A clever email marketing campaign from the folks at MarketingProfs for their upcoming B2B Forum — which makes a larger point about just how much the culture of marketing has changed. I received the following email from "Don Draper" with the subject line, "Why I'm Not Attending MarketingProfs B2B Forum," and I just had to read it:
Just goes to prove that with email marketing, as with most other kinds of technology-powered marketing, the creative still matters. (Ironically so in this case.)
Marketers will spend about $1 trillion this year on external costs: everything from advertising of every kind, marketing services such as direct mail and lead generation, agency fees, data and intelligence such as market research, and — at the very bottom of the stack — software and technology.
In 2012, marketing technology will account for only 1% of marketing spend.
According to a recent report by research analyst Dan Salmon, the amount spent on software and technology globally this year will be around $12.1 billion out of the $984.6 billion spent on all external marketing costs. (Dan's report does not cover in-house marketing expenses —...
How many different solutions do you estimate you have integrated to support your website capabilities today? How many do you anticipate you will have integrated into your website 2 years from now?
For eCommerce professionals, the answers are surprising:
Even to a marketing technology polyglot such as myself, that's staggering.
Yet, upon reflection, quite plausible.
This data comes from a new Forrester paper commissioned by...
The agile marketing movement is underway, and right in the front lines of the charge is an agile champion named Jim Ewel.
Jim publishes the Agile Marketing.Net blog. He helped organize SprintZero, the first public gathering of agile marketers. He coaches companies on how to implement agile marketing through his consulting practice, Peel the Layers. He's organized the Seattle Agile Marketing meet-up. And I'm just scratching the surface.
He's on a mission "to evangelize agile marketing and to help marketers become better practitioners of agile marketing." And given all the great content produced and community building he's engaged in, the mission seems to be going splendidly.
I had the...
I just read Social Marketology by Ric Dragon, and I have to say, I love business books like this. It's intelligent and practical, written in a direct yet entertaining style, and delivers meaty ideas that you can put into practice pretty much immediately.
First, full disclosure, McGraw-Hill sent me a free copy of the book to review. But life is too short to read bad books, so I wouldn't have made it past a casual flip-through if it didn't prove compelling.
Social Marketology is a guide to the management of social media marketing. The emphasis is on the word management. While there are plenty of books out there that...
The following is a foreword I wrote for a new Agile Marketing white paper produced by Valtech.
We're privileged to live in the most exciting time in the history of marketing.
While every profession has been impacted by the explosion of ubiquitous computing and connectivity in the digital age, the impact on marketing has undoubtedly been the most profound. As the world has moved online, the distance between companies and customers has collapsed to zero. Google calls it the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), and it changes everything.
Previously...
Momentarily, I'll be delivering the closing keynote at Agile Day hosted by Valtech in Paris, talking about customer experience, agile marketing, and marketing technology — and how they're all entwined into the new competitive landscape of business. (Agile. Marketing technology. And Paris. I may have found paradise.)
Here is the slide deck from my presentation:
I had an interesting call earlier this week with Samson David, the global head of business platforms for Infosys. Our chat came about because Infosys, in partnership with WPP and its Fabric subsidiary, is now promoting its own marketing technology platform for major brands, BrandEdge.
There are so many fascinating layers to this story, it's hard to know where to begin.
First, the facts. BrandEdge is a software solution developed by Infosys that aims to unify the fragmented landscape of digital marketing within global enterprises — their leading case study is...
Julie Schwartz, SVP of research for the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, shared some fascinating results from a recent survey on marketing transformation they conducted with the following companies:
They asked marketers in these firms about a number of different roles — community manager, social engagement leader, chief content officer, data scientist, and chief technologist:
Two numbers about...
The problem with the Chicago school of economics isn't so much its belief in rational decision-making — we can save for another day the computational complexity arguments against such precision in our thinking. Rather, it's that it is too easy to misjudge what people are optimizing in their decisions.
How many times have you looked at something a large organization does and remarked to yourself, "Yikes, that seems a little irrational."
The irony is that there is rational decision-making happening in a lot of those scenarios. But the decisions are made by individuals who are naturally optimizing their own success and happiness — which all too often diverges from the higher order function of the organization as a whole (i.e., maximizing shareholder value). This is why truly great organizations work so hard at aligning the interests of their employees with their mission, and it's definitely...
