearly every aspect of our work.

While many of these solutions are designed for non-technical marketers, the process of selecting the right software, configuring it to your specific needs and connecting it to the other pieces of your digital ecosystem inevitably requires a certain technical savvy. Even a little knowledge of web protocols, scripting languages and database schemas goes a long way in managing this growing federation of marketing technologies.

Read the complete article here.
June 22, 2011
10:37
You might be a marketing technologist if...
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

How do you know if you're a marketing technologist? Well, you might be a marketing technologist if...
...you regularly use three or more different web browsers.

...you know that third-party cookies aren't leftover snacks from two previous social gatherings.

...you have spent weeks trying to get two different web analytics packages to report the same numbers.

...when someone mentions Amazon, you think of web services, not books.

...you read TechCrunch more than AdAge (but you do read both).

...you have a collection of books with illustrated animals on their covers. And one with a purple cow.

...you know that a "callback" doesn't necessarily involve the telephone.

...the words agile, sprint, and stand-up don't conjure up images of calisthenics.

...you have personally consumed an API (and that didn't involve eating anything, except maybe time).

...you know at least three acronyms that end in -aaS.

...you have ever used the word "canonical."

...at 2am you have wondered if "marketing automation" is possibly the greatest oxymoron of our time.

...you have ever meditated in the CSS Zen Garden (and know that they don't serve tea there).

...you know that a RESTful web service isn't relaxed or sleepy.

...you know that a "statistically significant" test is not necessarily a meaningful one.

...when you hear "the script doesn't work," you think of bad programming, not bad screenwriting.

...you know that Cocoa Touch is not a flavor you add to your coffee at Starbucks.

...you have ever been accused of performing the black rites of shadow IT.

...you know that having Python in your LAMP stack is not a snake emergency.

...you anticipate the demise of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) as a kind of rapture.
Are there other tell-tale signs of being a marketing technologist? Please share.
June 21, 2011
12:48
Should agencies show more -aaS?
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

First there was SaaS — software-as-a-service.

Then PaaS — platform-as-a-service.

Then IaaS — infrastructure-as-a-service.

These days it's EaaS — everything-as-a-service. Development-as-a-serivce (DaaS). Testing-as-a-service (TaaS). Content-as-a-service (CaaS). Social-media-as-a-service (SMaaS). I'm not making these up.

Is it AaaS — anything-as-a-service? Is the right adjective for that AaaS-inine?

Which made we wonder...

Should agencies simply rebrand themselves as MaaS — marketing-as-a-service?

"We're not mass marketing. We're MaaS marketing." (A homage to homonyms.)

They'd better hurry. One of their competitors, the digital agency space150, already has the jump on space-advertising-as-a-service (SAaaS).

There's a serious question in here somewhere, but I'll save that for another day.
June 10, 2011
19:43
CEOs rank technological factors higher than CIOs
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
I recently read the report from the 2011 IBM Global CIO Study, the result of "face-to-face conversations with more than 3,000 chief information officers worldwide."

Frankly, it read a little more like an IBM sales brochure than an objective research report — kind of light on actual data. But I did find one semi-quantitative diagram to be particularly intriguing:

In a study last year, IBM asked CEOs to rank the impact of external forces on their organizations. The above diagram compares those rankings with how CIOs ordered the same list — previously in 2009 and now in 2011.

A few observations:
- If the CEO considers technological factors to be so important, the CIO isn't the only executive who needs to be addressing this — the CMO needs to have a handle on technological factors in his or her domain as well.
- It's interesting that CEOs rank technological factors higher than CIOs over the past few years. I guess I would have expected the CIO to be more attuned to those forces — and therefore rank them higher (or at least as high as the CEO does).
- Regulatory concerns as a top external force on the CIO's mind makes a lot of sense to me — and dovetails with my belief that the IT organization should retain control of regulatory governance as a subset of technology management.
What do you think?
June 09, 2011
11:41
Google *finally* innovating with search ads
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Maybe it's the Mad Men marketer in my hybrid DNA, but I've always been a little underwhelmed with Google AdWords.

The business model of pay-per-click (PPC) is great. The ability to scale to thousands of micro-targeted ads is great. The analytics and testing capabilities are pretty good. And, hey, major hats off to intercepting buyers at their moment of expressed "intent."

But the design canvas — trying to market to people with a maximum of 135 characters of plain text — always seemed really low-fidelity to me.

In essence, search advertising in Google (and Yahoo!, Bing) had only four levers to pull:
1. The keyword phrase on which the ad appeared (context)
2. The text of the ad — a mere 135 characters of plain text
3. The position of the ad on the page as a faint signal of quality
4. Any brand equity the advertiser had previously established
That was fine 10 years ago, but what's changed since then? Marketers have done a lot with very little, but compared to the other media where marketers ply their craft — such as the post-click marketing space, which I know and love — search marketing has been terribly constrained.

And although Google's spartan page design could be considered a feature — at least it originally was — I've increasingly doubted that those constraints truly serve the needs of users. It's really hard to tell which ads will deliver on a user's intent.
Google Instant Preview and Google +1
But recently, Google unveiled a couple of small features with big implications for search marketing: Instant Preview for Ads and Google +1 for Sites.

With Instant Preview, a little magnifying glass appears next to ads that lets users see a thumbnail and brief snippets of text from the landing page that the ad links to. Once a user clicks on a magnifying glass, they can zoom around the search results page — comparing the landing pages of all the ads and organic results — before they click through on any of them.

So instead of making a click choice based solely on a stack ads like this:

Users can take a look at the actual experiences these advertisers will deliver. Do they intrigue? Impress? Fulfill the promise implied (or stated outright) by the ad? If users aren't satisfied with the preview, they simply won't click.

In a recent Search Engine Land article, Google Instant Preview: A Game-Changer For Landing Pages, I observed that this raises the importance of several post-click marketing best practices:
- Design matters — a landing page that looks good can now send a signal of the quality of the advertiser (as can a page that looks like junk)
- Message match matters — the promise that the ad makes should be reflected in the copy and imagery of the landing page (even inadvertent bait-and-switch will be poorly received)
- Avoid long forms — especially on page one; instead use behavioral choices or multi-step experiences to do "progressive conversion" of respondents
- Do A/B testing carefully — to avoid unintended mismatch, pair ads and their landing pages in your A/B tests, so the preview always reflects the actual landing page
In the hands of a creative and enterprising advertiser, this opens up a huge opportunity for competitive advantage. Any competitor can copy the text of your ad. But it's much harder to imitate compelling and meaningful post-click marketing experiences. Imagination, daring, design values, and the operational capability to match ads and landing pages at scale are not easily copied.

Combined with the new Google +1 button — Google's equivalent to the Facebook Like buttons proliferating the web — users can now give a little "social love" to advertisers that deliver great post-click experiences. In turn, those +1's will register on the ads when other users in those social circles see them — a nice positive feedback loop. Are your landing pages +1 worthy?

Suddenly post-click marketing has moved from the middle of the funnel to the top.
Post-Click Marketing at MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Next week, I'll be speaking at MarketingProf's B2B Forum in Boston on the topic of post-click marketing — including up-to-date best practices arising from these new Google AdWords innovations.

I'll be in a session with Sally Lowery of iContact, who will be sharing a marketer's perspective of implementing post-click marketing strategy and tactics in an organization. Sally has amazing experience to share, so I'm thrilled to be presenting with her. If you're at the event, please come up and say "hi."

If you can't make it in person, you can attend online. (You can use the code POSTCLICK to save 30% on the online registration.)
May 23, 2011
11:20
Is marketing becoming a math state? Is that good?
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 ad is bought, served, delivered because that's where the cool money is. Even though the supporting technology and platforms have never been more abundant, capable, efficient and smart, we remain a math state, which ultimately will backfire and dumb down the agency ranks.

The rest of her article rails against the increasing dominance of the "math state" mindframe, especially in the agency community, and the harm that is doing to brands and the DNA of agency talent:

With our hyper-focus on efficiency, mastery of the mechanics, tuning of the [tool sets] — what can we really expect to do long-term for the brand? Even though they all have certain performance goals and sales targets, was the brand marketer's ultimate goal always such large-scale ROI? What about competitive marketshare; brand visibility; consumer advocacy; and so on? The way we operate now suggests that mass efficiency and uber ROI are the only imperatives. This cannot be an authentic long-standing objective that clients really have in their heart of hearts. We absolutely bred that beast with our math and our fancy tools.

Joe Zawadzki responded the following week with a rebuttal: Why the "Math Men" Will Set Online Advertising Free.

He pushes back hard — not that technology should rule the roost, but that rather it's an enabler for the very goals Kendall is championing. He writes, "In the past three years, all of those scary concepts of RTB, DSP, ad exchanges and data exchanges have been about radically fixing digital advertising — using technology and math [to] do what computers and models do best — freeing people up to be able to think."

A section of his article that I found particularly compelling:

There's no unringing a bell: math and technology are part of [the] future of marketing.

But it's not art or science, people or machine. It's mad men AND math men.

Marketers can rise up above the drudgery of execution. They can put systems in place — yes, the demand-side platform — that provide the technical and analytic infrastructure to succeed in this next generation of marketing. Math and technology have already been bundled and made easy to use, so why resist: let the machines do what they are good at, and let them help the marketer be smart again.

Then marketers can focus on stunning creative concepts, or bold re-imaginings of the brand promise. The machine won't come up with the message, but it will optimize the medium like it's no one's business.

Kendall (and a whole mob of other people) then join in the comments.

Kendall replies, "I do not eschew the math. But, I am deeply wary of its dominance in the business and brand-building equation. That is dominance implied by a total math state that we run the risk of establishing if we don't keep mindful of the balance."

Good points on all sides. What do you think?

(Thanks for alerting me to this, Audrey.)
May 16, 2011
2:22
Put strategy and creative ahead of marketing technology
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Where should marketing technology live in the marketing organization?

I agree with Forrester's recommendation of creating an office of marketing technology within the department — headed by a marketing CTO or chief marketing technologist, reporting to the CMO. (For smaller companies, that "office" might consist of a single marketing technologist with many hats.)

But what should be marketing technology's relationship to the rest of the marketing team?

The above diagram proposes one possible structure:
1. Leadership
2. Marketing Strategy
3. Creative
4. Marketing Technology
5. Marketing Operations & Tactics
6. IT Protocols & Policies
In practice, modern marketing is far less "top down" than this diagram suggests. But the prioritization of these components is important.

Technology does not generate leadership, strategy, or creative. While it certainly can inspire and enable brilliant new ideas — and a good marketing technologist should continually feed such possibilities up to those levels — technology will not fix bad strategy or creative.

However, once it's properly aligned with strategy and creative, technology should have dominant influence over marketing operations and tactics. Much of the power of marketing technology is its ability to efficiently automate and optimize marketing processes, accelerating them and making them more agile. You want to minimize grunt work and free up marketing's human resources for more meaningful contributions.

Finally, even though marketing should take control of its domain-specific technology, it still must adhere to IT governance policies, especially with regard to security and data compliance regulations. Ideally, this layer should not unduly constrain the mission of marketing above it, but it's prudent to respect its checks and balances.
What is the domain of marketing technology?
I see the domain of marketing technology as the intersection of three capabilities:
- Application software built for marketing, often highly configurable
- Programming, such as customer-facing apps/web sites and integration "glue"
- Data collection, analysis, and deployment in personalized experiences
Applications are now mostly cloud-based, including software such as PPC bid management, marketing automation, social media monitoring, post-click marketing platforms, SEO auditing and automation, and web content management.

Programming can be as simple as a little bit of scripting to "glue" together several different applications. It can be as sophisticated as customized data mining and parallel processing on "big data." But the heart of programming in marketing is the development of customer-facing applications, be they mobile apps or web-based experiences.

Data is the input and output of all marketing technology. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don't believe that the blossoming field of "data science" in marketing should be treated separately from other marketing technology. Data and the applications that generate it and use it are inexorably tied together. While some marketing technologists may specialize in data management and analysis, they should be distanced from the engines of that data.

(For more details on the specialties of marketing technology, see 8 things every marketing technologist should know.)

What do you think of this structure? Would you arrange it differently?
May 13, 2011
12:43
5 Strategies for Business, Life and Really Hard Math Problems
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

These are remarks I'm delivering today for the Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony at my alma mater, the School of General Studies at Columbia University. Since these five strategies come in handy in my work nearly every day, I thought I share them here as well.

When I arrived at Columbia, a 30-year-old software entrepreneur with a chip on his shoulder about never finishing college, I was pretty fearless. Tackle art history, no problem. Learn Chinese, no problem. Fearless.

Well, that's not quite true. Actually, I was afraid of math. Terrified, really. There, I've said it. All those clichés you've heard about computer people being good at math? I was the exception.

So, as excited as I was to major in computer science, I was dreading — dreading — the two or three math courses I had to take. The centerpiece of which was discrete math. (Important tip: any time someone puts a qualifier in front of the word "math" — pure math, applied math, discrete math — buckle your seatbelt.)

Of course, my luck, the professor who taught the class — Jonathan L. Gross — was renown for giving the hardest exams ever. For instance, one student noted that his tests are "often referred to as 'the learning experience.'" That sounds like code for pain, doesn't it?

Yet students also raved about how brilliant and funny he was, how he influenced their thinking, encouraged them to "become their own experts." And his repertoire of entertaining anecdotes was legendary. I have to admit, I was intrigued.

So, in a rare moment of bravery, I decided to face my fear and sign up. Bring it on, Professor Gross.

And he did. I won't sugar coat it, that course was one of the toughest intellectual challenges of my life. The exams? As advertised, ridiculously hard. (Although I suppose, like fish tales, they get a little harder every time I relate them.)

But everything I'd heard about Gross's brilliance, humor, wisdom, and wit was true too. This guy was inspiring. He didn't just teach us discrete math. He taught us mathematical thinking, the logic of proofs, creative problem solving — and in some Zen way, how it related to life. It was a difficult class for me, but — and I probably can't convince you of this second-hand — it also was fun.

In fact, the strangest thing happened: I, of all people, fell in love with math.

Now, love is one thing. Survival is another. It was a struggle to pull myself up from the mathematical swampland of my past to the Olympian plateau on which this class was at. But Professor Gross shared a few pragmatic strategies for scaling that mountain that helped me tremendously.

In fact, these strategies were so good, that long after I graduated, and forgot almost all of the math I worked so hard to learn, they stuck with me. Because not only were they useful for solving really hard math problems, I found them insightful for conquering other challenges in life too.

So I thought I'd pass them along to you: 5 strategies for business, life, and really hard math problems, my tribute to the wisdom of Professor Jonathan L. Gross.
#1: Do Something.
Gross used to say that the worst thing that could happen to someone in an exam was to "freeze" when they hit a hard problem. (And, in his class, most of the problems were hard problems.) People would just stare at the paper, not even sure how to begin. A blank answer is worth 0 points.

His advice: snap out of it and do something. Anything. Start writing, break out little pieces, experiment with random methods. Even if you weren't sure what you were doing. At the very least, you might get some partial credit. More importantly, doing something makes progress — even a little baby step — which often leads to another baby step, and then another. Sometimes the great machinery of our subconscious just needs a little manual hand crank to get started. And suddenly that previously insurmountable problem starts being surmounted.

This is certainly true in life. As an entrepreneur, I've met a lot of other entrepreneurs... and a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs, but who never quite get going. There are always barriers, and people get hung up on them. They're not quite sure what to do, so they do nothing. Meanwhile, the successful entrepreneurs I know just start doing things. They take steps. Even if they aren't always the right ones, they make progress. They adjust course as they go along, but they move forward. They do something.
#2: Try Small Cases.
For instance, many problems in math revolve around X. (Like the country song: All My X's Live in Algebra.) And sometimes that can be tricky, working in abstract mathland. Gross's suggestion? Substitute 1 for X. Then 2. And then 3. And see how the problem behaves.

This is an incarnation of strategy #1, do something, that's usually easy to try. But it taps into the incredible pattern recognition capabilities of your brain, a finely-tuned product of evolution. We're naturally good at things like discerning a tiger camouflaged in the underbrush. This same powerful, parallel processing engine can be commandeered to pick out patterns in modern life, like on math exams or in building a business. Trying a handful of small cases helps you detect the pattern.

After Columbia, I went to business school at MIT, and my marketing professor presented this as his primary advice to entrepreneurs: test, test, test. Don't just leap in with one big bet. Start with a few small tests, look for the pattern, tweak and test again. Once you've unlocked the pattern: only then do you go big. Your odds of success increase dramatically.
#3: Work the Problem from Both Sides.
A common problem in math is to show that equation A is equal to equation Z. You do this by manipulating one, step by step, to turn it into the other. So you go from A to B, B to C... but people often get stuck on one of these steps and just stop. Gross's advice? Work the problem the other way too. So if you get stuck going from C to D, jump to the other side and work backwards from Z to Y, Y to X. And then meet in the middle. Okay, sometimes with a little hand waving between, say, L and P.

In software engineering, this is like a applying a mix of top-down and bottom-up design. In business, it's spending time both working backwards from a customer's needs, while working forward on new inventions and ideas. Want to publish a book? Work forward building an audience and developing your material, while working backwards getting to know publishers and agents. Don't let yourself get stuck in a one-way tunnel.
#4. Collaborate.
Okay, Gross didn't suggest that we collaborate during exams. But for homework assignments, he strongly encouraged students to work together in groups of two or three.

I teamed up with two very good friends, Frank Enos and Leo Kim, and we spent many an hour at a whiteboard working through problems. One of us would take the lead, madly writing arcane symbols on the board until hitting a conceptual wall. Then we'd step back, until someone else would say, "Ah ha!", seize the marker and scribble the next step. We went back-and-forth, questioning and explaining as we went, until the solution emerged to great cheers.

I learned more at that whiteboard than I could have ever imagined. And experienced more joy in collaboration too. Those days at the whiteboard instilled a vision for the kind of work environment that I now try to build in my company. Who you choose to work with will impact your ideas, your approach, and your enthusiasm. So choose carefully people whom you can have fun with at a whiteboard — or your creative medium of choice — while solving the hardest problems the world can throw at you.
#5. Don't Rely on Self-Serving Rhetoric.
Gross's exams were hard enough that even the TA's had trouble with them, which made grading a little tricky. So if you felt your score was not reflective of your answer, you could resubmit it to Gross with a written explanation, justifying your approach.

But with this warning: your explanation better have real mathematical merit. I always felt like the threat was that an unjustified regrade request could actually lower your score. I remember him saying once, something to the effect of, "You got into an Ivy League college. I assume that you can write self-serving rhetoric. You better give me something more."

That really stuck with me. The world is full of people who are proficient at self-serving rhetoric. And, hey, you should certainly wield that skill when the occasion calls for it. But the difference between being a stuffed shirt and someone who truly makes a difference in the world is the substance behind the rhetoric.

Do something. Try small cases. Work the problem from both sides. Collaborate. And don't rely on self-serving rhetoric. Six years out from Columbia, that's what I really remember. And it's been invaluable.
Bonus Strategy: Be Undaunted by Hard Problems.
One last thing. You still might wonder why Professor Gross gave such hard exams — doesn't really seem necessary to impart these strategies, does it? Well, he told me once — and again, I'm paraphrasing from memory — something to the effect of, "Making a million dollars is a hard problem."

He wanted students to be undaunted by hard problems. Discrete math exams were just one way getting us comfortable confronting them.

Maybe you want to make a million dollars. Or a billion dollars. Or win the Pulitzer Prize. Or the Nobel Prize. Or fix our crazily dysfunctional government. There's a hard problem. Just ask the current Columbia grad in The White House.

Whatever hard problem you dream of solving, I know Professor Gross would encourage you to tackle it with passion and tenacity. And if any of his strategies help a little — even though I've barely done them justice here — I think he would be pleased.
May 12, 2011
12:11
Forrester: Establish a marketing technology office
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
A recent Forrester report on Understanding The Marketing Technology Buying Process (which is also available from Neolane) had a few exciting revelations.

Their survey of 137 customer intelligence professionals — whom they see as a new breed of marketer — showed that marketing is now starting to lead the buying process for marketing technologies.

I know, that probably sounds obvious — marketing leading marketing technology decisions. It's like asking who's buried in Grant's Tomb? But until recently, such technology was either controlled primarily through the IT department or woefully under-adopted due to cross-organizational red tape.

Now, it seems that marketers are finally taking charge of their technological destiny as the final decision-maker in many marketing technology decisions:

This isn't an honorary decision-maker title either, because — perhaps most telling — marketing is now allocating a significant portion of their budget for the purchase, maintenance and support of marketing technology applications:

But while this is terrific progress, Forrester also notes that many marketing departments have a ways to go before they're able to fully handle this new responsibility:

"The empowered consumer, rapidly changing technology landscape, shifting software economics, and access to customer data and addressable media make technology management a core marketing competence. But while marketing organizations increasingly own the technology decision, they remain ill-equipped to select, manage, and deploy technologies to successfully establish competitive advantage."

Their chief recommendation for addressing this gap in the marketing department:

Establish a marketing technology office. Marketing organizations need a single place for all technology decisions. The marketing technology office must:
1. Develop a deep understanding of the entire technology ecosystem from advertising and branding to analytics and automation;
2. Coordinate the IT relationship;
3. Manage vendors and service providers;
4. Embed technology in to the marketing process.
For more thoughts on this, read the full report or check out my presentation on The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist.
May 06, 2011
11:26
From marketing specialties to marketing mash-ups
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Written version of my Search Insider Summit presentation today:

In the beginning, there was marketing. Simply marketing.

Then, in the era of Mad Men, the marketing universe split in two. Suddenly, we had brand marketing, building a brand image, a position in the market — marketing above the fray. Versus direct marketing, right down in the frothy fray of persuading individual prospects to do something, the origin of calls-to-action and conversion rates.

Specialized galaxies of marketing began to form — different tactics, philosophies, domains of marketing. There was channel marketing — managing distributors and dealers, reaching our audience through these intermediaries. Product marketing focused on the design and features of what we were delivering. Can we build it so they come? And database marketing — the first real intersection of marketing and technology — to segment and test, primarily in direct mail.

The concept of industrial marketing led to a bifurcation that would eventually become known as B2C marketing to consumers and B2B marketing to businesses. (Years later Gord Hotchkiss would publish The Buyersphere Project to show that this conceptual split actually obscures the point that in both scenarios we're marketing to emotional and beautifully irrational creatures.)

By the 80's and early 90's, the westward expansion of marketing specialization was in full gear. Some highlights included Jay Conrad Levinson's guerrilla marketing — a pragmatic, non-conventional attitude that infuses many of our marketing practices today. The development of global marketing programs, sparking the debate of centralization vs. localization that continues to this day. Relationship marketing championed by Regis McKenna focused on longer-term views of customers — which set the stage for the multi-billion dollar CRM software industry. In a similar vein, with a more consumer emphasis, was loyalty marketing, the origin of points and badges.

It was a fertile time for marketing invention and reinvention. But we hadn't seen anything yet. Because in the mid-90's, the web arrived and changed everything.
The Web as rocket fuel for marketing specialization
Initially, this was just one new offshoot of marketing, a rose by many names: internet marketing, online marketing, web marketing, interactive marketing, new media marketing, digital marketing — your label of choice depended on your point of reference. Digital marketing has probably won out as the most resilient variation.

But it was at this moment that arguably the most regrettable schism in our industry occurred: all this was online marketing, everything else was offline marketing. And for a while, the two slept in separate beds — just long enough to establish schizophrenic politics, precedents and silos that would haunt us for the next 16 years. Thank you very much.

The seeds of online marketing soon spread and germinated, quickly specializing on "Internet time." Search engines were born — followed minutes later by search engine marketing. A whole subculture grew around this speciality — with conferences and summits and rap battles debating PPC and SEO subspecialties that live on to this day. Seth Godin popularized the concept of permission marketing, which would influence a major shift in the marketer-marketee dynamic. The concept of crowdsourcing audience reach via affiliate marketing became even more effective than Tupperware parties. Email marketing thrived, garnering affectionate labels such as spam and bacon. And software vendors started to promote the capability of personalized marketing on this digital substrate — a promise that we keep making to this very day.

The Internet bubble may have burst at the turn of the 21st century, but Internet marketing specialization kept evolving. User-generated marketing emerged, as did the frequently related concept of viral marketing. With this staggering profusion of specialized marketing methods, someone raised the point that maybe we should coordinate our interactions with the customer, the combinatorially complex field of multichannel marketing. You can almost here the cha-ching for IBM's professional services.

Chris Anderson revealed the power of The Long Tail in Internet businesses, transforming segmentation and niche marketing into the far more sexy nomenclature of Long Tail marketing. As analytics proliferated in the marketing department and became meaningfully connected to the bottom line, performance marketing cast marketing as a source of revenue rather than an expense. (Now that's brilliant marketing.)

I'd also like to mention the amazing fields of conversion rate marketing and post-click marketing that emerged in this timeframe because, in full disclosure, this is what I do for a living and, objectively speaking, they rock.

But marketing specialization continued to accelerate. Data-driven marketing, the genetic splicing of database marketing with modern analytics, also known as analytical marketing or left-brain marketing. Mobile marketing — finally here after years of claiming to be here. The dancing elephant in the marketing room these days, social media marketing, in all its splendid incarnations — notable for, among other things, generating more self-proclaimed experts at a greater speed than any other subdiscipline in marketing history. Near ubiquitous bandwidth has powered a specialization in modern video marketing. And, courtesy of my MIT classmate Dharmesh Shah, we have another dichotomy: inbound marketing categorically distinct from outbound marketing — or pull marketing vs. push marketing, if you prefer.

Now we're really cooking, with new marketing specializations appearing almost faster than we can name them. Almost. Agile marketing, adapting agile software development practices in the marketing department. Computational marketing, closely related to algorithmic marketing — the immigration of Wall Street quants to Madison Avenue. David Meerman Scott's concept of real-time marketing, the ultimate conclusion of marketing's ever-accelerating clockspeed. Community marketing and the nurturing of our own gardens in the social media landscape. Content marketing as the three-way lovechild of search marketing, social media marketing, and good, old-fashioned brand marketing. Local marketing, which has been reborn via a plethora of new technologies and the popularization of the check-in. Too much marketing for you? There's the paradoxical antidote of unmarketing. And cloud marketing for leveraging a thousand blooming software-as-a-service platforms built for marketers.

Whew. Later at Search Insider Summit, Roger Dooley will blow people's mind, literally, with neuromarketing. And then on Saturday morning, Ben Edwards will enlighten the audience on agile.

All these different kinds of marketing begs the question: if marketing has an idea, but doesn't give it a jargony name... does it really exist?

Apparently not, so I'm going to call this the inflationary universe of marketing theory. Old marketing concepts never die, they just get fewer sessions on the conference circuit.
The power of marketing cross-pollination
Now nomenclature is fascinating, but I want you to take away something that you can actually use. And that's this: there's tremendous, untapped innovation in cross-pollinating among these specializations. Let me give you an example.

Take my favorite, conversion rate marketing, and say, content marketing. Now, each of these is a respectable field of marketing, each with books and books of best practices. Content marketing its experts, such as Ann Handley and Joe Pulizzi. Conversion rate marketing has its experts, like Tim Ash and Bryan Eisenberg.

But despite their respective success, each has its own weaknesses too. Content marketing can be a little shy when it comes to asking its readers and viewers to take the next step. (No offense intended to content marketers: heck, I spent most of high school pursuing a content marketing strategy.) Conversion rate marketing, landing page optimization, on the other hand, can be a little like honing pick-up lines. But, hey, sometimes people don't want to be picked up.

If you put these on a scale, ranging from free love to used car salesman, content marketing is on one end, conversion rate marketing is on the other.

But what if we mashed-up the best practices of each in the middle?

Build conversion-oriented landing experiences, like this example by Intuit. But instead of a single landing page of three bullets and a call-to-action, bring in much richer content. A walk-through. Not a qualified teaser price, but detailed pricing information. Not merely a meatball logo or two, but details of write-ups and endorsements. Not a hit-and-run social proof, but real feedback from real people. Give visitors the freedom to explore and learn, without losing the focus on conversion.

Or add a dash of content marketing authenticity into a conversion experience by surfacing the real people behind a product or service, like this example by Blue Mountain. Meet the people crafting e-cards, making them — and your offering — more real, more tangible.

Or take the concept of a landing page — like this example from Overland Storage, targeting a very specific search term — and multiply it the way we generate blog posts. Instead of a blog post per day, a laser-targeted landing page per day. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Where we measure the performance of this entire portfolio of post-click marketing.

I'm just scratching the surface here, but you can see that mixing these two kinds of marketing inspires a number of promising, creative ideas.

In fact, this one is so good, we should give it a name. How about conversion content marketing?
Marketing is dead, long live marketing
Okay, this is where the nomenclature police intervene.

Maybe instead of exponentially adding new combinations to this list, we should take this cross-pollination to its logical extreme. Let's strive to synthesize all of these different kinds of marketing into our worldview, converging rather than diverging. The Big Crunch instead of the Big Bang.

If we absolutely need a name for for this ultimate marketing mash-up, perhaps we could call it Renaissance marketing. Or maybe holistic marketing. Too New Age-y? Since we're leveraging all these other kinds of marketing, how about we call this meta-mash-up multi-marketing marketing?

Or, and this is a bit radical, what about... simply marketing?

Here are the slides to the above presentation:
Search Insider Summit: Marketing Mashup View more presentations from ion interactive, inc.
Source material from 131 different kinds of marketing.
May 03, 2011
11:06
A Few Good Marketers
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Jessep: You want conversions?

Kaffee: I think I'm entitled to them.

Jessep: You want conversions?

Kaffee: I want the clicks.

Jessep: You can't handle the clicks! Son, we live in a world that has web pages. And those web pages have to be built for persuasion. Who's going to do it? You? You, IT manager?

I want greater usability than you can possibly fathom. You weep for FrontPage software and you curse user-centered design. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that those extra hours spent tailoring good pages saves customers. And my hypothesis-driven approach, while incomprehensible to you, saves customers.

You don't want the clicks because deep down, in places you don't talk about at staff meetings, you want me on that testing platform. You need me on that testing platform. We use words like design, message match, and segmentation. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent marketing something. You use them as a Powerpoint.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very revenue I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up an optimizer and write some tests. Either way, I don't give a darn what you think you're entitled to!

Kaffee: Did you order the post-click platform?

Jessep: I did the job you sent me to do.

Kaffee: Did you order the post-click platform?

Jessep: You're goshdarn right I did!!
April 26, 2011
11:19
Lobbying for marketing technologists outside IT
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Last month, the IT Services Marketing Association published an interview with me, Do You Need a Chief Marketing Technologist? (Note: the article is free for ITSMA members, but $195 for everyone else.)

Although I've made the case for a chief marketing technologist several times before on this blog (my original post, my Search Insider presentation, and my Pivot presentation), the ITSMA interview had some great discussion and pushback on whether marketing should have its own technical staff.

Here's an excerpt from two of their questions:

ITSMA: How would you suggest that CMOs go about lobbying for their own group of technologists? Won't the CFO and CEO see this as a potential duplication of resources? Won't they say that the CMO needs to work harder to get what he or she wants out of the existing IT organization?

Brinker: First, this is largely a "net new" set of technology demands. This isn't about taking existing resources away from IT, and it's not about duplicating them. It's primarily a need for new resources. If there's a tradeoff in resources, it's largely inside marketing, which increasingly has less need for legacy resources in print advertising, direct mail, event marketing, etc. Those channels are being superseded by digital alternatives.

Second, marketing must understand — deeply — how these technologies work (and work together) to apply them effectively in creative and agile ways. They can't outsource or delegate that know-how in driving modern marketing campaigns. To achieve that, marketing must incorporate native technology talent on its team. It's not for the sake of doing the kind of work that IT has traditionally done; it's for the sake of doing an entirely new kind of marketing that uses software and data as a creative medium in its own right.

Marketing technologists are a function of an evolving marketing department, more than a reflection or referendum on IT.

ITSMA: How will the CMO avoid creating conflicts with the central IT group over turf, authority, budget, and resources?

Brinker: I firmly believe that the CIO and the IT department should have governance over all technology in the organization. But there's a distinction between governance and management that's important to recognize.

A board of directors has governance over a company on behalf of its stockholders, but it's the CEO who actually manages the company. A CFO and the finance department provide governance over budgeting and expenditures — but it's the heads of individual departments that manage and apply their own budgets.

Marketing needs to directly manage more of its application layer of technology. Marketing technologists, reporting directly to marketing managers, are the people who should implement and operate that layer. However, they should adhere to overarching rules and guidelines established by the IT department as part of the company's overall IT governance strategy. IT will play less of a role in defining and operating the applications and become more of a consultant to marketing as marketing selects its applications.

This governance of a federated structure is not a new concept in IT; it's been successfully employed in coordinating IT management across different divisions and regions that have differing IT needs. Technology-driven marketing is not a far stretch as a state within such a federation. In such an organizational configuration, the CIO retains the final say in a technology strategy or architecture, but as a day-to-day practice, marketing can run a good portion of its technology within that framework.

As for the issue of whose budget, marketing should pay for its marketing technology initiatives itself. To the degree that marketing can leverage other common infrastructure operated by IT, that's great — such common infrastructure is then clearly under IT's control. But for technology investments that are marketing-specific, it should be up to the CMO to trade off where money is best spent among software, service, headcount, etc.

If the CMO thinks that taking money from an underperforming advertising channel and applying it to enhancements to a marketing automation system will deliver better overall performance on marketing's objectives, that's exactly the sort of tradeoff that marketing should be making.

The entire article is available here, but again, it's $195 for non-ITSMA members.
April 25, 2011
10:34
Carpe marketing technology seize the platform, boys
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 a great article on customer intelligence hubs by Kenyon Blunt.)

But my main takeaway from this report was this: marketers are finally becoming comfortable leading their own technological destiny.

For instance, from the Forrester survey, 80% of the respondents claim that they, at the very least, adopt technologies in line with trends in their industry — if not faster. 53% of the respondents consider themselves to be technology leaders, either early adopters or fast followers:

That's a fairly aggressive position on technology adoption — and I suspect still much more aggressive than traditional IT. Why? Because IT typically optimizes for cost reduction and stability. Marketing leaders seeking customer intelligence to drive leads and sales are optimizing towards a different primary metric.

And take a look at the top three themes of these marketing organizations:

The three most common themes are:
- Improve the online customer experience (42%)
- Improve the multichannel customer experience (40%)
- Implement a system to measure the success of marketing campaigns (39%)
All of these imply marketing technology leadership to achieve their goals.

But a little further down the list, such leadership is explicitly stated: 20% reported that "deploy or unify a technology strategy for our marketing efforts" was one of their top three themes.

Yes, 1/5th of these marketing organizations are prioritizing technology strategy. (Sorry, I keep using bold because that truly is a sea change in marketing's orientation towards technology as a backbone rather than a black box.)

Does your marketing department have a technology strategy?
March 31, 2011
13:31
An inspiring case of IT-marketing governance
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
I have to share an inspiring IT-marketing experience with you.

I've advocated before that IT doesn't need to own and implement all technology in an organization in order to provide valuable guidance and oversight. Instead, the CIO can provide governance on independently operated technology projects much in the same way that the CFO provides financial governance for other departments — while still letting those groups wield their budgets without micromanagement.

Or, more broadly, how the Board of Directors of a company provides corporate governance on behalf of the shareholders — while still letting the CEO run the organization with a minimum of interference.

But would, could such utopia — marketers running their own technology projects with IT simply providing useful governance — actually exist in the real world?

Yes, it can. Because I just witnessed it first-hand.

Although I cannot reveal the specific company involved, I recently worked with a large, financial industry customer that had just subscribed to my company's post-click marketing SaaS platform. The purchase was made directly by marketing, to enable them to create new digital marketing campaigns and optimization programs — outside of the company's own IT department.

However, being a large, financial industry firm, it's important for the organization to be secure and compliant with all relevant regulations when it comes to data collection and information publishing. So, a member of the company's information security team intervened to review.
We're from the government and we're here to help
Now, many marketers shudder when they hear the phrase "IT review" because it sometimes seems like code for "the option for IT to unilaterally kill any project they disagree with." It often comes across as a process of erecting barriers rather than a way of overcoming them — some impenetrable blend of CYA and NIH.

But that was not what happened in this case.

The company's information security analyst started with their boilerplate list of review questions and topics — many of which were not applicable to our particular application. Uh-oh.

But whereas others might have stonewalled there and balked at any contextual subtlety ("one policy to rule them all!"), this analyst was genuinely eager to understand the nature of our software and how the marketer was going to actually use it. He quickly adjusted his questions — throwing out irrelevant ones, clarifying others — and then tailored a suite of software and network scans accordingly.
Yes, you can be secure and competitive
At every step, he described their rationale and invited discussion for ways we could address their objectives in ways that made sense in context. Sometimes the answers were simply choices of how the marketer would want to use our software. Not everything was black-and-white: risk management is inherently a matter of degree, balancing several competing trade-offs. (Hey, for maximum security a company can shut down all Internet access entirely — but that's going to have a few deleterious side effects on their business...) This analyst proactively worked to find the ideal balance for this specific project.

Throughout the process, he was thorough, efficient, and responsive. Most of all, his approach was a positive one — his default position on any concern was how to find a workable solution and to meet the needs of the marketer.

In the end, the marketer launched with our software quickly, adopting several good suggestions on operational parameters. We took away several great recommendations on how to make our platform better suited to more regulated environments, which we're currently adding to our product.

The whole process went incredibly smoothly and it achieved three huge benefits for them:
1. It got the marketer up and running quickly with the application of their choice.
2. It assured the company that there were no immediate security risks in doing so.
3. It positively influenced the vendor's (our) development agenda moving forward.
As far as I'm concerned, this experience is now my gold standard for IT governance of independent marketing technology.
March 27, 2011
20:26
Analytics: it's not about the math
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 analytics (the dismal science with a dashboard?). Collectively, these different beachheads combine into enterprise analytics.

He called it the "analytical equivalent of the European Union." I'll call it the United States of Analytics. It's a loose affiliation of independent groups in the enterprise who are harnessing similar techniques to their different domains. They're starting to connect to each other. And together, they share a common agenda: making better decisions in business based on data.
It's not about the math
But this transformation shouldn't be framed as data over human dynamics. To the contrary, the two should be entwined into a new culture of analytical leadership.

To illustrate this point, Tom quoted Karl Kempf — who has the title of Chief Mathematician at Intel and is an Intel Fellow — as saying: "If you want to be good about analytical decision-making, it's not about the math."

Yes, according to the Chief Mathematician, it's not about the math, "It's about the relationships."

"The math person must understand the intuition and speak the language of the business person." This is an asymmetrical relationship where the math person needs to have enormous respect for the business person, and the business person should have at least a little respect for the math person. The right models can help businesses compete, but models in the abstract have little value unto themselves.

A big part of capturing the value in analytics is being able to translate data into stories. "A lot of people can tell stories, a lot of people can work with data, but there aren't too many at the intersection," said Tom. "Without a story, you're not going to influence a decision very much."
New analytics: engineering + liberal arts
In Tom's opinion, there are 4 skills that analytics professionals need to step up to the next level:
1. The ability to tell a story with data.
2. The ability to help frame decisions with data.
3. The courage to stand firm when necessary.
4. Don't just identify problems in data — propose solutions!
Ideally, these skills should be applied in "agile analytics" — an approach, like agile development and agile marketing, that favors user-driven deliverables with frequent outputs and check-ins.

Tom sees this as essential to developing "a new analytical culture" that emphasizes:
- facts, evidence and analysis as central to the decision-making process
- a pervasive "test and learn" approach when there aren't yet facts available
- a free pass for push-back — okay to question people, "where's your data?"
- never resting on your analytical laurels — no model is a sacred cow
In surveying hundreds of corporate decision-makers, Tom found that the most common ways to "make better decisions" alternated between left-brain and right-brain techniques. Analytics was the #1 answer. But "changes in culture and leadership" was #2. Better data was #3. But "changes to process" and "better education" where #4 and #5 respectively.

"If your job is to make better decisions, you have to alternate between these two worlds."

"A new model for analytics is emerging," Tom said in closing. "There's no better time to be in analytics. But it will require new management approaches and new ecosystems. This is not business as usual — this is a historic opportunity to transform your industry and function."
March 15, 2011
20:03
Better than "If pigs could fly..." I guess
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

I've had an AT&T iPhone for several years now, and I must confess, the service in Boston and New York has been pretty poor. Dropped calls, weak signals -- the usual complaints. Which is why I found this ad in the San Francisco airport amusing:

"If There Really Were a Camelot, AT&T Would Have You Covered."

I presume the intent of the ad was to imply that AT&T could provide coverage anywhere. But an equally valid interpretation is: If Camelot were real, then AT&T would have great coverage — but since it isn't, they don't. Like the phrase, "If pigs could fly, I could make calls reliably in Harvard Square."

Memo to the irony department.

But the iPhone camera works great. ;-)
March 13, 2011
17:42
75% of CMOs rearranging their teams in 2011
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
A colleague recently alerted me to an article in Marketing Week that shares new data from a Forrester report by Chris Stutzman:

An astonishing 75% of chief marketing officers plan to rearrange their teams by the end of this year, according to a study seen exclusively by Marketing Week.

Why? Because new forms of media and communications are having such a fundamental effect on business that the customer is closer to becoming king than ever before. Meanwhile, many businesses that still operate under models that were designed for another time, are lagging behind consumer trends.

For three-quarters of marketing heads to be saying that they are going to rejig teams at the same time seems like a bit on an epiphany.

Stutzman is quoted as saying, "It's almost like a reality check went off within marketing leadership, where they realized they can't be the brand of the future through yesterday's organization."

Amen — it's about time we reached this tipping point!

The Marketing Week article goes on to suggest four ways that brands can do things differently "in the wake of this new media explosion:"
1. Get rid of the ghettos — no more teams working on projects in their own worlds.
2. Don't hire a social media specialist — the company as a whole should engage.
3. Experiment and negotiate — set aside an ample experimentation budget.
4. Get your customer service right — don't say customer-centric, be customer-centric.
Reminds me of some of the ideas Chris Kuenne shared a couple of weeks ago, such as the vision of a Rubik's Cube structure for the marketing department.

The Marketing Week article includes some insightful weigh-ins from InterContinental Hotels, Epson, Thomson Reuters, ING Direct, Disney, and more. Read the entire piece here.
March 12, 2011
13:14
If it's in an infographic, it must be true
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 your company out of the quagmire of publishing — or worse, making decisions on — bogus infojunk? Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie With Statistics (1954!) is a great primer for avoiding and debunking the common errors of logic and visualization, intentional and unintentional, packaged in this way:
- correlation does not imply causation
- avoiding selection bias with truly random sampling
- visual tricks of scaling that confuse and distort
Or you could read pretty much anything written by Edward Tufte.

Or you could simply grok the different levels of what's being satirized here (click to go to the original site):

Infographic by Smarter.org
March 04, 2011
12:56
The tyranny of consumerization. Really?
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

A headline on Computerworld this morning caught my eye: Apple's iPad 2 provokes IT anxiety. I can imagine the iPad stirring up a lot of reactions — including mere indifference — but anxiety? That seems incongruous. Unless maybe you're HP, Motorola or Samsung.

But the article starts off with, "As exciting as the new iPad 2 is bound to be for both consumers and business users, some IT executives who will have to support the second-generation Apple tablet are already cringing." They're concerned that the new features and apps "will likely lure many business users to try out the new device."

"Generally speaking, the massive numbers of workers who are using consumer-focused products like tablets and smartphones for business tasks are already forcing their will on IT shops and the corporations they serve."

And then there's this:

"I have coined this 'the tyranny of consumerization,'" said Dave Codack, vice-president of employee technology and network services at TD Bank Financial Group in Toronto. Codack's group supports some 81,000 workers at the financial services firm.

Codack is not a Luddite, not even close, and says his IT staffers "seem to be excited" about the new dual camera feature, the dual processor,the improved graphics and the lighter weight of the iPad 2. "I believe this translates into additional perceived benefit for end users," he said.

But, Codack quickly added that, "Frankly, the newer technology is making these devices more consumer oriented. With employees using these devices in their day-to-day lives, it's inevitable they will expect enterprise support to eventually bridge these two worlds, which will put pressure on the internal technology organization to step up."

He call the process a form a tyranny because "the enterprise is not dictating technology with these devices, the revolt is coming from the end user community."

Now, I appreciate that new technologies like iPhones and iPads change the expectations of what IT must support — or, in some cases, are simply taken out of the loop of supporting. And, fair enough, those new expectations may not be what IT would have wanted to deal with relative to the rest of their agenda.

But if you're a technology professional — your life and your career are all focused on technology — surely you have to expect change like this. Even if you can't predict or control it. You're at least ready to accept it, if not outright embrace it for the new innovation it enables.

It would be kind of like a marketer decrying the tyranny of the customer in the new age of the Interwebs. "They want to visit our web site any time of the day, expect it be up and running, have the latest content. They expect to find us on Google and Bing. They even expect to find us on Facebook and Twitter — and then they actually expect us to respond when they talk to us!"

What do you think?

P.S. I can't help but think of the recent 37signals post: The end of the IT department.
March 01, 2011
10:20
Visualizing marketing analytics with Tableau
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 to find structure, trends, and insights. These visualizations are all interactive, so you can zoom in on individual items, filter subsets of data, link several different visualizations into a multi-pane dashbaord — all point-and-click.

It's fun, creative, and inspiring.

This beats the pants off of the typical Excel report. As Jock Mackinlay, Tableau's Director of Visual Analysis, said, "The human visual system is very good at looking at data presented visually — compared to being very slow at "mental math" with just tables of numbers." Tableau was designed to tap into our visual intuition, and it does so marvelously.

If you're into marketing analytics, budding as a data scientist, you should run — not walk — to download their free trial. The professional desktop version runs $1,999, which isn't cheap, but if you're an analytics professional, it's well worth it.

Also, check out Tableau Public, which is a free version of Tableau that can be used to publish and share public data visualizations. It's primarily meant for journalists and bloggers, and includes some terrific examples of what Tableau can do — such as an example of how fast successful tech companies grow.
February 28, 2011
12:13
A Rubik's Cube structure for the marketing department
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
In case you haven't seen it yet, Chris Kuenne wrote a terrific guest editorial in Ad Age a couple of weeks ago: Four Talent Categories You Need to Win in a Connected World.

This is one of the best articles I've read yet that focuses on how the structure of the marketing organization needs to — and is finally starting to — change. He makes an apt analogy comparing the old approach to football teams and the new, emerging approach as rugby teams. His point being that new marketing has much less of a "linear" flow than in the past, and marketing teams must have a more agile and collaborative deployment methodology.

Writes Chris, "It's a major transition from the hub-of-the-wheel organization in which the brand or product manager is at the center to the Rubik's Cube structure that requires all functions to be interlocked with one another as they rotate around a core — the brand — in perpetual pursuit of the winning platform."

The four talent categories required for a successful marketing organization? According to Chris:
1. Strategic
2. Analytic
3. Program design
4. Technological
To quote his paragraph on technological talent, which asserts the need for marketing technologist leaders in this new structure:

Is your team able to build engaging interactions across platforms in a stable and scalable manner so that the customer experience is consistent across devices? Just as important, do you have a technologist as a member of your inner circle, someone involved in initiatives from the start? We are seeing the emergence of the chief marketing technology officer on both the agency and client side — evidence of a broadening of the marketing team's composition and outlook.

He also emphasizes the importance of culture in the reconfigured marketing team.

"As CMO, your other challenge is culture," states Chris. He notes that traditional marketing brand strategists and interactive program architects must now mesh with analytic Mozarts and technology whizzes. "The result: the high school equivalent of the captain of the football team hanging out with the class chess champion and the AV club president. You must encourage collaboration across radically different temperaments, skills and backgrounds."

Definitely worth reading the complete article.
February 18, 2011
11:29
A marketing-math geek's formula for success
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Want to know the formula for success? Here it is:

This was published by marketing metrics master Pat LaPointe earlier this week in his Metrics Insider column. Read the full article for his accompanying explanation and insight.

Success is the sum of all your experience finding insights, transforming them into action, and trying to create more value than the resources you consume in the process. And then all of this is raised to the power of perception.

I love this. He should make a poster of this for marketing-math geeks like me.
February 16, 2011
12:04
Mashing media, advertising and technology (interview)
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

I lived in New York City for about five years, and if I had to name one thing about the city that I loved most, it was its energy. The city just crackles with creativity and drive. Our inaugural marketing technologist interview was with New Yorker Jonathan Mendez, who in turn, introduced me to today's metropolis-based interviewee: Darren Herman.

Like Jonathan, Darren is a multi-faceted marketing technologist: an entrepreneur, an early-stage venture investor, and the chief digital media officer of kbs+p/The Media Kitchen. Some of kbs+p's clients include Giorgio Armani, Victoria Secret, Delta, PBS, Vanguard. As we were editing this interview, Darren unveiled a new initiative — kbs+p Ventures, an early-stage investment arm of kbs+p. (Coincidentally, their first announced investment was in Jonathan Mendez's Yieldbot.) He also has a terrific blog where he shares additional thoughts and ideas on this space.
Darren Herman, Chief Digital Media Officer, kbs+p/The Media Kitchen

I find that many of the people who really "get" marketing technology have been Internet entrepreneurs or digital agency leaders. You're both! What led you into this field?

Yeah, my background and CV wouldn't pass the traditional talent management/HR departments of most major agencies, and I think that's fantastic. I started my "career" as an entrepreneur at a young age and got my feet wet with building startups from the ground up.

I was introduced to the first love of my life, the Apple II and fascination began. I've done everything from contracting dysentery on the Oregon Trail, traveled around galaxies in Pax Imperia, and built some of the worlds largest cities (Sim City). [Ed: Early video game references here and here.]

After 12 years of building technology driven startups, I entered the agency world with a transparent agenda of bringing the two worlds together. At kbs+p, we call this Curated Collision.

Innovation happens in garages of Palo Alto. Innovation happens in the lofts of NYC. And many places in between. In order to truly understand where innovation is happening and how to harness it, you need to have experienced it first-hand and deeply participate in it. Sending out an RFP to a startup and asking them to fill out a proposal in Excel format is not harnessing early stage innovation.

"Sending out an RFP to a startup and asking them to fill out a proposal in Excel format is not harnessing early stage innovation."

I'd like to think that we're making great strides at understanding how marketing and technology are coming together and how to build and invest in the capabilities that an agency would need both internally and externally for the forthcoming decades.

On your blog, you wrote that you are fascinated by the "white space" that exists between media, advertising and technology. What do you mean by that?

The application of technology within the media and advertising world is sexy to me. I don't know why, but somewhere in my DNA is a strand that recognizes this. Depending on the startup I'm working on or the agency I'm at, I get to position myself within this white space. In some cases, it's only 2 of the three. Today, it's all 3. It's fascinating.

The white space is ripe for innovation. Chaos breeds opportunities for taming and when you are able to tame an area, you are recognizing opportunity and building both process and foundations that allow you to innovate on top of. Sometimes this innovation is technical. Sometimes it's process oriented. Either way, it's the opportunity of the white space that is thrilling because most people are scared of it and don't want anything to do with it. I like to think that I thrive on the uncertainty and chaos.

"The white space is ripe for innovation. Sometimes this innovation is technical. Sometimes it's process oriented."

Tell me about your role as Chief Digital Media Officer at kbs+p. What kinds of marketing technology are you working with these days? How do you evaluate and adopt them, internally and with your clients?

As Chief Digital Media Officer, I get to play both a client-facing role and an internal operations role. As client-facing, I along with my team provide strategies and tactics that allow us to put forth the best media plans and digital direction possible to hit whatever their goals are. From an operational perspective, I make sure we have the best tools and processes in place to deliver on both our client goals but also agency efficiencies. Part of my day involves talking with our clients, part of my day involves meeting with various agency brand teams, and the other parts are meeting with partners and vendors who can make our total solution/product better. Each day is different and that's what the thrill of the job is to me.

We're seeing a boom in the types of marketing technologies that are available to us. Everything from next generation search bid management tools to our internally incubated trading desk and DSP, Varick Media Management, through to data management platforms, dynamic creative, etc. The list can go on for pages. However, there is a trend I'm seeing and it deserves a paragraph or two here.

"We're seeing a boom in the types of marketing technologies that are available to us."

Digital is driving cross-silo collaboration and the tools that are being built are best used by multiple agency teams. Let me explain. In the early days of digital, and even today in some agency cases, digital is/was silo'd. There was a digital group that used digital tools and planned digital campaigns. By doing this, agencies essentially created a silo. Silos in themselves exhaust inefficiencies and are hard to integrate into the fabric of the larger agency. What I'm seeing today withi the digital landscape and how we're uniquely positioned is that agencies who can offer an integrated offering (creative + media + communications) can drive a BIG digital idea that is exponentially greater than if it's silo'd into one area. Think about it — any digital idea needs development, creative, media, PR, etc. If it's all in one place and controlled tightly, it can be positively executed against.

Marketing technology (or ad tech as I refer to them) tools are being created now that service horizontally, not just vertically. These are the types of tools that are extremely important because they drive integration and they create stickiness. An example of this is a tool that can deliver a form of media, but drive insights that inform planning, and make ad operations much simpler. Maybe too simple an example but at least you get the picture. I think there is significant opportunity there and in order to deliver digital, which is not easy, you need to be integrated or at least have extremely tight agency partnerships and work really, really hard and well together.

You've worked with many different companies as an entrepreneur, an advisor, a consultant, an agency executive. From your experience, what makes some organizations more successful harnessing marketing technology than others?

Marketing technology generally disrupts whatever came before it. In order to be successful with marketing tech, you need to understand and let go of previous iterations and ideations of how you executed in the past. It's hard to let go of what worked in the past — and having the vision to understand how the new shiny tool will deliver differently. Firms who have the vision and the patience to integrate a new tool have, in my opinion, the best chance of harnessing all of its power.

"In order to be successful with marketing tech, you need to let go of previous iterations and ideations of how you executed in the past."

Where firms fail is when they dip their toe in the water. You cannot do this, but all too often, it's done. You can't half-ass an integration. It'll fail. You'll end up spending a lot of money for almost no gain.

Take the installation and integration steps seriously and you'll have the best chance of successfully launching marketing technology. Then of course, but you'd be shocked at how many companies don't do this — TRAIN your staff. Spend time and resource to make sure all of your staff knows how to use the tools. Do not keep the tools silo'd into just one business unit.

You've written that we're entering "the data decade." Beyond standard analytics, what should marketers — and marketing technologists — be think about with big data?

The astute data person calls me out on this every time. The reason: we've been in the data decade every since products and services exhausted data!

However, what I refer to regarding the "data decade" is the proliferation of thinking around harnessing the data to make business transforming decisions which are now much quicker due to digital exhaust. All too often we think of these decisions to improve media efficiency and targeting, but we also can use this data to inform product development, customer service, human resources, and the list goes on.

"We can also use this data to inform product development, customer service, human resources."

Marketing technologists could be at the forefront of this as they are the ones who are identifying opportunities to harness technology for their organization. I think though that "marketing" would just sell it short — depending on the brand/agency of course. You should think about how to leverage technology to support the entire organization. There are key decision makers and influencers outside of the marketing group, so make sure you have the opportunity to figure out who they are and align them with the vision.

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

Since innovation is happening at such a rapid pace, the best CMO's will be (a) open to innovation and (b) able to identify where they should place their bets.

If the CMO doesn't have an informal council of people to call upon to help vet opportunities, they should plan for this. Innovation doesn't happen in a vaacum and there takes an entire village to raise a startup, so CMO's should make friends with venture capitalists, world-class entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders to make sure that they understand the entire ecosystem.

"CMO's should make friends with venture capitalists, world-class entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders to make sure that they understand the entire ecosystem."

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

Tinker as much as you can. Tinkering is easiest when you work within a technology company, but since many marketing technologists work within agency walls without technology, it's hard to get the experience. If you want to deal with technology on the day to day, especially in marketing and advertising, go take some time and join a technology driven startup (or larger company) and learn the ins/outs.

"Tinker as much as you can."

Thanks, Darren. Inspiring ideas!
February 15, 2011
9:55
Looking for an amazing marketing technologist
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
I'm looking to hire an amazing marketing technologist.

As my company — ion interactive — grows, we're finding that there's a gap between our account service team and our engineering team. The account service group are primarily marketers, teaching other marketers how to implement successful post-click marketing with our product, LiveBall. The engineering team are primarily software developers, building the product.

But between those two realms, there's a space to provide support and services to our customers who need more technical answers, insights, and ideas. Answers that are more technical than the account services team can handle — but that aren't really engineering issues for our development team. Common examples include:
- integrating analytics, such as Google Analytics, Site Catalyst
- wiring up exchange of data with form posts, query strings
- installing/verifying cookie tracking across multiple sites
- connecting our software with marketing automation systems and CRMs
- adding widgets and social media connect features
- implementing custom Javascript features and behaviors
- helping to resolve HTML and CSS oddities, especially cross-browser
- providing a logical, technical approach to web-based "mysteries"
The ideal person that I'm envisioning for this role would be able to tackle these challenges at multiple levels:
- first, dive in with a hands-on approaching to helping people with these issues
- second, improve the process by which these issues are managed in our company
- third, publish knowledge and help train others to nip more issues in the bud
- fourth, consult to our engineering team to improve the product accordingly
- fifth, build relationships with third-parties to provide additional services
- sixth, as we grow, hire and lead a team of other support marketing technologists
This role would thrive at showing other marketers (and other budding marketing technologists) how to harness the intersection of marketing and technology.

This is an opportunity to apply marketing technologist and leadership skills in a highly entrepreneurial position, playing a key role in the growth of a pioneering marketing technology platform — our software has been adopted by American Greetings, Cigna, DHL, eMusic, General Mills, Intuit, Iron Mountain, and more.

The position would be either a "manager" or "director" level position, depending on your experience level — but my hope is that a manager could grow into a director. This person would report to me (CTO) and would need to be based at our Cambridge, Massachusetts office (some telecommuting is doable). We offer terrific compensation and a number of very attractive perks.

Because marketing technologists have such a wide potential background, the "requirements" for this position are ultimately that you'll be able to perform the above mission with passion and brilliance. But certainly a strong mastery of tools like Firebug would be good start.

Are you the one? Or do you think you know someone who is? Send me a note at sbrinker@ioninteractive.com.
February 14, 2011
13:08
Content marketing + conversion optimization
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

I'm a big believer in the power of "intersections," as described by Frans Johansson in his inspiring book on innovation, The Medici Effect.

The intersection of marketing and the-domain-formerly-known-as-IT is one, of course.

But recently I've also been exploring some fascinating ideas by mixing concepts from the 131 different kinds of marketing. Often, many of these subdisciplines of marketing grow independently of each other. Ultimately, however, they're all focused on building connections and bonds with customers — and they can learn a lot from each other.

Last week, I presented a session on The 5 Principles of Conversion Content Marketing at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, riffing on what content marketing can teach conversion optimization, and vice versa. Here are the slides:
Conversion Content MarketingView more presentations from ion interactive, inc..
What are some of the intersections that have inspired you lately?
February 09, 2011
13:03
Marketing technology at a 113-year-old firm (interview)
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Disruptive innovation can be exhausting. Exciting. Full of opportunity. But also relentless hard work. And with all the disruptive innovation wrought by the Internet — particularly the seismic changes in marketing — there are times when even the best of us could use a little boost of inspiration.

Today's marketing technologist interview was just that boost of inspiration for me because it features a 113-year old company — Thomas Publishing Company — which has adapted itself into this new digital century. And, hey. If a company with that much legacy can change, the rest of us have hope!

Brian Makas is the Director of Marketing Technology & Business Intelligence at Thomas's new incarnation, ThomasNet.com. He's had the opportunity to participate in their transformation at this nexus of marketing and technology. Here he offers us some of his perspective on that process, what his role looks like today, and more.
Brian Makas, Director, Marketing Technology & Business Intelligence, ThomasNet.com

Thomas Publishing Company was founded in 1898, right? What has it been like implementing digital strategy at a firm with such long history?

That's correct. Thomas Publishing Company was founded in 1898 when it started publishing the Thomas Register. For more than 100 years, the Thomas Register was the foremost directory of the industrial marketplace. That said, when I came on board in 2006, Thomas made the decision to stop publishing the print directory in favor of ThomasNet.com.

When ThomasNet first went online, it still listed the same 650,000 distributors, manufacturers and service companies within 67,000+ industrial categories... but... that was about it. It didn't take long before we realized that for our clients to be truly successful, we also needed to help them deliver the detailed content that engineers and purchasing managers want. And we needed to give clients a way to track their efforts and correlate that to their success.

So, I'm fortunate enough to have the best of both worlds. While I have access to over 100 years of industrial expertise, ThomasNet itself still has a fresh entrepreneurial spirit — in how we enable our clients' marketing departments to succeed and in which we, ourselves, engage in digital marketing.

Can you share with us a little bit about how your team is structured and the type of projects you're working?

To describe my job, can I just go ahead and check off every box in your 8 Things a Marketing Technologist Should Know post? In this last week alone I've been worked on optimizing landing pages, tweaking our social and search engine marketing initiatives, streamlining our CRM system, upgrading our marketing automation platform, providing our clients with more sophisticated means of tracking their return on investment and, finally, connecting a half dozen or so once-distinct data silos.

Although I get knee deep in code when it’s absolutely necessary, cloud technology makes it possible for me to leave ownership of the technology where it belongs: with the subject matter experts rather than with a team of technical experts.

"Cloud technology makes it possible for me to leave ownership of the technology where it belongs: with the subject matter experts."

How does your marketing technology team fit into the larger marketing organization? What's your relationship with IT?

Our IT department is responsible for the management of all physical (or "on premise") infrastructure. The marketing department is responsible for everything else, including any applications hosted in the cloud.

While IT provides a critical service — and we have a very positive relationship — our interactions are essentially limited to times when we need new hardware or when said hardware requires servicing.

How did you arrive at your current position? Was there a turning point in your career?

I'd say there were two key turning points.

The first occurred between my sophomore and junior years of college. I went to college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), majoring in computer science with the intention of becoming a programmer. But after interning at a small manufacturing firm I discovered I could have a much greater impact — solving problems that the staff didn't even know they had — simply by walking around and listening to what they were doing. That semester, I transferred into the newly formed school of IT, with a focus in Management Information Systems. I was one of the first five graduates — getting a job within my new company's Business Continuity Planning department, rather than in IT itself.

The second pivot occurred while working at The Wallace Foundation, where I came in as a network systems engineer. I soon heard about an upcoming website redevelopment project, and volunteered my time. This was the first time The Wallace Foundation began work on a website with IT included at the start of a project, rather than waiting for the business requirements to be defined. The timing was critical — enabling me to exceed design expectations and ensure the site met the foundation's strategic goal of facilitating idea-sharing by increasing downloads of their research reports by over 2,000%. I quickly found myself working nearly full time for marketing.

"I quickly found myself working nearly full time for marketing."

How do you see business intelligence evolving, both technologically and organizationally?

Having started my career in IT and having seen one too many mission critical databases built in Excel, I believe that "Shadow IT" can be a very real problem, particularly when IT is held responsible for producing a single view of an organization’s data.

On the other hand, cloud computing platforms now make it easy for marketing to develop fully scalable and standardized systems, with very little technical expertise. That's beginning to alleviate many of IT's concerns about rogue development as it naturally breaks down data silos and exposes data that might otherwise have been lost.

For example, we use Salesforce.com to manage our prospecting, lead nurturing, sales support, recruiting and client databases. Want to know how many times we touch the average prospect before they make their first purchase — or how support influenced their purchasing behavior? Thanks to the shared platform, we can quickly and easily cross reference the information stored in each application — in real-time and without IT support — even though the reporting need wasn't realized until well after the applications were built.

"We can quickly and easily cross reference the information stored in each application — in real-time and without IT support."

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

To fully quantify your marketing efforts, make sure the data is pulled together by a team that understands both the technical nuances and "gotchas" of data collection as well as the aims of the marketing department. And, as hard as it is to say in today's data-driven environment, sometimes you still just have to trust your gut.

Any advice you would give to new marketing technologists?

Success as a marketing technologist often comes from solving problems that others might not even be aware of. But to do that, you need to get involved early in the process.

Take the time to really understand the challenges marketing is facing — and make the effort to explain how new tools or new approaches can simplify their lives or make their efforts more successful.

"Success as a marketing technologist often comes from solving problems that others might not even be aware of."

Thanks, Brian! You know, as an odd personal coincidence, my dad used to work with Thomas Publishing back in the 1970's. It's very cool to see how it's evolved 40 years later.
February 07, 2011

Permalink for 'Got marketing technologists? 1,000-fold growth'

14:37

Got marketing technologists? 1,000-fold growth

» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

exponential growth of marketing technologists

This is both an anniversary post and a state-of-the-market update. Three years ago, I launched this blog to focus on marketing technology — and perhaps more importantly — the new professionals emerging at that intersection, marketing technologists.

At the time, I did a quick Google search for a couple of phrases: "chief marketing technologist" and "director of marketing technology" to see how popular those job titles were. Both terms predated my blog, although neither was particularly popular.

Yesterday, I ran those searches again — and this is how far they've come:

Google Search	February 2008	February 2011
chief marketing technologist	320	320,000
director of marketing technology	7,520	847,000

Granted, these counts are only estimates from Google, but the overall trend is clear: a 1,000-fold increase in the number of matching pages. Even if you generously assume that a couple thousand of those pages are directly related to my own writing, the broader proliferation of those terms dwarfs my humble contributions.

The marketing technologist meme is spreading!

Got marketing technologist? tweet from David Armano

Anecdotally, the number of times I've been seeing "marketing technologist" appearing on resumes, job posts, other blog articles, and social media discussions has been ramping up tremendously over the past 6 months.

For example, just over the past few weeks, here is some of the latest marketing technologist chatter I've seen:

The Marketing Technologist: Time has Come by Paul Dunay on his Buzz Marketing for Technology blog. This in turn was picked up by B2B Magazine and retweeted by many, including David Armano of Logic + Emotion and Edelman ("Got marketing technologist?"). Since Paul and David have inspired me for many years, I was particularly excited by this thread.

Cheryl Burgess of Blue Focus Marketing wrote a terrific piece on the "Quest for The Marketing Technologist" that garnered a large number of comments and tweets. And for good reason! She dives right into the untapped opportunity for marketing and IT collaboration, the intersection where marketing technologists thrive. Cheryl's post was also reprinted by B2C Marketing Insider.

Chris Penn, one of the co-founders of PodCamp, VP of Strategy and Innovation at Blue Sky Factory, and a pioneering marketing technologist himself, was recently featured in a two-part profile by BostInnovation, Boston's New Marketing Superstars: Chris Penn, The Marketing-Technologist Hybrid. To quote Chris from that article, "As a technologist, you know the capabilities of the tools you are using and the tools that are out there. You can then pick which tools fit the marketing goal."

And just this morning, I came across the post Marketing 2.0 (long read!) by Guerson Meyer, an MBA student in Spain and co-founder of foodieSquare (yum). In discussing new marketing — and why he was chosen as a co-founder in this new venture — he says, "It is clear that the role of marketing can only be found with the new marketing principles. At foodieSquare, acting as a Chief Marketing Officer and Technologist, my tasks will be to understand the implication of current and future technologies in the community and interact with them in the most efficient way in order to deliver a consistent message that is credible that will enable to build trust and loyalty with an emotional engaged community."

In addition, I've been hearing the term used by recruiters, seen job posts for marketing technologist positions on Monster.com, and talked with CMO's who are establishing chief marketing technologist positions. Marketing technologist roles are quickly becoming recognized as part of the modern marketing team.

Marketing technologist highlights from last year

If you're new to this blog — welcome! — and you'd like to learn more about marketing technologists, here are a few of the articles and presentations on the subject from last year:

Rise of the Marketing Technologist presentation at Search Insider Summit
The Case for the Chief Marketing Technologist presentation at Pivot
Should Your Company Have a Chief Marketing Technologist? on Mashable.com
The Time Is Ripe For a Chief Marketing Technologist on Six Pixels of Separation
Why Marketing Should Run Its Own Technology in InformationWeek
The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist in AdAge
Chief Marketing Technologist: Finding the Right Person on MarketingSherpa.com
The Role of the Marketing CTO or Chief Marketing Technologist at CloudTimes

For future reference...

I kind of wish that I had kept track of other terms back in 2008 to measure progress in this area. But it's not too late to rectify that for future analyses. Let's add a few more marketing technologist terms:

Google Search	February 2008	February 2011
chief marketing technologist	320	320,000
director of marketing technology	7,520	847,000
marketing technology		625,000
marketing technologist		109,000
VP marketing technology		194,000
vice president marketing technology		232,000
creative technologist		103,000

Other terms we should be tracking? Please add them in the comments!

P.S. When I launched this blog, I also mused about whether the term "martec" — short-hand for "marketing technology" — would catch on like "marcom" did for "marketing communications."

In February 2008 there were 78 results for the term "martec and marketing technology". In February 2011 it grew to 982 results. Well, as Meatloaf said, two out of three ain't bad.

February 02, 2011
11:54
Bring your A-game to marketing technology (interview)
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Earlier this week, I shared a presentation by marketing technologist Cleve Gibbon on building a marketing technology platform for engaging global brands. Today, I'm pleased to share with you our own interview with him.

Cleve is the Chief Technology Officer of Cognifide, a European digital technology agency that has built sites — or, as Cleve would insist, marketing technology platforms — for clients such as Skype and Virgin Media. He's a brilliant technologist with a Ph.D. in computer science. (His thesis was on bringing "techniques for building maintainable object-oriented software closer to the developer in the form of design heuristics.") And for the past 10 years he's applied his knowledge of technology towards building better marketing.
Cleve Gibbon, Chief Technology Officer, Cognifide

You've led marketing technology solutions for a number of major brands. Without revealing anything confidential, can you give us one or two examples that really highlight the impact marketing technology can have?

Our clients initially start off wanting a website, but we quickly re-establish what they actually need is a marketing technology platform. And by platform, I mean a reliable technical foundation and the supporting services required to execute marketing strategies that effective manage the end-to-end customer experience.

For one high traffic client, go-live saw a 28% uplift in conversion rates and by baking analytics in the core of the marketing solution, they are able to test customer experiences and continually optimise their marketing efforts.

For another client, we built and continue to manage their brand marketing platform across 14 different country sites. Their challenge was largely acquisitions and providing a clear communication channel for their customers to start and maintain a conversation with the right people within their organization. The results were astounding. Subsequent phases have been kicked off to widen the conversion part of the sales funnel. This requires marketing technology platform to integrate with CRM systems and social media channels to enable the client to have deeper and more relevant customer conversations.

"Our clients start off wanting a website, but we quickly re-establish that what they actually need is a marketing technology platform."

How did your career journey lead you here?

To fund my undergraduate education, I used to give training courses to technology companies. One day I was asked by the CTO of a security firm, "how can you tell if one piece of technology is designed better than another one." Back in 1994, there weren't too many answers to that question, so that became my doctorate.

I left academia and started a training company where for the next 10 years I built and supported numerous technology platforms, specialising in real-time trading systems for Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, ABN AMRO and USB. It was great timing and I was lucky to be part of some innovative development to build web-based solutions that manipulated massive data sets, shaping and using open standards that collaborated on interfaces and competed in their implementations. It was a busy time for the web.

"I was lucky to be part of some innovative development to build web-based solutions that manipulated massive data sets."

In early 2000, I was introduced to the creative agency Oyster Partners. This was my tipping point. Oyster Partners were building web sites for large global brands dipping their toe into raging digital waters with software teams that had an average age of 22 and the commensurate amount of experience. I loved the space. In 2006, I joined the executive board of Cognifide, where we are all ex Oyster Partners people.

Since you're based in London, can you give us a sense of the attitudes towards technology in marketing departments there? How have they changed in recent years?

We're lucky in that London is home to many of the world's leading global brands and creative / advertising agencies. We have a very mature digital industry that is lockstep with the evolution of effective marketing technology. Our edgy / quirky culture encourages marketers to be creative and innovative.

I've seen massive re-allocations of marketing spend taken from offline budgets and poured into digital initiatives. As marketing departments enter the digital space, the trend is to become more and more results focused.

The demand for what I call "A" class real-time data is staggering. "A" class data must be automated, accurate, aggregated, accessible, auditable and always available. There are trade-offs between the A's that ultimately impact the delivered results, but that's your job as a marketing technologist to understand and clearly communicate them back to the marketing department in a way that they can make informed and authoritative decisions.

"The demand for 'A' class data is staggering — automated, accurate, aggregated, accessible, auditable and always available."

As a consultant, you have the vantage point of working with many different marketing departments. What makes some companies more successful adopting marketing technology than others?

This answer talks somewhat to the previous point, but with a different A — that being Agile. Marketing technology enables marketing departments to be agile. Marketing agility gives businesses real-time customer insight and the ability to course correct their marketing strategies. The success stories come from those companies that go all out to embrace change. When executing marketing plans, it's not fire and forget, but more inspect and adapt. Expect small failures. Be prepared to continually inspect where you are and adapt your thinking, based upon a steady stream of marketing feedback.

Unfortunately, this is not for everyone. You may have an agile development team supporting a state-of-the-art marketing technology platform, but if the marketing department cannot be agile, those benefits will never be realized. Challenges range from changing traditional marketing attitudes to aligning external agencies (creative, advertising, pr) that are also non-agile nature. This has stunted many moves to adopt shorter marketing planning cycles and fed fear, uncertainty and doubt for agility in some companies.

"You may have a state-of-the-art marketing technology platform, but if the marketing department cannot be agile, those benefits will never be realized."

Agile marketing companies and/or those that want to become more agile, understand these challenges. We are entering into more and more discussions with these early adopters whose IT departments do not have agile mindset and/or the deep marketing technology expertise they need to execute profitable online.

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

Marketing technology serves as the catalyst to companies that value planning over the plan. Confidence comes from small successes and well-understood failures. Try something. Fail fast. Inspect and adapt. Rinse and repeat. This is the very essence of an organization that places optimization at the centre of an agile business culture and leverages marketing technology to the hilt.

Are there any marketing technology innovations that you're particularly excited about these days?

Honestly, no. When you take a look at the technology building blocks, nothing much has changed in terms of the APIs, standards, security and data formats recently. These are all well known to the technology industry. However, what does blow my mind are the unlimited number of ways that you can assemble these building blocks within the marketing space to solve some previously intractable business problems.

"What blows my mind are the unlimited number of ways that you can assemble these building blocks within the marketing space."

For example, the ability to track lifecycle of a prospect through the sales funnel, across multiple channels and digital media, taking every opportunity to localize and personalise the customer experience by targeting content based up their behavioral profile, is nothing short of breath taking.

Customer experience management (CEM) plays a big part in driving key marketing technology innovations for our clients. However, the flip side of CEM is Author Experience Management. Marketing departments needs authors to continually create, curate and deliver messages, typically through a content management system. Author Experience (AX) is a critical part of a marketing communications plan that is often overlooked. A marketing technology platform that invests in enhancing the AX enables marketers to focus upon executing and monitoring their campaigns instead of managing tools not equipped deal with their authoring needs.

"Author Experience (AX) is a critical part of a marketing communications plan that is often overlooked."

It always brings a smile to my face when I have an insightful web experience where a company correctly infers my online intentions. At that point, I tip my hat to the marketing technologist that is clearly one step ahead of their target audience.

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

You're expected to know that your customers don't know what they don't know. The best marketing technologists can deftly navigate through the noisy world of customer wants to surface their actual needs. Although the aim is to drive online revenue, focus upon providing solutions to real people problems, however big or small they may be.

People your products/services in the most compelling ways in markets that you're perceived in as a supportive influence and not the salesmen. Only then provide a marketing platform that does everything possible to facilitate that 3-way conversation between you, your customers, and the community.

Learn your trade. Understand your weaknesses. Form internal alliances and external partnerships with people that can fill those gaps. Marketing technology is a big place. The fastest moving target I've ever tried to hit. Get help. Support others. And be the best!

"The best marketing technologists can deftly navigate through the noisy world of customer wants to surface their actual needs."

Thanks, Cleve — awesome, applicable, and alliterated. And very inspiring.
January 30, 2011
13:45
Thinking of marketing technology as a platform
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 management:

What I want to talk to you today is about marketing technology platforms and how we got there. Because the journey wasn't as simple as it should have been.

First of all, I want to talk about three shifts:

The first shift is in marketing, and there has been a noticeable shift in which brands think about how they market. Traditional marketing moving into content marketing, and we'll talk about that.

The next big shift was a technology shift. And this isn't a shift in terms of what technologies we use: HTML, XML, [HTTP.] They're all known quantities. But the way in which we use the technologies has shifted, and how that adjusts our thinking in terms of marketing, I'll cover again.

Also, I want to talk about a platform shift. In terms of the platform, the shift there is more about how you get everything together and in and out of a platform. When we first started on our journey, we started talking about content management, but it sort of grew. And I want to show how that grew from a solution into a platform.

Then I want to give you some hard facts around Skype, which is one of our clients, and how they perceive customer experience management and what we're doing with them, taking them on their journey from content management all the way through to customer experience management.

Click here for the entire presentation.
January 28, 2011
11:58
The Mother of All Post-Click Marketing Diagrams
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

For my latest column on Search Engine Land, I sketched out a post-click marketing heuristic to help visualize the different factors at work in conversion optimization.

Or, as I call it more informally, The Mother of All Post-Click Marketing Diagrams (click to enlarge):

To read the article that explains this diagram, click over to Search Engine Land.

P.S. If you're a professional designer and my PowerPoint-based illustration makes you cringe, I'd be thrilled to have a collaborator for version 2.0. :-)
January 26, 2011
12:09
To marketing, then IT, and back again (interview)
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
For this week's marketing technologist interview, we move in-house to talk with someone who's balanced the relationship between marketing and IT on the front-line. In fact, he's worked for marketing, then IT, and then marketing again — all with the same mission. I'm thrilled to have Eric Long, an experienced online marketer, information architect, and web strategist share his perspective with us.

Eric is the Senior Manager of E-Business for the Decor Global Business Unit of Newell Rubbermaid. Newell Rubbermaid has 13 such business units, each with its own marketing department. Decor's brands include Levolor and Kirsch (window blinds, shades, draperies, and drapery hardware) and Amerock (cabinet hardware).

Eric also publishes ebusinessblog.org, which has more great ideas on this topic.
Eric Long, Senior Manager of E-Business, Newell Rubbermaid

First, how did you end up at the intersection of marketing and technology? What did your career path look like?

I think it's important to note that I really got into computers with Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) before I started working professionally. Networking computers so people in remote locations could carry on conversations fascinated me for some reason.

When it came time to choosing a college major, I knew I didn't want to "fix computers" but wanted to work in a field related to computers and the conversations they helped facilitate. This was very difficult for college advisers to grasp, and at the time the options were limited because technology was so foreign to many people. Computer science was "too techy" for me and a business degree was not techy enough. Then I stumbled upon management information systems and realized this 50-50 blend of technology and business was the perfect degree for me.

I spent my first 9 years working professionally for a small production and interactive agency doing work as an IT administrator and an interactive project manager. It was there that I learned that the world was not black and white and that I needed to move into the "gray area" — as I was told on numerous occasions by my heavily marketing-oriented colleagues.

It was through my time at this agency that I learned the value of the end-user experience and how, above anything else, this was the single, most important quality to a product.

"It was through my time at [an] agency that I learned the value of the end-user experience."

5 years ago I began working for the Decor Global Business Unit in Newell Rubbermaid as a web marketing manager and reported to the director of consumer marketing. I was tasked with launching our business into e-commerce on a new platform with a new shopping experience.

Can you tell me more about the relationship between IT and marketing in that e-commerce launch?

At the time, our e-business department was split up in 3 different departments:
- marketing
- IT infrastructure
- R&D/engineering
This silo'd approach was a result of small teams forming within specific department silos that needed "systems-related" work to be performed for projects.

After 2 years and a successful launch into e-commerce, it made the most sense to bring these 3 silo'd functions together. I was appointed the senior manager of IT Applications and managed the newly-formed team while reporting to the CFO. During this time we handled all IT-related requests that pertained to applications in the business unit (intranets, custom development, customer systems, internal systems, websites, etc.). The project list was long and extremely backlogged.

Another 2 years passed, and the organizational structure changed again—a new executive team was formed as the business was shifting from "fix" to "growth" mode. This time I moved back over to the marketing department with largely the same team members (and approval to expand the team for growth), and I would now report to the VP of Marketing. At the end of the day, each project my team works on has a direct impact on end-user experience, and we used this as a means to justify the move to marketing.

"Each project my team works on has a direct impact on end-user experience, and we used this as a means to justify the move to marketing."

For the marketing department to not have any managing authority over such an important strategic component (end-user experience) of our business would be a problem. IT should not be responsible for defining how customers or consumers experience our B2C or B2B systems. By realigning our team in marketing, we set up our business unit for long-term project alignment. We then shed our team of the list of internal projects (intranets, custom development, etc.) that were not impacting customers/consumers.

How does the team look today? What's under your e-busines umbrella?

At our Decor business unit, we break down e-business into the following 5 functions for which my team is responsible for:
1. Business Intelligence & Web Analytics
2. Content & UX
3. Application & Development
4. E-Marketing & Interactive Marketing
5. Merchandising & Conversion
I report to the VP of Marketing and manage a staff of 17 marketing and technical team members. Our in-house expertise is heavily Application & Development, related with a developing competency in BI & Analytics and Content & UX. We get agency help across all 5 functions depending on workload.

The types of projects vary considerably when the scope can span these 5 functions. Some projects only touch one function, other projects touch all five. Examples of projects we're currently working on with marketing technology:

Redesigning the online merchandising experience based on web analytics data, voice of consumer data, and segmentation research (executed by our Consumer Insights department).

Leveraging our B2C e-commerce experience for B2B e-commerce. Gone are the days where B2B portals were purely functional and companies could get by on a poor experience. Everybody uses Facebook and Google, therefore everybody expects this type of ease-of-use with their web applications.

"Gone are the days when B2B portals were purely functional. Everybody expects ease-of-use with their web applications."

Since you've worked for both IT and marketing, what suggestions would you give for optimizing the relationship between those two departments?

I honestly believe the marketing department requires a dedicated marketing technology team. This is essentially what we have in our e-business team.

The main problem with IT is that it has so many customers to satisfy in addition to outside customers and consumers: internal stakeholders, internal projects, etc. As a result, a value equation is often used to determine prioritization of IT projects. The fundamental flaw with this is that by always focusing on the biggest ROI projects — which on paper, makes sense — you can easily miss the low hanging fruit that would drastically improve the end user experience for a customer or consumer. Sometimes, it's the little details that matter most.

Since it probably isn't an option for many businesses to have a dedicated e-business team, then you need someone who can serve as this bridge between the worlds of marketing and IT. Nothing infuriates an IT team more when a marketing representative can't "talk the talk" and requirements are so broadly scoped that it leaves the IT team to interpret the intent.

"You need someone who can serve as this bridge between the worlds of marketing and IT."

Conversely, nothing infuriates a marketing team more than when an IT team under-delivers on the end-product because they didn't capture the essence of what was needed. In the end, no one is at fault because IT delivered exactly what the marketing department requested.

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

The online channel is not a zero-sum game; distribution is still distribution. Consumers buy where it's convenient for them and they don't care about your channel conflicts.

Your call center is not the first place a consumer will go to report a problem anymore, so don't rely on it as your only means of measuring the voice of consumer.

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

Spend time working for an agency so you get a healthy cross-section of projects and customers to get a feel for the type of work you like to do. Don't be afraid to work in IT if there is a rotational program available where you are.

And finally, work in an industry you are passionate about. Your work is much more rewarding and you are infinitely better at it when you are passionate about the topic.

"Your work is much more rewarding and you are infinitely better at it when you are passionate about the topic."

Thanks, Eric!
January 25, 2011
11:30
A marketing technologist's Swiss Army knife
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
If I had a litmus test for marketing technologists, it would be this: do you use Firebug?

Firebug — in case you don't know — is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that gives you a wealth of tools for peeking at, poking into, and debugging HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the underlying network activity going on in your web browser. If you're a web developer, this is almost certainly already in your toolbox.

But it's not just for web developers.

Every marketing technologist should be proficient with Firebug. Why? Because digital marketing manifests itself through the web. Almost all of the 8 things every marketing technologist should know — or at least be familiar with — are connected through the web.

Firebug gives you an insider's view of how those technologies are working (or not) from the perspective of the web browser. For instance, you can use Firebug to:
- make sure web analytics code is properly installed, firing correctly
- quickly verify page structure and link best practices for SEO
- understand page load time and caching, which elements are slowing you down
- peek at tracking cookies managed by your application or third parties
- verify that integration of social media widgets are working correctly
- see how your software-as-a-service marketing applications are performing
- examine dynamic advertising code and monitor its data exchange
- profile your web site performance — including client-side Javascript
- peer under the covers of web services and analytics competitors are running
- and more (check out all the great Firebug Extensions...)
Mastering Firebug, even if you're not a web developer or CSS designer, gives you the power to know what's actually going on with so many web-based marketing applications. Once you learn how to peer inside the black box of the browser, you'll turn many marketing technology mysteries into quickly identifiable answers.
January 19, 2011
12:06
The "rocket scientists" of marketing (interview)
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
If you want an example of how a marketing technologist can rise to an executive leadership role in a billion dollar company, you need not look any further than today's guest for our marketing technologist interview series: Brad Terrell.

Brad is VP & General Manager of the Digital Media business unit at Netezza — a firm recently acquired by IBM for $1.7 billion. He is responsible for maximizing the value Netezza delivers to digital media firms such as AOL, CBS Interactive, eHarmony, Intuit, Merkle, and Nielsen, powering their large-scale data analysis initiatives with Netezza's data warehouse applications.

Brad also writes about the intersection of media and technology on his blog, Data Drives Media.
Brad Terrell, VP & General Manager, Digital Media, Netezza

At Netezza, you help companies adopt some pretty sophisticated analytics technology. Does this technology incrementally improve existing marketing approaches, or is this an entirely different kind of marketing?

An entirely different kind of marketing. Netezza's offering is essentially a massively parallel supercomputer optimized for data analysis — a relational database instantiated in hardware that enables marketers to analyze petabytes of data about people and their behaviors much more quickly and simply than was previously possible. This creates opportunities for innovative new approaches to marketing that dramatically increase both the reach and targeting precision of marketing campaigns.

For example, 40-year-old marketing powerhouse Acxiom is transforming the next generation of its popular InfoBase and PersonicX consumer insight offerings using Netezza to acquire data from over 10 times as many sources as its competitors and enable near real-time data refreshes on over 8 billion records containing over 2,000 unique elements per US household. As a result, Acxiom is able to differentiate its offerings from the competition by providing new classes of consumer insights to their clients that create entirely new kinds of marketing opportunities for them.

AppNexus, one of the hottest ad technology startups in NYC, provides another great example. Netezza enables the AppNexus real-time bidding (RTB) platform to serve over 5.5 billion highly targeted display advertising impressions each day in which advertisers analyze the value of each impression in real time using conversion data (hundreds of data points on a per-impression basis) in order to determine the optimal bid for each impression used to reach specific users in real time. And Netezza's simplicity of deployment and operation allowed AppNexus to launch their offering ahead of schedule with a 92% reduction in operating costs.

Technologies like Netezza seem like they would require a lot of collaboration between marketing and IT. How do your best customers make that work? Are there certain kinds of individuals who really shine in these projects?

Data warehouses have historically been among the most complex of technologies. The Netezza appliance changed that — it is remarkably simply to deploy and operate. As a result, marketers can now analyze petabytes of data in a system typically maintained by less than one full time employee. This reduces the burden on IT significantly and often eases alignment challenges between IT and marketing.

Our best customers make collaboration between marketing and IT work in part through:
1. Effective organizational design that aligns incentives across marketing and IT while placing decision power with those holding the most expertise and responsibility for project success.
2. Instilling a culture of innovation and accountability.
But most importantly, our best customers hire "T-shaped people" that have deep expertise in at least one discipline, but also have broad skills and interests that enable them to work with a wide range of people across functional disciplines. Your excellent post on 8 things every marketing technologist should know offers specific guidance on how this idea applies to being a successful marketing technologist. The people that I see shine on marketing technology projects combine "T-shaped" characteristics with the ability to simply get things done.

"Our best customers hire 'T-shaped people' that have deep expertise in at least one discipline, but also have broad skills and interests."

How are attitudes around technology changing in marketing management and the executive suite?

Technology is increasingly considered an important source of competitive advantage in marketing management and the executive suite. Marketers and senior execs want access to their own personal "rocket scientists" — people that can apply technology and data analysis to the art of marketing. The best rocket scientists — those that can understand and speak the languages of both technology and marketing — are moving out of the back office into significant leadership roles for their firms.

"Marketers and senior execs want access to their own personal 'rocket scientists' — people that can apply technology and data analysis to the art of marketing."

In addition to this evolving attitude regarding the value of technology to marketers, the role of technology itself is evolving. Every marketing organization climbs a maturity curve over time with respect to their ability to leverage increasingly sophisticated classes of technology and data analysis to create competitive advantage. For example, simple reporting and ad hoc analysis lead to predictive analysis, and ultimately to machine learning and optimization techniques that automate decision-making on behalf of marketers. The uniform truth I see is that the firms that climb this curve the fastest are the ones that win.

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

Don't underestimate the power of technology to move the needle on the marketing metrics that matter most — customer acquisition and retention.

Marketing technology is evolving at a dramatic pace. For example, our ability to predict relevant messaging for specific audiences has improved considerably in the past few years, in part because modern data analysis platforms now allow segmentation and matching algorithms to consider much more data, and do it much more quickly than was previously possible. The result is that even the old algorithms can now achieve dramatically better results, and new classes of marketing algorithms that were previously infeasible are now possible.

To cite just a few examples, I've seen 300% to 2,000% conversion rate improvements at AOL Advertising, 25% conversion rate increases with 33% lower CPA at WPP's Media Innovation Group, 50%+ increases in campaign lift at MediaMath, and over 20% revenue increases at Epsilon — all specifically attributed to their investments in state-of-the-art technology. Treating technology as a strategic asset pays off for CMO’s.

"Treating technology as a strategic asset pays off for CMO's."

The title of your own blog is "Data Drives Media" — what do you mean by that?

It's a reference to the massive industry transformation that is underway as the proliferation of new digital devices fragments consumer attention, thus creating new challenges and opportunities for marketers seeking a share of that attention.

All of these new media devices (computers, smartphones, gaming systems, set-top boxes, etc.) create a "digital exhaust" of data as consumers interact with them, and this data creates compelling opportunities for marketers that invest in analyzing it. I enjoy exploring these topics through my blog.

You have a computer science degree from Rice and an MBA from MIT. How has that combination of engineering and business/marketing helped you?

Going to great schools has certainly opened doors for me. I once had a mentor tell me, "Most people are really good at one thing. If you can be really good at two things, that will give you a leg up." My engineering background taught me how to manage through complexity and get things done, and also amplified my love for building things (initially products, then teams, and ultimately companies).

"Most people are really good at one thing. If you can be really good at two things, that will give you a leg up."

But it takes more than great technology to create great business success. Early in my career as an engineer, I helped develop the core technology for Spyglass Mosaic, the world's first commercial web browser. Spyglass Mosaic was licensed by Microsoft to form the basis of the Internet Explorer web browser. It was great technology, but when the "browser wars" with Netscape led Microsoft to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows and give it away for free, much of the license revenue to Spyglass dried up. It was a painful lesson on market strategy, channel structure, and bad contracts.

But the most important lesson I learned from that experience was that creating value only leads to success if you are also able to capture that value in the form of revenue. It motivated me to move to the "revenue side" of business and I've been there ever since. Combining my early engineering experience with my subsequent sales and marketing focus lets me execute effectively on the most important of all business-building tasks: linking the unique capabilities of a firm to appropriate markets in ways that maximize the value a firm can create and capture.

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

Focus all of your efforts on generating revenue for your firm. If you are not able to quantify your contributions in terms of revenue, then you are either in the wrong role or in the wrong firm.

Work at a firm where customer insight is considered a source of competitive advantage. This is most likely to be true at firms that either sell to very many customers or reach their customers through complex sales channels.

Great marketing technologists can quantify the costs and benefits of nearly every aspect of their firm's strategies for customer acquisition and retention. But don't lose sight of the fact that business (and marketing) is fundamentally about people. Pick up the phone and get to know your customers — the insights gained from those personal relationships will shed new light on your data.

"Great marketing technologists can quantify the costs and benefits of near every aspect of their firm's strategies."

Thanks, Brad!
January 16, 2011
17:24
Box.net CEO: The new reality of IT lives outside IT
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Aaron Levie, the CEO of co-founder of Box.net — and a self-acknowledged purveyor of "shadow IT" — wrote a terrific post for the Fortune Tech blog on CNNMoney.com today: To save the IT department, blow up the IT department.

On a daily basis, a select group of individuals are making technology decisions on behalf of their entire organization. They're implementing services to solve real business problems, sometimes under the guidance of their IT department, but most often on their own. For the first time, the power of technology decision-making is in the hands of those who will be using the solutions deployed. These are the managers, project leaders and knowledge workers responsible for getting work done — not just the IT administrators managing implementation or the executives writing the checks.

One of the tenets of Aaron's article is that the adoption of technology is now often different from the buying of technology. Before, those used to be linked together under the complete control of the CIO. In the previous era, adoption often "happened grudgingly, after technology had already been forced on employees from the top-down."

No longer.

When end user adoption precedes buying, it happens with purpose and even excitement. Users now have a much greater say in what technology they use, so much so that's massively disruptive to the organization itself. There's simply no way that IT administrators can get their proverbial arms around all the tools and services that individuals are bringing into the enterprise.

Aaron points out that IT and users often have opposing goals (I've made a similar argument in my post on why marketing and IT are diametrically opposed). He lists IT's goals as:
- implement the fewest solutions to solve the greatest number of problems
- maintain complete control over technology and information
- answer to expectations around cost and risk
- deploy proven solutions
In contrast, users have goals such as:
- use best-of-breed technology to solve problems
- gain complete mobility and flexibility
- answer to the productivity expectations of their manager(s)
- move quickly by using the fastest, most intuitive new tools
"Although contradictory," writes Aaron, "both sets of goals make perfect sense. IT should be responsible for information security. Knowledge workers must be asked to move quickly and stay productive. So how do we reconcile these seemingly disparate by equally valid needs?"

Part of his answer is that "the cloud changes everything."

By democratizing adoption, the cloud changes everything about enterprise IT. It's now the sales manager that implements Salesforce.com for her team. It's the developer that brings Amazon S3 into his toolkit. It's the support representative that selects Zendesk as the simplest solution for her customer service team.

"With enterprise software finally starting to focus on the individual, and not just the IT buyer, we're seeing dramatic changes in business productivity, speed of execution, and overall sentiment towards technology," writes Aaron. "People are able to work much more quickly, access more information than ever before, and make decision in real-time that are backed by data — all leading to a more open, connected and collaborative work environment."

He goes further though, claiming, "With the right solutions, even the IT professionals are happy — they're finally able to get ahead of the game instead of always having to fight fires, solve problems, and answer to unhappy users."

Definitely take time to read the entire article.

Thanks to marketing technologist Jay O'Hare for alerting me to this — great read!
January 12, 2011
13:25
Marketing Technologist: Jonathan Mendez
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

Today we're launching a series of interviews highlighting marketing technologists — who are they, what they do, and how they got there. We have a terrific line up of interviewees and plan to publish one a week for the next several months.

Our inaugural interview is with Jonathan Mendez, a quintessential marketing technologist. Jonathan is the Founder & CEO of Yieldbot — an innovative "real-time intent engine" for online advertising — and publishes the popular marketing blog Optimize & Prophesize. From his work at Omniture to his own agency, RAMP Digital, he's helped companies such as Amazon.com, Disney, IBM, Monster.com, and T-Mobile leverage marketing technologies to improve performance.
Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, Yieldbot

You've been an entrepreneur and thought leader at the nexus of marketing and technology for many years. How did you get into this space?

I was lucky to be born into it. My father is a technology entrepreneur and out of college I started working in the family business. This was the early days of C++ and we were writing our own software, building hardware and burning EPROM chips into IBM 286s.

Then one day around 1995, I got on the web for the first time. I decided at that moment that the web was going to change everything and I needed to get involved with it. The easiest way seemed to start a company that could sell things online. I founded an e-commerce business that sold vitamins and ended up doing that for 6 years.

I learned SEO, affiliate, and email marketing as well as UX, site optimization and of course analytics. I was lucky to get that foundation. E-commerce is a great place to start for anyone interested in marketing technology because it encompasses all aspects of it.

Over the years, how have you seen attitudes around technology change in marketing management? How has that impacted your work?

There has been slow acceptance of the role technology can play in decision-making. People seem very unwilling to cede this power to machines and data. Of course, it depends on the vertical as well. Direct marketers have been comfortable with data for decades. Brand marketers have been highly reluctant to move away from gut decisioning around "big ideas."

I think the largest change is the realization that data collection enabled by marketing technology is more than numbers, it is the voice of the customer. This awareness impacted my work tremendously because I have always focused on using marketing technology to meet the goals of customers. It's also why I moved in 2004 from e-commerce into search. Search is nothing but marketing technology for goal fulfillment.

"Data collection enabled by marketing technology is more than numbers, it is the voice of the customer."

What are your thoughts on governing the intersection of agencies, technology vendors, marketing departments, and IT departments? Who should do what?

Wow, you are talking about a few minefields there. My experience is to give as much latitude to the technology vendor as possible and build your own in-house mindshare around the technology. In parallel, the stakeholders should be watching, learning and getting trained from the vendor.

The most important thing of all is someone needs to own the entire process from ideas to execution to results and that someone should always be marketing. Everyone else is a vendor or IT for marketing.

You've got tremendous expertise in the state-of-the-art of digital advertising. What's most exciting to you in that field, and what should marketers — and marketing technologists — do to excel in it?

For a long time the most exciting thing for me has been real-time. That is why as a marketer search and then LPO [landing page optimization] were always so exciting to me. Never before could marketers know the exact moment of people were interested in receiving media. That 'right time' is a pillar of relevance and a touchstone to improving the web experience for people with things like dynamic landing page optimization and dynamic content.

Right now, I'm most interested in the marriage of this real-time data with the predictive intelligence that is becoming capable from "big data." Things like Hadoop, cloud storage and custom algorithms will make us smarter as marketers and marketing technologist need to become very familiar with these services in order to excel.

Most of all, excelling as a marketing technologist requires a deep understanding of the marriage of qualitative and quantitative data. Data only tells half the story — it tells you what people did. It doesn't tell you why they did it — or even more importantly sometimes why they didn't do it.

"Excelling as a marketing technologist requires a deep understanding of the marriage of qualitative and quantitative data. Data only tells half the story."

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

Unless the business culture is ready for it and embraces technology, metrics, data, automation and optimization, whatever marketing technology you use will not succeed. However, if you create a culture of optimization — or as I like tell people, live the optimization lifestyle — you will be successful and gain market intelligence beyond your wildest imagination.

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

Two pieces of advice:

Don't get stuck in one vertical or channel. People don’t use the web thinking about channels and verticals. The more you learn about search and display or auto and financial the smarter you become. A major reason for my success is that I've been fortunate to work in every major vertical and in every major digital marketing channel. Since most marketing patterns repeat experience means so much.

The second is around mindset. Do what you are doing to create more relevance on the web. If you keep that nobility about your work and focus on the customers goals, and not the business goals you will be successful no matter what technology you use and what business you use it with. This is a user-controlled medium. Behind all the technology, all the data and all the metrics are people. Don’t ever forget that.

"Behind all the technology, all the data and all the metrics are people. Don’t ever forget that."

Thanks, Jonathan — great way to kick this series off!
January 10, 2011
13:52
Experimental marketing: 1 out of 20 ain't bad
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

If you think a hit rate of 1 out of 20 for marketing ideas is a poor showing, go Elf Yourself.

No, really. Take a lesson from OfficeMax's "Elf Yourself" holiday campaign, that has been a viral brand marketing hit for four Christmas seasons in a row. The www.elfyourself.com web site lets people upload photos of themselves, friends, family, pets, etc., and transpose their faces onto animated dancing elves — and then share those e-cards via email, Facebook, Twitter.

Over 378 million people in 50 countries have elf'd themselves. The site has been featured on CNN, ABC World News, Good Morning America, The Today Show, Fox News, and hundreds of blogs (including TechCrunch).

All told, we're talking about millions of dollars worth of public relations and brand exposure.

Yesterday, I was on a marketing technology panel at the National Retail Federation's Big Show with Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising at OfficeMax, who offered some unique insight into the campaign.

"We were trying to create a holiday tradition, to help people connect the idea of holiday shopping with OfficeMax," said Bob. "Most people don't think of office supplies for gifts — but we've got computers, cameras, GPS's."

Elf Yourself was incredibly successful in achieving that goal.

But what I found most interesting was the way this viral hit came to be. Bob related that they actually launched 19 other web sites at the same time as Elf Yourself. Each had a rationale for why it might be a winner, but it was Elf Yourself that ended up taking off. OfficeMax ran it with and quietly dropped the others.

OfficeMax's plan from the beginning was to experiment and harness crowd feedback.

This is a terrific example of what makes agile marketing — working quickly and iteratively to efficiently test new ideas with low risk — so different and powerful than the old approach of "place a couple big bets and pray."

"The cost of those 20 web sites was less than a single TV spot," said Bob. The ROI of Elf Yourself made the cost of experimenting with the other 19 ideas not much more than a rounding error.

Thanks to Darrell Fry at CrossCap, who organized and moderated the panel, which also included Greg Navalance of American Eagle Outfitters and Jay Kolbe of Weber Shandwick.
January 05, 2011
14:11
8 things every marketing technologist should know
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
The term "marketing technologist" is sometimes broadly interpreted as anyone who wields technology in the marketing domain. However, since everyone in marketing should be doing that to some degree these days, it makes sense to distinguish what a marketing technologist does above and beyond that.

I've drafted a set of skills and knowledge that I propose delineate a marketing technologist:

In the inner ring are eight areas of expertise that I think every marketing technologist should be familiar with — and proficient or expert in at least two or three of them:
- Data & Analytics — management, measurement and manipulation of the fuel of digital marketing
- Marketing Applications — configuration, operation, and integration of marketing software
- Advertising Networks — managing and optimizing the complete digital advertising ecosystem
- Social & Mobile Platforms — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and their tools and APIs
- Content Marketing — navigating the entire lifecycle of content marketing, especially SEO
- Web Mechanics — a clear and thorough understanding of the web and browser platforms
- Software Programming — how to speak, read and write the lingua franca of technology
- IT Operations — independently leveraging cloud computing and a strong liaison with IT
Different marketing technologists will combine different strengths. For instance, a web developer working in marketing might specialize in software programming, web mechanics, and IT operations. A data scientist might focus primarily on data & analytics, IT operations, and marketing applications. An SEO expert would logically master content marketing, web mechanics, and data & analytics.

From these core areas of knowledge, we can extrapolate more specific capabilities (the outer ring), along with a few links to get you started with any you're not familiar with:
- Data Mining & Analysis — a data scientist who "can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning", see the Data Science Venn Diagram
- Web & Social Analytics — technical and interpretive mastery of tools from Google Analytics (web) to Radian6 (social media), see Avinash Kaushik and the Web Analytics Association
- A/B & Multivariate Testing — a mix of analytics and content marketing that embraces test-driven marketing, see Conversion Science, Which Test Won? and ion's post-click marketing blog
- Email & Marketing Automation — configuration and operation of semi-automated "nurturing" platforms, see Email Insider, MarketingAutomationSoftware.com, Propelling Brands and Eloqua
- CRM — customer relationship management systems such as Salesforce, the backbone of modern marketing, new social CRMs, see CustomerThink and Destination CRM
- CMS & DAM — (web) content management systems and digital asset management, metadata organization, see CMS Wire, Digital Asset Management, Drupal and Nimble report
- PPC & Bid Management — tools and tactics for pay-per-click advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook, see PPC Hero, Clix Marketing, WordStream, Click Equations and this post
- Behavioral Targeting — audience targeting/segmentation and data exchanges in ad networks, remarketing or interest-based advertising, see Behavioral Insider, BlueKai and Quantcast
- Social & Mobile APIs — go beyond canned applications, directly tap platform feeds, make mashups, see Facebook APIs, Twitter APIs, Google APIs, Mashery and Programmable Web
- SMO — social media optimization to maximize content distribution and influence, sharing buttons, badges and widgets, see Open Graph protocol, OAuth, Rohit's 16 SMO rules and 5 new rules
- Video & Delivery Networks — video production, formatting, encoding and delivery, the technology and economics of content delivery networks, see Akamai, CloudFront, Ooyala and Brightcove
- SEO — search engine optimization to maximize organic rankings on Google/Bing, see SEOmoz, 100% Organic, Google Rich Snippets, GinzaMetrics and Conductor
- HTML, XML & CSS — complete fluency in web markup, browser capabilities, features of the new HTML5, see QuirksMode, CSS Zen Garden, XML.com and Visibone's HTML cheatsheet
- HTTP, REST & Cookies — the protocols of the web, IPs and DNS, URLs and RESTful interfaces, how SSL works, caching, cookies and 3rd-party cookie constraints, see Fielding/Taylor paper
- Javascript — the client-side language for web applications, Web 2.0 behaviors, Ajax, see jQuery, Mozilla Developer Network, Visibone's Javascript card and regular expression cheatsheet
- Application Frameworks — server-side development of web applications, iPhone and Android apps, your own utilities and customizations, see PHP, Rails, Django, Stripes and ASP.NET MVC
- Agile Development Process — experience with agile software development such as Scrum, adaption to agile marketing, see Agile Manifesto and Agile Marketing blog
- Cloud Computing — evaluate, setup, operate and monitor cloud-based infrastructure, platforms, and applications, loosely-coupled integrations, see Amazon Web Services, Heroku and Azure
- Privacy & Security — privacy policies, how to enforce them, network and cloud security, see Google Privacy Principles, Network Security Blog and CERT
- Databases & Big Data — relational databases and SQL, NoSQL data stores, 3rd-party data sets, large-scale data processing, see Factual, InfoChimps, Hadoop and Google's MapReduce paper
This list isn't comprehensive, but I think it covers the "common ground" of many marketing technologists. Depending on your business, you might also leverage technical depth with e-commerce platforms, transaction processing, industry technical standards, integrated product technologies such as RFID, etc.

What would you add to this list?

Of course, technology is just a tool — don't forget the marketing in making marketing technology sing!
December 20, 2010
11:53
Interview request for marketing technologists
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Paul Dunay listed the rise of the marketing technologist as one of his 11 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2011. "Marketers for the last few years have been closet techno geeks, and it's time for them to rise up — companies need digitally fluent marketers who can apply technologies to make marketing more measurable and scientific."

Hear, hear! So starting in 2011, I'd like to put a spotlight on these rising stars and launch a series of interviews with other marketing technologists. They would be published on this blog — as well as likely used in other publications. (I've been fielding a lot of requests from journalists who want to feature marketing technologists in other stories.)

Questions for these interviews might include:
- Did you start your career in marketing or in software engineering/IT?
- Where do you fit in the organizational structure of your company?
- What does "a day in the life" of your job look like?
- What are 3 marketing technologies that you find most exciting these days?
- What advice would you give other budding marketing technologists?
If you're a marketing technologist, and you'd like to share some of your experience with others, I'd love to have you participate. Just send me a message to "sbrinker" at chiefmartec.com and briefly introduce yourself.

Happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year!
December 16, 2010
17:00
Champions of agile marketing
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 of social media? How deftly can a campaign, a program, a product, or an entire company pivot?

These are the questions that every marketer must ask. The answers measure agility.

While technology can help, achieving agility ultimately requires adjustments in the "operating system" of marketing management to better encourage, enable, and harness networked speed. Organizations must adapt their structures, processes, and incentives to execute at this new operational tempo.

To make this transition, marketers should look beyond lowercase-a agile — an admirable adjective — to uppercase-a Agile, a noun that defines a management methodology. Based on the agile software development, an Agile Marketing Methodology is emerging to give marketers a systematic way of running at high-speed without chaos. (Back in March, I posted some ideas for an Agile Marketing Manifesto to capture the spirit of this movement.)

Of course, as a new methodology, there's precious few examples of Agile Marketing in the wild. IDC's CMO Advisory Service produced an Agile Marketing Principles and Practices report earlier this year that did a great job of introducing the concept (along with a great accompanying blog post by one of the authors). Their report also included three vignettes of early adopters of Agile Marketing at Novell, HubSpot, and Webtrends.

One of those early adopters was Frank Days, Director of New and Social Media at Novell, who also runs the Marketing Agility blog with some terrific reflections on his experience in championing the blossoming discipline of Agile Marketing.

Now, in collaboration with John Cass of Pace Communications (and author of the excellent PR Communications blog), Frank has launched a new Marketing Agility podcast series. The first four episodes have been posted. The first two are John and Frank introducing themselves and the concepts of agile marketing. The third includes an interview with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, who was the VP of marketing leading Agile adoption at Webtrends in the IDC report mentioned above.

The fourth episode is an interview with yours truly, covering topics such as the impact of agile marketing in conversion optimization and the importance of having embedded marketing technologists in the loop.

The Marketing Agility podcast is off to a great start, and it promises to be a good source of real-world discussions around the adoption and evolution of Agile Marketing. If you're one of those marketers asking questions that begin with "how quickly can we...?", then this podcast is for you.
December 15, 2010
14:05
Marketing technology grows on a tree
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 I was getting ready to post this, I saw a terrific article on ReadWriteWeb, 3 Tips for Engaging Online Communities with Data Visualization, based on a presentation by Leslie Bradshaw of JESS3.

Her three points, which are manifestly evident in pieces such as The Blog Tree, are:
1. Users make credibility-based decisions based on how something looks.
2. As data becomes more abundant, the trick is not to make more noise, but to sound different (quoting Joe Chernov of Eloqua).
3. The new frontier for organizations is not only cloud-based collaboration, but also social document sharing.
December 14, 2010
3:15
131 different kinds of marketing
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 terms that ended with the word marketing — any " marketing" phrase. So my apologies to advertising, branding, public relations, packaging, pricing, and all other such nomenclature. I also decided to leave out industry-specific terms such as real-estate marketing, healthcare marketing, political marketing, etc., as well as segments like Hispanic marketing and Millennial marketing.

I included anything that qualified as a tactic ("loyalty marketing"), a channel ("mobile marketing"), a style ("conversational marketing"), a structure ("corporate marketing"), or any other widely applicable aspect of marketing. I included some synonyms ("Internet marketing" and "online marketing"), but not exhaustively so. For each phase, I added a brief description and a link to a resource or more detailed definition.

Do you have other phrases to nominate? Better descriptions or resources? Please add them in the comments.

account-based marketing — marketing to individual, key accounts as markets of one (Wikipedia)
affiliate marketing — paying affiliates to send traffic/customers to your website/business (Affiliate Scout)
agile marketing — using agile development methodologies in the marketing department (a manifesto)
algorithmic marketing — using software algorithms to execute (semi-)automated marketing (computational)
ambush marketing — piggybacking marketing on a major event without paying for sponsorship (WSJ article)
analytical marketing — quantitative methods and models of marketing (Carnegie Mellon program)
article marketing — writing articles (online and offline) to promote one's business (Wikipedia)
B2B (business) marketing — marketing to other businesses (B2B Magazine)
B2C (consumer) marketing — marketing to consumers (B2C Marketing Insider)
B2P (person) marketing — marketing to persons, in business and life (New Marketing Labs post)
behavioral marketing — targeting advertising/offers based on user behavior (ClickZ column)
blackhat marketing — primarily in SEO, unethically fooling the search engines to game rank (About.com)
brand marketing — developing your brand, often contrasted to direct marketing (Best Brands 2010)
buzz marketing — getting people to talk about your stuff, similar to viral (Mark Hughes book)
call center marketing — outbound telemarketing and handling of inbound prospect/customer calls
campus marketing — marketing to (and often by) college students, campus ambassadors (Boston Globe)
catalog marketing — marketing through printed catalogs delivered in the mail (DIRECT article)
cause marketing — businesses marketing cooperatively with nonprofit(s) to mutual benefit (Alden Keene)
celebrity marketing — use of celebrities as spokespeople, for endorsements or testimonials (BSI post)
channel marketing — marketing promotions through wholesalers, distributers, resellers (definition)
closed loop marketing — measuring ROI from lifecycle of marketing to sales (Closed Loop Marketing blog)
cloud marketing — using software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for marketing (CloudMarketing.org)
cooperative marketing — companies co-marketing a jointly developed product, service or brand (Wikipedia)
communal marketing — engaging the public in the development of a marketing campaign (Wikipedia)
community marketing — marketing by building an online community (Jeremiah Owyang's blog)
computational marketing — the marketing equivalent of computational finance (my post)
content marketing — producing useful or entertaining content for your audience (Chris Brogan's post)
contextual marketing — delivering relevant, optimal messages/offers, esp. online (HBS article)
controversial marketing — generating attention through controversy or conflict (Michael Gray's post)
conversational marketing — actively engaging with consumers in two-way conversations (Nokia preso)
conversion (rate) marketing — optimizing conversion rate in online marketing and sales (ion's blog)
conversion content marketing — a hybrid of content marketing and conversion marketing (SEL article)
corporate marketing — company-wide marketing and standards, esp. in multi-product firms (Forrester report)
cross-marketing — co-marketing, product bundling, co-promotion, licensing, etc. (Wikipedia)
culture marketing — branded content, the intersection of culture and marketing (Chief Marketer article)
data (web) marketing — using data as a marketing channel, esp. with the semantic web (my post)
database marketing — using databases, such as CRM systems, to drive marketing programs (The Book)
data-driven marketing — use data, especially analytics, to direct marketing decisions (Kellogg program)
digital marketing — marketing through digital channels, primarily the Internet (AdAge Digital)
direct marketing — marketing directly to audience, often without TV, radio, or print ads (DMA)
direct response marketing — direct marketing expressly designed to solicit a response (Wikipedia)
disruptive marketing — applying disruptive innovation in marketing to create new markets (Digital Tonto post)
diversity marketing — marketing to different culture groups in audience, i.e. in-culture marketing (TransCity)
door-to-door marketing — salespeople walking to houses, knocking on doors (MSNBC story)
drip marketing — sending pre-planned messages to prospects/customers on a schedule (Inside CRM article)
email marketing — emailing prospects/customers, either by list rental or express permission (Email Insider)
entrepreneurial marketing — marketing in start-ups and new ventures, often guerilla style (MIT course)
ethical marketing — marketing ethics for being socially/morally responsible (Wikipedia)
event marketing — running events such as trade shows, conferences, seminars, festivals (Event Marketer)
expeditionary marketing — forging new markets before competitors (HBR article)
experiential marketing — enabling sensory interactions with brands (Experiential Marketing Forum)
Facebook marketing — marketing on and through Facebook (SEOmoz Ultimate Guide)
field marketing — people selling and promoting in person, "in the field" (The Handbook)
geomarketing — geo-targeting for marketing tactics such as price, promotion (Geomarketing in Practice)
global marketing — marketing of products/firms worldwide, global strategy and structure (Forbes article)
green marketing — explicit promotion of products that are environmentally friendly (Green Marketing book)
guerilla marketing — low-budget, high-impact marketing, typically entrepreneurial (Jay Conrad Levison)
horizontal marketing — similar message across different groups/industries, in contrast to vertical marketing
inbound marketing — pulling in customers via content, instead of pushing ads or cold-calls (HubSpot)
industrial marketing — B2B marketing but specifically for large firms, esp. manufacturers (Wikipedia)
influence(r) marketing — focus on convincing a few influential people in a market (Influencer Marketing book)
informational marketing — providing useful/educational material to nurture audience, like content marketing
in-game marketing — in-game advertising, also known as advergaming, and in-game promotions (Wikipedia)
in-store marketing — promotions based at a retailer's location (In-Store Marketing Institute)
integrated marketing — coordination and integration of multiple marketing tools, channels, vehicles (ClickZ)
interactive marketing — interactions between marketers and prospects, mostly online (Forrester blog)
Internet marketing — synonymous with online marketing and web marketing (Wikipedia)
internal marketing — marketing to one's own employees to synchronize customer experiences (Wikipedia)
international marketing — marketing overseas/across national borders, same as global marketing (Wikipedia)
keyword marketing — researching and optimizing keywords in search marketing (WordStream blog)
left-brain marketing — roughly synonymous with analytical marketing (Left Brain Marketing blog)
local marketing — ad targeting and promotions to support brick-and-mortar stores (WilsonWeb)
Long Tail marketing — marketing to many niche segments that aggregate to a huge audience (Wikipedia)
loyalty marketing — focus on growing and retaining existing customers, e.g., rewards programs (Wikipedia)
mobile marketing — marketing delivered via mobile devices such as (smart)phones (Mobile Marketer)
multichannel marketing — using multiple channels to reach customers (Multichannel Marketing Metrics)
multicultural marketing — pursuing ethnic audiences with products, advertising, experiences (The Book)
multi-level marketing — marketing by recruiting others, who recruit more; e.g., pyramid scheme (Wikipedia)
neuromarketing — the intersection of brain/cognitive science and marketing (Neuromarketing blog)
new media marketing — essentially synonymous with online marketing, fading term (Wikipedia)
newsletter marketing — delivering regular newsletters to target audience via email or print (DIRECT article)
niche marketing — targeting very specific audience segments (Entrepreneur article)
non-traditional marketing — methods outside the norm, e.g., publicity stunts, guerrilla marketing (Inc. article)
offline marketing — all marketing that doesn't happen online, traditional marketing (MarketingSherpa)
one-to-one marketing — marketing to individual consumers: identify, differentiate, interact, customize (book)
online marketing — marketing online, same as Internet or web marketing (Online Marketing Summit)
outbound marketing — contact prospects via ads, cold calls, list rental; opposite of inbound (BridgeGroup)
outdoor marketing — examples: door hangers, car advertising, billboards, balloons (eHow article)
out-of-home marketing — marketing to people in public places, e.g., outdoor marketing (Wikipedia)
performance marketing — marketing driven by performance metrics and ROI (Performance Insider)
permission marketing — inspiring your audience to want to hear from you (Seth Godin's book)
personalized marketing — like one-to-one marketing, including product customization (Wikipedia)
persuasion marketing — derived from "persuasion architecture" for effective web marketing (the Eisenbergs)
point-of-sale marketing — advertising to customers at point of a purchase in a store (eHow article)
post-click marketing — user experience after an ad/email click, e.g., landing pages (ion's blog)
PPC marketing — pay-per-click marketing on search engines, ad networks, social sites (PPC Hero)
product marketing — marketing around a particular product, versus corporate marketing (Wikipedia)
promotional marketing — broadly speaking, almost any kind of marketing to attract customers (PROMO)
proximity marketing — localized wireless distribution of advertising associated with a place (Wikipedia)
pull marketing — pushing messages to prospects, synonymous with inbound marketing (The Power of Pull)
push marketing — prospects pull messages from you, synonymous with outbound marketing (Wikipedia)
real-time marketing — accelerating marketing in the age of speed (David Meerman Scott book)
referral marketing — encouraging/incentivizing existing customers to refer new customers (Wikipedia)
relationship marketing — emphasis on building long-term relationships with customers (Regis McKenna)
remarketing — modern meaning: behaviorally-targeted advertising (Google Ad Innovations)
reply marketing — replying to end-users with personalized messages, e.g., Old Spice campaign (Wikipedia)
scientific marketing — application of analytical testing/statistical methods in marketing (Scientific Advertising)
search (engine) marketing — organic and paid promotion via Google, Bing, etc. (Search Engine Land)
self marketing — marketing yourself, also known as personal branding (U.S. News article)
services marketing — approaches for selling services instead of products (Delivering Quality Service)
shadow marketing — unexpected marketing outside the control of the marketing department (my post)
shopper marketing — understanding how consumer shop across channels and formats (Wikipedia)
social marketing — changing people's behaviors for the better, not social media marketing (Squidoo)
social media marketing — interacting with prospects in social media channels (Social Media Insider)
sports marketing — use of sporting events, teams, and athletes to promote products (Wikipedia)
stealth marketing — ways of marketing surreptitiously to people, undercover marketing (HBR article)
street marketing — unconventional marketing in public places meant to engage prospects (Wikipedia)
technical marketing — marketing with technical depth to a technical audience (great post)
telemarketing — calling people on the phone with a pitch, usually uninvited (Wikipedia)
test-driven marketing — systematically and iteratively testing marketing ideas (Test-Driven Marketing)
time marketing — research on when to release and promote products in the market (Wikipedia)
trade show marketing — subset of event marketing, exhibiting and promoting at trade shows (TSNN)
traditional marketing — pre-Internet marketing methods and channels (MarketingProfs)
undercover marketing — when consumers don't know they're being steathily marketed to (Wikipedia)
user-generated marketing — marketing created by consumers, communal marketing (Disney campaign)
vertical marketing — packaging a solution differently for different industries (Wikipedia)
video marketing — incorporating videos in online marketing, leveraging YouTube (Pixability)
viral marketing — tapping into existing social networks to spread a marketing idea (Wikipedia)
web marketing — marketing on the web, synonymous with online marketing (Web Marketing Today)
word-of-mouth marketing — when happy customers spread your marketing message (WOMMA)
youth marketing — targeting young audiences, often using emerging channels (Wikipedia)
November 16, 2010
19:42
50 billion reasons for marketing innovation
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 — and executives should be asking how their businesses can benefit. Her Exhibit A is this graph showing the % of time spent in different media vs. the % of advertising dollars allocated to each media:

On the surface, it makes sense that the percentage of advertising dollars spent in a medium — such as TV or Internet — should approximately track to the percentage of time that people spend engaged in the media. In that model, there's a $50 billion gap in what should be the amount of money spent on the Internet.

This is a disequilibrium that will eventually be rectified — and in the process offer a huge opportunity to marketers and entrepreneurs. (And especially marketing entrepreneurs.)

However, I believe the answer is broader than advertising.

One of Mary's subsequent slides asks, "Where are the Great Online Ads?" — noting the lack of iconic Internet advertising campaigns relative to TV creatives. No doubt, new Internet advertising formats and technologies will bear creative fruit eventually, but because the medium is so different than its predecessors (print, radio, TV), I think the broader win here is in marketing innovation.

We may not have seen many iconic Internet advertising campaigns, but we have seen iconic new kinds of marketing engagement.

Content marketing, conversion optimization, social media marketing, game-driven marketing, extended relationship marketing with marketing automation, etc., are all examples of marketing innovations that the Internet has enabled that have rocked our world. And many of them are still in the early adopter phase — we've only barely begun to reap the benefits. Collectively, these innovations are forging new patterns of brand building and customer acquisition outside the domain of "advertising" (in the semi-traditional sense, such as with banner ads sold by CPM).

Indeed, these new mechanisms for market engagement may very well reduce the net amount of paid advertising in the world — even if the total dollars spent on marketing remain the same. Arguably, total marketing spend will increase with ever better tracking and accountability and the continued disruption of the "sales" function.

Later in her presentation, Mary refers to Clay Christensen — one of my personal heros — on the potential for disruptive innovation to change markets primarily by addressing an underserved low-end portion of the market or by addressing non-consumption. This latter approach is about giving people something that categorically wasn't available to them before (such as iPhones, iPads, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) — and I think that is ultimately the kind of innovation that marketing (not merely advertising) is experiencing.

Along those lines, I wrote a post a few years ago about disruptive innovation in online advertising that applies Christensen's model to the changes from traditional advertising to search advertising to social media marketing — an entirely different beast.

Net takeaway: it's a great time to be an innovator in marketing.

Here's Mary's complete slide deck on Scribd.
November 13, 2010
16:07
Marketing technologists make fire
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

"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 difference between the two.

Let's consider a metaphor with fire — you can fear it, use it, or make it:

Fear. You are afraid of fire. You avoid it. You might respect what people do with it — say, cooking — but you don't understand it. You don't want to understand it. You'd prefer just to order your steak and have the waiter bring it to you when it's done.

Use. You can work with fire. Given raw ingredients and an open flame, you can cook up something delicious. You understand timings and temperatures. With practice and a little imagination, you can harness fire to create the amazing and the sublime. But if you were in the woods with nothing but sticks, you'd be stuck.

Make. You can start a fire from scratch. When charcoal, lighter fluid, and matches are available, you can employ them (without burning down the yard). But you can also make fire in less cushy circumstances, using flint and steel — or if necessary, rubbing two sticks together — beginning with kindling in a tepee, building it up with twigs, then sticks, then logs.

Making fire is a different set of skills than using fire — although they're clearly complementary.

With this analogy, I believe all marketers should be able to use technology. There's just too much cooking to be done to keep ordering out. But only a subset of marketers in the kitchen actually need to make fire. These are marketing technologists. The two together are an effective combination that rarely gets stuck.

And the IT department? In this over-extended metaphor, if they provide governance, they're the fire marshal.
November 09, 2010
14:26
IT dictators in an age of marketing democracy
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 before they are installed. "No amount of revenue generated by Marketing is worth putting our company's or our clients' data at risk," she writes, "and allowing technology silos within the company would only add an additional layer of complexity and cost."

It is easy to see why the marketing department wants to make its own decision regarding its IT (just as it is easy to see why PR, HR, finance and sales would want the same). It is also easy, however, to envision the day when these experts in their own fields say, wait a minute, we need to get back to focusing on what we do best and leave the technology to those who do IT best.

The added emphasis is mine. If this represents the collective worldview of corporate IT — and FierceCIO probably has a better sense of their audience than I do — then the gap between marketing and IT (and, frankly, between reality and IT) is bigger than I thought.

Here's my reply, reprinted here (with a bonus photo):

Caron — thanks again for encouraging this discussion. It's crucial to have this dialogue, even if it's not an easy one. I appreciate many of your points. However, in the spirit of reaching a better understanding of our positions, allow me to respectfully push back on a couple.

Christine's view that "no amount of revenue" is worth putting data at risk — which is what she believes would happen if she didn't personally approve all technologies used anywhere in the company? — is, I think, endemic of this dilemma. I'll acknowledge that there is non-zero risk with making technology decisions more distributed. But can we also agree that not all risks are equal?

For instance, your customers' payment details (credit cards, account balances, etc.) are in a different risk category than, say, your social media management software configuration. Modern governance should be able to treat these differently without imperiling one or smothering the other.

When it comes to business risk, ask yourself this: in the past 30 years, how many companies have gone out of business because of a breach with their data? Now, in contrast, over that same 30 year time period, how many companies have gone out of business because they didn't adapt to changing markets, didn't keep up with their audience, or were outmaneuvered by more nimble competitors? That's the real risk at stake here.

It can be a little too easy to dismiss "no amount of revenue" when your mission ("keep the data safe") isn't directly tied to revenue. The CMO, whose performance metrics are now increasingly tied to revenue (thanks to the accountability of digital marketing), increasingly has a different view. Certainly the CEO, whose job is ultimately about balancing risk and revenue, writ large, does.

Again, that's not to say that keeping data safe isn't an important mission. It is. However, it must be balanced with other missions — particularly the meta-mission of any corporation, which is to generate revenue and profit. Having one person control all technology, top-down, regardless of its risk category, just doesn't seem like a balanced approach coming into the second decade of the 21st century. It's like trying to be a dictator in an age of global democracy. Technology is becoming too ubiquitous for that strategy to be stable.

Speaking of rebellion, the concern that if marketing goes free, so will HR, finance, sales, etc., may be well-founded. However, I don't think these departments are equal in the amount of technology-driven disruptive innovation that they are experiencing today. As one metric to attempt to quantify the difference, consider the number of digital marketing software start-ups launched in the past 10 years — thousands upon thousands — versus the dozens in HR or finance. There's an order of magnitude difference here, which — combined with the CMO's new accountability — is why IT is seeing this technology uprising much more from marketing than any other department.

One last point with regard to Christine's comment about "an additional layer of complexity and cost." It shouldn't be IT's job to dictate how marketing spends its budget. If marketing wants to invest money in technologies that IT considers redundant, that should be marketing's prerogative — as long as marketing is delivering its ROI. Because, no offense, what IT might consider "redundant" may have more subtle differences in marketing than IT can appreciate.
November 05, 2010
13:25
Is this the future of marketing education?
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
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 by one of the world's leading journalism schools — now partnered with a top computer science department, if I may stroke my alma mater — to tackle this challenge head on with deep integration between journalism and hard-core software engineering.

If you visit the school's page on Dual-Degree: Journalism & Computer Science, their program brochure starts with this call to arms:

Columbia University's innovative dual-degree program, accepting its first students in 2011, will offer a Master of Science in computer science and journalism. Students will receive highly specialized training in the digital environment, enabling them to develop technical and editorial skills in all aspects of computer-supported news gathering and digital media production. The goal of the program is for its graduates to refine and create new news gathering and digital media technologies that will redefine journalism as we know it.

If you substitute "journalism" with "marketing," and replace "news" with "customer," this would sound like a killer program for fostering a new generation of marketing technology leaders. Instead of two semesters in the journalism school and three semesters in the engineering school, simply swap those two semesters in the journalism school with two semesters in the business school on a marketing concentration track.

Wired wrote a terrific article on this program earlier this year, Will Columbia-Trained, Code-Savvy Jouranlists Bridge the Media/Tech Divide? The heart of their vision is not merely aligning IT and journalism, but fusing the two disciplines together:

The Columbia program ... seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of news gathering, reporting and delivery. The problem: users really don't know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users.

"The IT Department [at a news organization] comes up with software programs that the journalists don't use; the journalists ask for software that is computationally unrealistic," said Julia Hirschberg, professor of computer science at the Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. "We aim to produce a new generation of journalists who will understand both fields."

Again, substitute "journalists" with "marketers." The list of technologies that Wired reports these new graduates are hoped to contribute include:
- Automated journalism modules
- Data visualization
- Deep data mining and analysis
- Device-driven journalism
- Digital trust
- Identifying under-reported events
- Next-generation narrative
Who will create the marketing/computer science version of this? A master's degree in computational marketing?
November 01, 2010
14:04
Governance vs. management in marketing technology
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 marketing should largely run its own technology, IT could continue "to provide shared infrastructure, coordinate data and technology that crosses multiple departments (such as CRM systems), serve as a trusted consultant and enforce security and regulatory compliance as a checks-and-balances authority."

Caron's reaction:

I would love to hear from you on this vision, but at first glance it looks to me a nightmare in the making. As a general matter, any position that comes with enormous responsibility but without the commensurate authority to fulfill it is an untenable position. How could it be possible to ensure information security, compliance and integration in a large organization when one is not making either the strategic or nitty-gritty decisions involving whole sets of applications?

The emphasis added is mine because I strongly agree with Caron's meta logic. A key reason I advocate for greater technology leadership in the marketing department is because I don't believe that marketing can have responsibility for marketing outcomes that are based on technology — the bulk of digital marketing, which is becoming the bulk of all marketing — without equally having the authority to manage that technology.

Therefore, I appreciate the rationale of her argument perfectly.

So is this just a stalemate? In many organizations today, sadly, yes. It's Shadow IT vs. Shadow Marketing and the unproductive tug-of-war that was vividly reported by the CMO Council and Accenture.

But I don't believe it has to be.
Governance and Management Are Not the Same Thing
One possible resolution to the paradox is understanding the difference between management and governance. Throughout organizations, we have many instances where one group provides governance and oversight for what another team actually manages.

For instance, HR often governs hiring practices — but actual hiring choices are made by managers within each department. Finance often governs budgeting and investment — but all the other departments are responsible for allocating and wielding budgets within that framework. Ultimately, the Board of Directors governs the way a company serves the interests of its shareholders — but it's the CEO that actually runs the firm.

In all these cases, most people would agree that governance is a good idea — it provides checks-and-balances in an organization and coordinates disparate departments around a common set of playing rules. But it balances that with enormous freedom (and, in equal proportion, risk) given to those departments to execute their mission. It's not perfect, but given the complexities of the trade-offs, I think it works pretty well — and is adaptable to a wide range of different organizations.

Is it reasonable to position information technology security and regulatory compliance as something that IT governs, but that other departments — in this case, marketing — incorporate into their management of technology within their domain?

Personally, I think that's more feasible than the other way around — having marketing govern IT. There are many reasons why, but the least controversial would be to say that IT security and compliance have much more well-defined best practices and "rules" than marketing. But if you have a different opinion, please make your case — we could use as much creative discussion around this topic as possible.

By the way, my thoughts about governance vs. management originate from an amazing book written by Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross — two IT leadership gurus — IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results. Many of the governance archetypes they discuss could be well adapted to integrating a marketing-led technology group with a broader IT structure.

Caron mentions at the end of her editorial that she has "an idea for one possible alternative, but more on that later. For now, I'd really like to hear from you. Send me your thoughts."

I look forward to reading her idea, theirs, and yours. What are innovative ways to break the stalemate and supercharge marketing technology management?
October 30, 2010
14:23
Q&A threat to Google that marketers should watch
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 Facebook threatening to disrupt that money-pump of an ecosystem, the reality is that social networking isn't a direct threat to "googling." To be sure, it's another amazing venue for marketers to connect with consumers, but in a very different context — one that is arguably better suited for brand advertising and organic social media marketing. (Portals such as Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL are probably the ones being more disrupted.)

Bernard Moon just wrote a terrific article on VentureBeat, Are Q&A startups a threat to Google?, that identifies a much more direct source of disruption to The Big G:

...numerous Question & Answer players that people unwisely dismiss but which are working hard to ... become a danger to Google's current search dominance.

Q&A companies like Quora, Peerpong and others are seeking to become the next Google in what many are eyeing as the next stage of search: capturing specific knowledge and providing the best answers to any question through the Internet.

Bernard sketched the following diagram of the Q&A landscape:

Read the entire article on VentureBeat.

Given that this is a marketing technologist blog, you may already be familiar with Stack Overflow, the Q&A site for programmers. If not — go check it out. This is one of the best implementations I have seen of a reputation system that incentivizes quality contributions in a crowdsourcing community.

This is a much more accurate way of determining authority in specific queries than PageRank, the algorithm behind Google. It can still be challenging to find the most relevant Q&A thread for what you're looking for, but once you hone in on it, it's much easier to determine the "correct" answer. The supporting evidence to its correctness is succinctly and intuitively organized.

If I'm looking for an answer to a programming question — or if I'm looking to hire new developers — Stack Overflow has become my go-to destination. If other Q&A communities, especially in aggregate, are able to achieve a similar dynamic, it's not hard to see how they could very well displace Google's information-seeking ecosystem.

For marketers, this disruption represents intriguing new opportunities.
October 27, 2010
18:57
Why the marketing technology genie isn't going back into the IT bottle
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist

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 to control it.

Admittedly, in the seemingly zero-sum game of corporate budgets and power, ceding anything is rarely a popular opinion. But if IT can better understand the forces behind these changes, I hope it will inspire open discussion and fresh ideas for embracing the future. Because in the big picture, this isn't a zero-sum game inside an organization — the real competition is in the marketplace.

A recent report by the CMO Council and Accenture, surveying both CMO's and CIO's, reached two conclusions. First, in many organizations, there's growing frustration between the marketing department and IT. Second, the opportunity for leveraging data and technology in marketing is greater than ever.

What should we do to reconcile these two truths?

I actually disagree with the report's recommendations that this conundrum can be solved simply with better communication. (A frequent remark overheard is, "Can't the CIO and the CMO just talk?") Better communication is good, but something else is happening here that is bigger than that.

The tectonic shift causing these organization tremors: marketing is becoming a technology-driven discipline.

My conclusion—and you may not like it—is that marketing must ultimately lead its own marketing technology, from high-level strategy down to in-the-trenches code. It's the only way marketing will be able to succeed as a technical-driven discipline.

Click here to read the rest of the article on InformationWeek.com.

What do you think? (And are you in marketing, IT or somewhere above the fray?)
October 22, 2010
10:45
Advocating marketing technology leadership at Pivot
» ‎ Chief Marketing Technologist
Earlier this week I had the honor of presenting at Pivot, a new conference in New York City hosted by Chris Shipley (see 5 reasons to be excited about Pivot). My talk: The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist. It sparked a number of interesting conversions, both at the conference and around a wonderful article that was written about it on Mashable, Should Your Company Have a Chief Marketing Technologist?

I'll follow up on some of those points-counterpoints in a subsequent post, but if you're interested in the presentation slides (and an approximate transcript of the talk), here they are:
The Case for a Chief Marketing TechnologistView more presentations from Scott Brinker. The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist (Transcript)
Life used to be simpler, right?

There was the marketing department, which did, well, marketing. And we all knew what marketing was. Brand positioning? Advertising campaigns? Customer segmentation? That's marketing. Very clear what marketing was responsible for.

Just like the fire department would fight fires.

Just like the police department would police.

Just like, if it had anything to do with information or technology, it was the responsibility of the IT department. Everything fit into nice neat boxes. And if marketing occasionally needed something from IT, all they had to do was go through the fire department and the police department to get it.

But what if marketing became entwined with information and technology? I mean deeply entwined. Suddenly those boxes aren't so nice and neat. What would be marketing's responsibility? What would be IT's?

Before we answer that question, let's establish the premise. Sure, there's lots of technology around — it is the 21st century — but that doesn't mean marketing is entwined with it. Entwined is a strong word. That's entwined. So let's examine the premise.

It wasn't too long ago that "marketing software" meant Adobe — Illustrator, Photoshop, PageMaker. That was the software most typically bought by marketing departments. But in recent years, the number of marketing software applications has grown...

...exponentially. There's software for web analytics, social media monitoring, email marketing, bid management, search engine optimization, conversion optimization, landing page management, marketing automation, campaign management, behavioral targeting. Full disclosure, my company, which offers conversion optimization software, is one of the logos up there. And this is just a tiny fraction of what's available out there.

There are now hundreds of marketing software solutions built for every aspect of marketing today. And I predict that in the years ahead there will be thousands. What's driving this explosion of marketing technology?

Entrepreneurship. We're in a perfect storm for marketing technology ventures. Five forces are driving a wave of start-ups and innovative products for marketing.
1. The migration of dollars from old media and methods of marketing to new ones — billions of dollars that are shifting around and represent a huge market.
2. The cloud computing, which makes many of these applications available through the web — no need for expensive on-premise installation and maintenance.
3. The trackable nature of digital makes it easier than ever to justify these new solutions with measurable ROI.
4. The disruptive innovation enabled by a greenfield opportunity. There aren't a few big companies who dominate this space — vibrant competition among hundreds of new ventures.
5. And finally, the economics of software are just plain attractive. You can usually build the first version of an idea on a low budget, extend and improve it as demand grows — and at scale, it can be quite profitable.
So you take a large market, with relatively low barriers to entry, that's becoming easier than ever to sell into, and it's bound to be alluring to entrepreneurs, funded or bootstrapped alike.

But what's the significance of all this marketing software? Okay, we're marketers. Catchy phrases are part of our craft and trade. So we love a good adage, like "you are what you eat."

Or the advice your mother gave you, "you are the company you keep."

Well, I have a new maxim for you... you are the software you use.

Think about it. In a digital age, software is our interface to the world. It's the gateway for our inputs and outputs. The choices those software developers make — and how we choose to buy, configure, adapt, and manipulate their software — in a very real sense delineates our capabilities in this environment.
- Analytics shapes our perception of our audience by how it frames data.
- Automation software guides the evolution of marketing operations.
- Optimization software focuses our attention on particular tactics in the funnel.
- Social monitoring software alerts us to what it thinks is important for engagement.
- Behavioral targeting software helps define the de facto segmentation of our market.
- And CRMs — by the data they collect and the way they structure it — become the blueprint for our relationships with customers.
But wait, there's more...

Marketing technology isn't just software you buy. It also encompasses all the myriad of platforms we use to create experiences for our customers and prospects. More than ever, marketing technology is a creative medium.

We're way beyond the web site. Today we have web-based applications, Facebook apps, iPhone apps, Android apps, iPad apps, ever-more-interactive advertising. We have the semantic web on the horizon. And then there's the technology that is increasingly embedded into our products and services, connecting marketing with the ongoing customer lifecycle. Each of these is a channel to your audience, and their experiences here impact the position of your brand.

So if we take all of these marketing technologies — the channels we use to reach our audience, the software we use internally to drive our operations, and the always-on features we can tap into in next-generation products and services — well, I think we can appreciate the scale and scope of technology in marketing.

And it's not just each of these technologies on their own. The real fun is connecting the dots between them — sharing data, coordinating processes, assuring continuity and brand consistency throughout — do we end up with a prince or a frog?

Okay, so we can concede that marketing and technology are entwined. Now I just have one question for you...

Who coordinates this marketing technology ballet at your organization? (Pause to think about that.)

Now some of you might be thinking, "Ballet? The state of marketing technology seems more like a mosh pit!" Fair enough. But even a mosh pit has a certain rhythm and flow. Who's keeping beat?

Not the IT department. The fundamental problem here is that you can't separate the marketing from the technology — we've already seen they're entwined. IT doesn't have marketing skills, and they don't have the same incentives as marketing. It's not their fault, but using technology as a creative and marketing medium is just not what IT was structured to do. They can play a role, but they can't direct this movie.

Not the HiPPO. You've heard of the HiPPO, right? The highest-paid person's opinion. Most senior executives have opinions about technology (and everything else), which is fine, but they usually don't own the actual implementation of technology. That's someone else's responsibility. But who's exactly?

Not a committee. Sorry, but putting marketers and IT people on the same committee doesn't resolve the alignment problems between them. It's a band-aid at best, a political football at worst. And at the end of the day, no committee can deliver the vision and agility of genuine leadership. Just look at the U.S. Congress.

In my opinion, there is only one real solution: Marketing must champion its own technology. We must manage it and lead it as an integrated part of our function.

To do that, we need to tap a new class of marketing professionals: marketers who are also technologists.

One of these marketing technologists should be on the senior management team of marketing, a chief marketing technologist. Someone who is a business/technology hybrid. Someone with a strong technical background in engineering or IT. Someone who is an early adopter, yet understands the pragmatic realities of making new technologies work. And most importantly, someone with that background who is deeply passionate about applying their talents in the service of marketing. As such, the role might be a hybrid of marketing and technology, but their loyalties aren't divided at all — they report primarily to the CMO, not the CIO.

What would a chief marketing technologist do? Three missions:

Mission #1: Help the CMO translate strategy into technology — with high-fidelity, not the lossy translation we've had with IT. And vice versa, proactively recommend emerging technologies that enable new strategies and capabilities.

Mission #2: Choreograph data and technology across the entire marketing organization — there's tremendous value and efficiency here, waiting to be tapped.

Mission #3: Perhaps most importantly, work to fuse technology into the very DNA of marketing — its practices, people, and culture.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone in marketing needs to be a technologist.

Just as not everyone in marketing has needed to be a "creative." You can be a brilliant marketer without any skills as a graphic designer.

But just good creative is entwined deeply in the culture and identity of marketing — and collectively we're very good at leveraging it in our mission — so it needs to be with technology. It's one of the pillars of new marketing.

Why? You're already responsible for the outcome — the success and efficacy of your marketing is strongly impacted by the technology in your arsenal and how dextrous you are with it.

If you're going to be measured on the outcomes that are dependent on technology, shouldn't you call the shots on that technology? Who should ultimately be in charge of marketing technology? Marketing. And a new breed of marketing technologists, led by a chief marketing technologist, is the way to get there from here.

In summary, if you're this dependent on marketing technology (see image below) — who do you want packing your parachute?

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