Chief Marketing Technologist by Scott Brinker

Marketing and the distributed web

Paul Dunay's recent post, Marketing Needs to Prepare for the Distributed Web, succinctly heralds the sea change from silos of online marketing technology and content to a far more open model. He gives examples of wikis, blogs, widgets, social networks, and other syndicated content that now live beyond the borders of a company's primary web site.

"If Marketing has become, or is in the midst of becoming, more distributed, then we must prepare to become more distributed in areas like content and measurement. Marketing needs to be ready to start measuring outside of its platform (i.e., its own web site and subdomains)."

This idea is near and dear to my heart, as my company's focus on post-click marketing has been rallying for marketers to think beyond the web site for several years now. We've witnessed a tremendous surge in energy from marketers in this direction over the past six months.

I'd add that the growing drumbeat of the semantic web may very well be the final catalyst for an explosion of rich online marketing that is intentionally designed to take wings beyond the borders of the circa-1990s corporate web site.

Managing, tracking, and optimizing it all is going to be one of the great challenges for marketing technology vendors and professionals over the years ahead. And as Dunay points out, that's going to require a little more than Google + WebTrends + email databases.

Visualization in marketing analytics

A recent ReadWriteWeb article on VisualComplexity.com caught my attention the other day, triggering some thoughts about the underutilized potential of visualization in marketing analytics.

Generally speaking, marketing isn't hindered by a lack of data these days. To the contrary, the challenge for many marketers is the exact opposite: they are deluged with data. It's a syndrome marked by being up to your eyeballs in reports and dashboards, but feeling short-changed on meaning and insight from them.

Particularly when it comes to web analytics and online behavior tracking, one can easily be cornered between two extremes:

• super high-level dashboards (overall metrics for traffic, conversion rate, CPA) that lack sufficient fidelity to explain the forces driving those metrics;
• very detailed reports — i.e., any report longer than one page — that are difficult to extract meaning from because there are too many rows and columns in table after table, too many pie charts and bar charts with varying scales, and it all starts to blend into a fuzzy analytical haze.

From cognitive science, we know two things: (1) humans are fantastic at visual pattern recognition, and (2) humans are also wired to tune out background scenery and focus on the new and different. The latter is a feature, not a bug: consider the oft-repeated example of your distant ancestors detecting the tiger moving among the trees, while less attune to the static details of the surrounding flora.

Taken together, these ideas suggest an opportunity for marketers to learn from fresh and different visualizations of their data. Shake it up. As the saying goes, "It's all a matter of perspective."

I believe that one of the roles of marketing technology should be more proactive exploration of visualization in marketing analytics — with the goal of revealing meaningful patterns. ("Meaningful" = actionable insight that increases business.)

The graphs, maps, and images on VisualComplexity.com are a great inspiration for this. Of course, there's always Edward Tufte's collection of visualization masterpieces: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Beautiful Evidence, and Visual Explanations.

In more day-to-day analytics visualization, take a look at Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few — excellent visual design recommendations, with plenty of examples, for making those dashboards as effective as they can be.

Martec analogous to marcom?

Every profession has its vernacular, the insider lingo that serves as both a shortcut and a sort of secret handshake. Acronyms and abbreviations are often the epitome of such jargon, inscrutable to those outside the club. ("Fix the DNS with the new IP for your SaaS CRM ASAP — think of the SLA!")

But some rare abbreviations bring grace and beauty to an otherwise jumbled stack of industry terms. One of my favorite has always been "marcom" — leave it to marketers to elevate the rather bland label of "marketing communications" into something sleek and sexy. When you're asked what you do for a living at a cocktail party, "marcom" is an answer with great magnetism.

In that spirit, I'd like to nominate "martec" for "marketing technology".

I may not be the first to suggest it, although a Google search for "martec" and "marketing technology" returns only 78 results at this time. Most of them appear to belong to one or more companies named Martec — although the one at http://www.martec.com is an engineering firm that does things such as scientific modeling for building navy ships. Guess martec could also stand for maritime technology, but hey, that's a tiny niche in comparison.

I prefer "martec" over "martech", because martec has 6-letter symmetry with marcom and because it sounds less techy. In the marketing/technology hybrid, I believe the scales should tip towards marketing. Martec must live under marketing, not IT.

Martec is also nice because it's short, especially in domain names, such as www.chiefmartec.com. But before I overrationalize this suggestion (too late?), let me simply suggest trying it on for size. Martec professionals. The martec group. A martec agency.

At the next cocktail party, "What do you do?"

A blog for marketing technologists

I have spent most of my working life at the intersection of marketing and technology. I've been on both sides of the fence, with a background as a software engineer and platform architect on one side and many years of experience in product marketing (and enough corporate marketing to be dangerous) on the other. I've consulted separately with marketing departments and IT departments, for small start-ups and the Fortune 500.

But by far the most fascinating projects for me have been those at the nexus between these two worlds — the rapidly evolving space of marketing technology.

My passion for marketing technology can be triangulated by four pieces of writing:

(1) Nicholas Carr's controversial Does IT Matter?. I basically agree with his premise: IT departments can be too technology focused, and IT by itself seems increasingly commoditized in the grand scheme.

That's not to say that there isn't great advantage to be found through technological innovation in business -- there most certainly is. But it has everything to do with the business competencies enabled through that innovation, not the technology itself. Anyone can buy paint, brushes, and canvas; becoming the next Picasso is another matter entirely. In my view, there are two core areas of business competency — operations and marketing/sales — and these need to be the groups driving both the vision and the implementation of business technology.

(2) The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. The Internet has triggered a major inflection point in the arc of marketing since the Industrial Revolution, from a mass market culture — and the business models and processes that leveraged it — to an explosion of niches.

But niches don't have to belong only to small companies. The multi-billion dollar successes of Google, Amazon, eBay have been achieved through the aggregation of niches. I believe that the future of every business, consumer or B2B, is somewhere along this continuum. The challenge for marketing technology is to let an organization master as broad a spectrum of niches as possible, with as much depth and specificity within each niche as possible.

The three drivers behind The Long Tail strike me as a checklist for all strategic marketers to harness in their space:

• democratization of innovation and production via user-generated content and participatory marketing;
• minimization of production and distribution costs in a digital environment, where variable costs may even asymptotically approach zero; this is not limited to purely digital goods either — think of the service and support surrounding industrial, physical goods;
• social networking of consumers (increasingly even B2B "consumers") to define and amplify niches.

(3) The article Marrying IT and Marketing by Michael Fischler. "IT is the master of information. Marketing is the master of exploiting information. But ... these two organizations, traditionally mongoose and cobra, are at perpetual odds with each other. Chronically battling for budget share, chronically fighting to do things their way. Chronically misunderstanding that they have the same goals."

Fischler's proposed solution is that these two groups be consolidated through the creation of a new organization within the enterprise: Marketing Technology, led by a Chief Marketing Technologist. This group would consist of the best and brightest from marketing and IT, technically-savvy marketers and marketing-savvy technologists. These Chimeric creatures do exist, albeit somewhat scarce today, but the Internet generation is breeding more of them.

Fischler's article was the direct inspiration for this blog.

(4) Big Think Strategy by Bernd H. Schmitt. The reaction to the radical restructuring that Fischler proposes is often "yeah, but that's not going to happen in my organization". This goes straight to the heart of Schmitt's thesis: everyone knows that businesses need creative and innovative strategies to compete, but conventional corporate wisdom — which eschews risk taking and rewards small thinking — discourages the kind of bold thinking that is needed to change markets. Big Think Strategy is the antidote to such corporate inertia.

This book is liquid inspiration for marketers and business strategists, with a wealth of examples of successful "big think" execution: the iPod, Whole Foods, Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign, even the Trojan War. To me, big think strategy is both the goal of marketing technology and the coordinating device for elevating such a role in the leadership of an organization.

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I did a Google search today for "chief marketing technologist" and was surprised to find only 345 matches. The phrase "director of marketing technology" did a little better, with 7,520 matches. My hope is that this blog will serve as a resource to help spread the "marketing technology" meme.