(This also appears as a guest post on SAS’s Left of the Date Line blog for the Asia Pacific region.)
Later this month, I’ll have the privilege of meeting with groups of CMOs and other marketing leaders across southeast Asia as part of an event tour with SAS Institute. We’ll be visiting Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India, as well as doing a live webcast for Australia and New Zealand on Tuesday, May 21.
The...
Agile marketing has been gaining a lot of steam over the past year, but we’re still in the “early adopter” stage of this movement.
(If you have no idea what agile marketing is, I recently posted a video introduction to agile marketing as well as an essay version.)
Most teams that have adopted agile marketing have had to figure it out on their own, improvising from ideas of agile development and adapting the process as they go along. There are precious few published stories of how real teams...
Terry Kawaja and the brilliant folks at LUMA Partners — a modern investment bank specializing in the intersection of media and technology — have just released their Marketing Technology LUMAscape, shown above.
A few years ago, Terry put together a similar landscape for the more specialized...
In a world powered by software, the developers who create that software — especially the really good ones — are increasingly the center of influence and power in business. That’s the core thesis of Stephen O’Grady’s brief-but-brilliant, 48-page book, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World.
This is highly relevant to marketers and...
As marketers, we want to be better consumers of data. Presented with data and its analysis, we want to be able to judge its accuracy and relevance to our decision making. We want to gauge its ambiguity and uncertainty, even though on the surface we’re being presented with quantified “facts.” We want to detect bias and account for it.
So let’s start with our own statistics in content marketing.
Because, seriously, too many of the stats that are appearing in content marketing these days smell fishy. I don’t want to pick on anyone in particular — there are too many folks doing this to unfairly single out one — so I’ll give you a hypothetical example:
Company X reports that their latest state-of-the-industry survey reveals 72% of marketers are engaging in — or plan to engage in — hamster optimization. Clearly hamster optimization is big! And isn’t that great, because coincidentally Company X just happens to be a hamster optimization...
The terms “marketing technologist” and “growth hacker” seem to be gaining traction out there.
Voice-based marketing automation provider ifbyphone recently released their annual State of Marketing Measurement Survey for 2013, which included the following results on the evolution of the marketing team:
Darling, I don’t know why I go to extremes
Too high or too low there ain’t no in-betweens
— Billy Joel
There’s a common fallacy known as a false dilemma or false dichotomy. It’s where you’re artificially presented with a black-and-white, either-or choice: you’re forced to choose between all of one or all of the other. “Your either with us or against us!”
It’s a fallacy because, most of the time, you’re not actually constrained to just those two choices. There are many great options in the middle — and often even more outside of that narrowly framed continuum.
In modern marketing, however, I’ve been noticing that more and more issues are being framed as black-and-white, either-or choices. We seem more ready than ever to take a new idea and either reject it completely or embrace...
A couple of months ago, I wrote a column on Search Engine Land titled Why Big Testing Will Be Bigger Than Big Data. A shorter spin-off of my post here on the big data bubble in marketing, its overarching message was that in a world of ever more data, experimentation would inevitably become king.
The message seemed to resonate, and the article was widely shared. However, my suggestion that the number of people empowered to run experiments should be significantly expanded in...
If I were a marketer psychologist — that is, a therapist to marketing teams, for which I’m sure there’s a market — I could imagine making a fine living by asking open-ended questions, such as “What does marketing science mean to you?”, and holding up a mirror to people’s responses.
I hear you say data-driven. What’s your earliest memory of working with data?
“Marketing as a science” strikes me as a bit of a Rorschach test for marketers these days. The answers seem to vary tremendously, offering glimpses into an organization’s worldview and culture in our digitized and data-ified world. (To play fair, last month I wrote up my interpretation of that nomenclature inkblot by describing...
I first met Brian Kardon a couple of years ago, when he was the CMO of Eloqua. He was one of the early advocates for this blog, and he provided a lot of encouragement on the emergence of this new breed of “marketing technologists” that they were seeing appear among many of their customers.
When we first met for coffee, I remember him asking me what my hobbies were. I replied that this blog was really my hobby, following the fascinating growth of the marketing technology space.
He paused for a moment and then pressed, “But what do you for fun?” Um, well, I said I also liked jazz. And that elicited a broad grin of approval as we started talking about a...
