Interview with Scott Brinker by Adam Fraser

This is a transcript from this EchoJunction podcast episode.

I’m delighted to welcome Scott Brinker to the EchoJunction podcast. Scott is co-founder and CTO of Ion Interactive, a software and services that enables online marketers to produce, manage, and optimize portfolios of landing pages and micro-sites. Scott blogs at chiefmartec.com, where he discusses marketing technology and the impact that’s having on marketing strategy, management, and culture. This is also where he produces the extremely well known, annual marketing technology landscape info-graphic, showing logos of all those vendors with an offering at MarTech. Last count, in early 2015, was close to 2000. To give you an idea of how well known and regarded Scott is in the MarTech community, an endorsement on his LinkedIn page, from none other than the co-founder of Marketo, says, “Scott is the definitive source for expertise in marketing technology. I can confidently say that no one, including myself, has done more to help evangelize the importance of technology in marketing!” Scott, absolutely delighted to have you with us, welcome to the EchoJunction podcast.

Scott: Great. Glad to be here Adam.

Adam: Good stuff. Okay Scott, I guess in the first instance, can you just give the listeners a bit of a summary of your backstory and how you got to where we are today?

Scott: Sure. So essentially, my career has been a software developer entrepreneur for many years. For a while actually, I was head of the technical team for a web development company that was producing fairly technically sophisticated websites from the late ‘90s into the early 2000s. And so yeah, throughout that entire history of being in the business of either doing custom development or creating software products, largely that has been for an audience of marketers. I’ve just, pretty much, spent my entire career fascinated by the way in which technology and marketing interplay.

Adam: So long term fascination with this space. You started blogging around 2008, I assume at chiefmartec.com it’s always been. What was the trigger or the catalyst to become a publisher and I guess a voice in this sector?

Scott: So I think several years before that, back when I was running the technical team for a web development company, some just really fascinating experiences. We would always be hired by the marketing team, so it was the CMO who would bring us in, but because we were building fairly technically sophisticated web solutions, a significant portion of what my job would be is actually working with the IT teams at those companies to make sure we could connect, that we could have the right infrastructure agreements, and really getting these things to cooperate.

And it was fascinating to me to see, to hear marketing on one side and then hear IT on the other side, and they were just, it was just so obvious how worlds apart they were in the language they were using, in the concepts they were thinking, even strategically what they thought needed to be done. So you look at these two organizations that are diametrically opposed, but at the same time, if you step away from internal structures and you just look at where the world was headed, it was so clear that these teams were going to have to work much, much more closely together. And so that experience really stuck with me for a while and was the genesis for, in starting the chiefmartec blog, really trying to help marketers better understand what all this technology entering in their world means and a little bit vice versa, helping people in the IT and technical communities understand a bit better how they can help marketing.

Adam: Interesting. And, look Scott, you obviously cover a whole range of…and I’ll link up in the show notes obviously to your blog, you talk about a whole range of topics, but one thing you’ve become particularly well known for is this infographic that you produce annually, I think it began in 2011. The version in 2015, like I said in the intro, showed nearly 2000 vendors in the marketing technology space, so I want to dig into that a little bit. But initially what gave you the idea in the first place for this visual representation?

Scott: Sure. Well actually, I owe a lot of credit to Terry Kawaja, who is the founder of LUMA Partners, an investment bank, and he really is the godfather of the logo landscape. Back in 2010/2011, he had created a logo landscape, that really, it just focused on the ad tech world, you know, was really where his investment bank was doing most of their work. And it was fantastic, it was really a great way of explaining what had been a somewhat mysterious collection of vendors in ad tech. And as soon as I saw that, I thought, “Well hey, that’s fascinating,” but, well, it got me scratching my head to think for people not in the ad tech side of this, but more broadly in marketing, what are all the different technologies that we’re having to work with? And so that was what that first sketch I did in 2011 was, yeah I mean probably not very thorough at the time, but it was just an attempt to try and illustrate all the different pieces of technology that marketers have to deal with, really, frankly, to lend credence to my hypothesis that I’ve been banging on the drum for a while that marketing has become a technology powered discipline. And this was kind of like Exhibit A in the case for that.

Adam: Look Scott, tough for us to, in the time we’ve got, even begin to talk about the complexities and the insights in that infographic, with like I say, you know 1800 and something vendors, but if you could just talk us through, maybe some of the main sub-categories, or just dig a little beneath, under the bonnet of how you’ve structured it, and how people should use it?

Scott: Sure. Well I think the breakthrough I had a couple years ago was feeling that there actually is some structure to that landscape. If ever you saw some of my earlier versions of this graphic, oh my God, just a disorganized mess, terrible, embarrassing. But in some ways that’s a bit of what the landscape actually felt like. Today, the way I organized the graphic is in essentially six main buckets. There’s a bucket I put relatively little space on, but I do think it’s important to call out, which is what I call the marketing environment. So it’s things like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. The thing is, we don’t necessarily think of them this way, but those really are software programs. These are software tools that marketers need to learn how to use, they need to learn how to integrate. They have a huge influence on what marketing can do today, so I sort of think of that as the foundation. Then on top of that, there’s a bunch of infrastructure technologies that are traditionally in the IT department, that we as marketers, we have to be aware of them now. We have to be aware of things like different proprietary databases we have in our company that we either have to feed in to or take advantage of. In some cases, we’re doing little web development projects of our own, or mobile app development projects of our own. So there’s that structure of infrastructure technologies that are not specific to marketing, but marketers now have to be familiar with these, they touch them.

Then you get into a layer of things that really are focused on marketing and the foundation, what I call backbone platforms includes things like CRMs, marketing automation platforms, content management systems, eCommerce, and even this sort of the category of conglomerated marketing clouds. But almost every marketing team has one, if not several of the products from that layer really as the foundation of what they’re doing. On top of that, there’s a category for what I call marketing middleware products. And the simplest way is these are tools that help all your other tools work together better. So things like tag management, or data management platforms, things like that kind. And then on top of those, are actually the two largest categories, if you talk about the sheer number of vendors, which I split into two parts. There’s essentially what we do in the back office of marketing, or marketing operations. So these are things around asset management, resource management, analytics, team and project management, things of that kind. And then by far the biggest category is the front office marketing experience tools, which can be everything from content marketing to display advertising, social media, what we’re doing for events, both online events and management of offline events, and search engine optimization, and all sorts of wonderful things like that.

Adam: I mean Scott, just to hear you talk about a middleware layer, which is needed to help everything else work more efficiently together, I guess tells you how big and complex the environment has got. And look, I suspect I’d have asked you this question if we had been doing this podcast even a year ago and I think we’re just over 1000 tools in the 2014 infographic, here we are at, call it 2000 tools or close to. I mean logically, instinctively you would think some sort of consolidation would come, but as I say I probably would have thought the same thing a year ago, so are we any nearer to that moment when consolidation comes or do you think this is the new normal?

Scott: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think one of the challenges in understanding this market right now is you kind of have two narratives that you would think would be either/or propositions, but they seem to be happening simultaneously. One of those narratives is there is consolidation that’s happening, right? We look at these major marketing cloud providers that have spent over 12 billion dollars in acquisitions and they’re putting together some really incredible collections, and certainly we’ve also seen companies that have gone out of business too. So there’s clearly consolidation forces at work.

On the other hand, yeah, people just keep creating new companies. There’s new companies that keep getting significant funding from venture capitalists, there’s new companies that are winning over significant new brands as they’re getting out into the market. So we’re seeing still this very vibrant engine of innovation happening in this market as well. So I think we all intuitively agree there’s got to be a limit somewhere, there is a ceiling to this and my suspicion is we’re probably pretty close to that ceiling. But I think it’s going to be very unlikely that it’s going to shrink so much as it will hit a place where there will be a consolidation around really a lot of these core foundational systems, but that for quite some time to come, we are going to continue to see new entrants that are innovating new pieces of what marketing does today.

Adam: Yeah, I look even within the social media marketing software landscape, which in itself, is a reasonably crowded space. Just in the last three months, I think Tracx, Spredfast, there’s been some significant, Sprinklr, significant private equity money continuing to flow into that sector. The investors seem to like what they’re seeing, so it’s hard to see what the sort of circuit breaker is to the current situation, or the current trend.

Scott: Yeah, I mean it’s just one of these things where it’s not just marketing technology that’s in this state of disruption, it’s really marketing overall is in such a huge shift of companies making this change from what the old ways we used to frame marketing and winning customers to these new digital environments. I mean overall, marketing is a trillion dollar, some odd, industry, all things included in it and marketing technology today, depending on the estimate you’d pay attention to, is maybe 20 billion dollars, 25 billion dollars. So it’s actually a pretty small chunk of marketing, as we know it today, actually goes to technology spend and I think a lot of people look at where the revolution in marketing, overall, is headed and say “You know, there’s been a lot of growth in marketing technology but there’s probably actually a lot more growth ahead too.”

Adam: Yep. Now assuming when you look at it as share of straight media buy and spend, you absolutely get a different perspective. Scott, look, EchoJunction being born out of a SAP consultancy or systems integrator, probably a question you don’t get too often, but I did pick up in 2012, you wrote a blog post about marketing software will never be ERP, for the non-IT overly literate in the audience, effectively an enterprise wide system. You sort of link to the question above about consolidation, but do you ever see, do you still stand by that view, there will never be a single piece of system which brings all, a single piece of marketing software that brings all of this together?

Scott: Yeah, I do. I think it’s going to be very difficult for one piece of software to do this all and do it all really well. I mean part of what I was trying to say in my…I remember why I wrote that post about ERP, which I think actually upset several companies who is their mission, but when you think about ERP, the differences for marketing is marketing doesn’t control the environment in which it’s operating at this point, I mean you can’t lock down the pieces. For instance, marketing is so dependent on what Google does, what Facebook does, what Twitter does, what’s the hottest new social thing or the hottest new consumer app, or consumer technology, or the Internet of things, there’re all these disruptions that keep happening out in the marketplace, and marketing needs to go where the audience is. It needs to be able to react to this.

So this belief that somehow you could lock down the marketing process and predict how you’re going to want it to operate for the next 5, 10 years, it doesn’t feel like it has that dynamic. The other thing is one of the things that make ERP work is when you’re able to really say, “Okay, well everyone in the system is going to agree to play by this set of rules,” right? That way we can optimize everything. Well the number one actor in the marketing world is the prospect, is the customer. We cannot dictate to them how they are going to want to interact with us. I mean we can try to dictate how we want them to interact with us, but they can also choose to just go somewhere else. And so, this fact that we have to be much more adaptive and responsive to an audience that…we’re serving them, not the other way around, I think again, that makes it very difficult ERP-ize marketing.

And then last but not least is a lot of operations, best practices, they cross almost all industries, right? I mean there’s really someone who’s really phenomenal at supply chain management can bring that discipline to a lot of different businesses and have a certain set of commonality there. And I think that’s really helped with the systematization of ERP, but in marketing, I mean one of marketing’s primary responsibilities is to differentiate a business, to find ways of engaging with the world that’s different than competitors. And so I think you’re always going to have marketers looking for the next new thing or some new innovation that will help them stand out from their competitors. And if everyone was on one big standardized marketing ERP, it feels like we’d lose that.

Adam: Yep, now that’s interesting, that’s a great answer Scott. Makes a lot of sense. Look, I think quite obviously, they’ll be little disagreement from anyone that the marketer today has to absolutely be comfortable with technology and analytics. And yeah, I was at the ad tech conference this week, just in Sydney, and yeah, almost every single presentation had a technology or a big data or analytics kind of thread to it. I’m interested in the term chief marketing technology, Scott, because I know in the U.S. that’s getting some prevalence and I’ve blogged recently and in Australia, I think we may be a little behind in terms of understanding what that means. So talk us through the evolution, from your perspective of the chief marketing technologist, where did this term come from and what does this person look like?

Scott: Sure. You know, it’s funny, so my blog, which was originally titled “Chief Marketing Technologist,” I had heard a couple people use the phrase way back in 2007/2008 to describe this role and I thought that was a very nice way of blending these two worlds. That being said, I’m actually…one of the challenges we have in marketing right now is so many things are changing so rapidly that every other month it feels we’re being proposed that we need to hire another chief-something, like a chief digital officer, a chief data officer, a chief innovation officer, a chief customer experience officer. And so if we hired all these roles, it would be complete madness, and so to me I’m actually not as much of an advocate for that as a specific role or a specific title so much as a broader recognition that marketing has become a deeply technology powered discipline and as a result, the marketing team needs to incorporate more technical talent into its DNA.

And this goes up to a very high level, I do not believe that the CMO has to be technologist, although we’re actually now seeing a number of CMOs who do have that sort of a background, which is fascinating, but if they’re not, I think they really do want someone who is their right hand in the marketing team to help advise on how technology is mapped to marketing strategy, how they can help enable new marketing strategies, who can help the marketing team both select these tools and then, really more importantly, operationalize them, figure out how to really get the adoption of what these tools are capable of spread more widely throughout the marketing team.

And I don’t see this as a replacement to the IT department or even really a competition to it, as much as making marketing a more informed consumer of IT services and IT collaboration. That IT, as an organization, brings a tremendous amount to the table, but what they generally do not have is a deep understanding of how to apply these technologies in the service of marketing programs and campaigns and obj…it’s just not what their background has been. And so I really look at these hybrid marketing technologists as the people who bridge those two worlds. They can really help get the most out of the IT organization and make sure that marketing is adhering to good IT governance. But more importantly, they really can help the marketing team leverage these products and platforms to their fullest potential.

Adam: Yeah. It’s an interesting trend to observe, Scott. I guess even absent organizations which may have individuals with one foot in both camp, call them marketing technologists or whatever the job title is, it may be more traditional organizations where marketing and IT are more distinct, they clearly have to work collaboratively. To what extent…it’s 2015, one would assume this is now inevitable and happening, but what’s your observations of enterprises and how CMOs or CIOs or marketing and IT teams are working together?

Scott: That’s a good question, because I think this is one of the cases where the theory and the practice diverge. I think probably everyone fully agrees in theory this collaboration has to happen, and there are certainly a number of companies where you can point out and say “Okay, these folks are doing a really good job of this.” For a lot of companies, there’re still struggles. And part of this is, just to be very blunt, most senior CMOs did not grow up in a world of technology powered marketing. And so they’re still trying to figure out marketing’s place in this new world, much less how are we actually going to implement it internally. Vice versa, a lot of senior IT leaders grew up in a world where IT was a certain set of infrastructure management, cost containment, it was mostly about on-premise management, and this whole world of cloud computing and the democratization of IT, where people now walk around with more software programs on their smartphone than IT could have ever even conceived of existing 15 years ago. So I think the CIOs and the CMOs, each in their own worlds, there’s a number that are still struggling to just figure out what this means, and how do we adapt our organizations to support this. And then, trying to then get collaboration between those two on top of that, even if their intentions are good and their heart’s in the right place on this, it’s a lot to absorb, it’s a lot of change management challenges for organizations who have to make this shift.

Adam: So maybe the journey’s begun, but we’re certainly, it would be hard to say we’re at the best practice, or optimum.

Scott: We’re working on it.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. I mean look, Scott, related to your question, and again coming out an IT services sort of heritage, EchoJunction, if I look at a conventional IT integration project, maybe you’d say, “Okay, let’s take a social media listening tool and integrate that into a CRM, or Salesforce, or a cloud for customer type product, or perhaps a single tool coming into the core ERP system.” Again, back to the breadth and depth, and complexity of this landscape, I think close to 2000 tools in 43 categories. Are you observing, even, intra-marketing tool integrations, so not even touching core systems, but IT projects to make some of these marketing-specific tools talk to each other?

Scott: Sure, there’s definitely a lot of that that happens and the line blurs between what is a marketing only tool or not.

Adam: Sure.

Scott: You know, things like marketing automation systems, well CRMs, but also content management systems that are driving websites, in some ways they’re that core enterprise technology, but in a lot of cases they’re actually being really driven by the marketing teams. And so those core systems are the things we see a lot of people wanting to integrate. At the layer above that, a lot of that comes down to the specifics of which products are you integrating for what objective. I mean there’re tools, for instance, doing optimization on your website, or if you’re doing eCommerce, card abandonment, or if you want to do like a search engine optimization program that layers on top of your website. There’re all these things, content marketing, another great example, these tools that they can have relatively lightweight integrations to each other. And the truth is, that’s actually getting easier to do. I don’t want to say it’s easy, it’s not quite there yet, but it is slowly getting easier because a lot of the people who are creating these products recognize that they are living in a heterogeneous ecosystem and a part of what helps them sell their software is their ability to demonstrate that they can play nicely with the related components in their world. And so, the vendors here are investing a lot of effort in making this integration process better.

Adam: Great. Yeah, that’s interesting, Scott. I guess just pivoting a little bit into the sheer choice, the paradox of choice. Actually, in a previous career role, I was with a mortgage broking business, and we thought the world complicated in mortgages, we had 25 lenders and gosh, 300 mortgages and we, obviously the mortgage broker, sort of the spiritual guide to the consumer, advising and navigating that choice to find the best product. How on Earth are CMOs or CIOs or whoever’s buying navigating this landscape and selecting tools from I guess such a seemingly crowded marketplace?

Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well I think if you speak to many of them, they’re struggling with this. I don’t think there’s a lot who feel like it’s a cake walk at this point. Going back to one of your earlier questions, this is actually one of the roles that a marketing technologist can play in an organization, is helping to take marketing’s requirements, the things that marketing wants to do, or to the degree that the marketing technologist can also help them discover new possibilities that they might want to do. But to take that and help distill that down to a set of requirements that can then be mapped to candidate vendors and go through that process of identifying, evaluating, eliminating, prioritizing. It’s funny to me to actually the…I mean it’s not funny, it’s challenging, so much discussion in this industry happens around tool selection and I think it’s partly because people look at these landscapes and they kind of freak out, they’re like “Oh my God, I can’t figure out what to get.” But I do always caution people that the selection, in many ways, is the easiest part of this. I mean anyone with a credit card can essentially go out and buy a piece of software. The really hard part is figuring out how do we use this software well? And again, I think that’s why you want that marketing technologist role who’s going to…the entire exercise in developing those requirements and developing a plan for which tools you want to purchase is really being driven from the vision of, “Okay, how are we going to apply those in what we’re trying to achieve?”

Adam: Look, with such a broad and deep landscape, Scott, it’s hard to draw too many sweeping statements, generalizations, but what are you observing, who are the winners that are emerging within this space? And are there any themes or comments you have about their software, in terms of user experience, or what’s making the winners win in this space?

Scott: Yeah. So there’s a few forces. Some of them, frankly, are just better marketers than others. It’s funny, there was a CMO today who turned to me in a meeting and said, “You know, I get a lot of marketing from marketing technology companies and a lot of it’s really bad.”

Adam: Ironic.

Scott: So the irony of that is definitely not lost on the audience. But in all seriousness, some companies are very good at applying marketing and sales in this industry and that helps them with an edge. I think if you want to look a little bit more based on merit, the winners seem to be those who, first and foremost, are embracing that ecosystem, that more open approach to playing nicely with others because again, we are living in an environment where almost every company of any significant size has a lot of these different tools and the easier you can make it to have these pieces connect to each other, the better it is.

I think definitely the winners are those who are helping marketers use their tools, it doesn’t just end with “Oh, we got a contract, we signed them up for three years, good luck.” Whether it’s a combination of, as you said, the user experience, for marketers, coming up with products that are easier to use, that provide better guidance, I think that’s really valuable. And the third ones are those who are pushing the innovation. I think you see this a lot in the social media space, where there’re some companies, they developed a product that does basic social media listening and that’s fine, but not really much has happened beyond that and very quickly that’s become commoditized. Versus you see other companies that are really pressing on, “Okay, well what’s the next stage of this?” I see this whole area of influencer marketing, for instance, that has really started to gain a lot of momentum. That sort of sub-category, in my mind, grew out of largely, social media marketing, but it was a set of players who realized, “Wow, this is more than just listening in general, this is a way of let’s focus on a very specific value proposition that’s available to companies within this environment.” And so, yeah, those companies definitely are taking the lead, they’re creating a new space.

Adam: Look, you touched on this, got an example from social media niche, in particular. I guess obviously one of the focuses, obviously, of this podcast is the social media/technology landscape. So within your broader infographic, do you have any thoughts or observations on what’s happening in social media technology right now?

Scott: It is one of the most rapidly evolving ones. And probably one of the key reasons for that is social media environment is still in just a tremendous flux. We are still seeing new social media services that are coming out, some of them grow quite fast, some of them grow quite fast then vanish. Even in the major players, how Google’s continuing to, I’ll put this is air quotes, “evolve,” Google+, right. I mean, where’s that heading, how does that effect what we can do with it? Facebook continues to evolve very quickly, LinkedIn. So it’s like there’s so much happening in the social media environment that is seems very natural that software companies who are trying to helping you better manage your social media on that environment, they’re just going to be in a state of pretty much continuous disruption for at least as far as we can see over the next year or two.

Adam: So continuing, I guess existing players evolving and adapting, one would hope, but also you’re still seeing a flow of new players in the space.

Scott: Yes, and I think, to your earlier question about winners, is look at the social media players who are adapting quickly to these new disruptions. Yeah, they’re the ones I’d put the money on.

Adam: Okay, look Scott, just a couple more questions before we move to the close. Looking at some of the functionality, I guess, the tools we’re talking about cover, look at say sales, marketing, customer service, PR, analytics. Historically, and even perhaps currently, tend to be silos or separate departments within larger enterprises. I guess, firstly, are you seeing convergence right now, in terms of maybe marketing taking a more central lead in any or all of those? And secondly, do you think that’s a natural and logical progression for an organization?

Scott: Yes, we could probably do a whole podcast just on that. I mean I think the reality is the customer journey does not live just in the historical touch points we’ve associated with marketing, right? It crosses marketing, it crosses sales, it crosses customer service, it has connections to finance, it has connections back to what we’re doing with R&D. And so, the biggest challenge is customer expectations are that when they deal with a company, they don’t want to have to think about which department am I interacting with, they just want to think of, “Hey, this is my experience, and my life cycle with this company, how well do they treat me end to end?”

And so, for companies, this is a huge challenge…I mean there’s very good reasons why we built things into silos, it’s one of the ways you’re able to actually scale things. And so, this notion of how do you adapt an organization of significant size to really basically have those barriers, those silos be completely invisible to the customer, that’s a really tough challenge. I think one of the proposals we’re seeing companies experiment with, and I believe in, is this idea that out of all these various departments, marketing probably makes sense of the one who could do the best job of keeping track of that relationship from the very, very first touch point with an ad impression all the way through. That doesn’t mean marketing is going to be in control of everything in the company and customer service and sales and whatnot, but I think it does sort of suggest a model where marketing, rather than being on the periphery of the organization, might actually become more of that centralized hub, really the keeper of the end to end customer experience. And it would have a lot greater overlap and interaction with these different departments, depending on the context in which a customer’s at at any given point in time.

Adam: That’s great. Yeah, look, so much change, and change in the market leading to change in org. structures and the way enterprises are approaching this, it’s fascinating times, Scott, to be in this space. Look, last question before we start to wrap up. In terms of forecasts, I know the IDC is a figure I see quoted all the time that MarTech’s going to be worth 32 billion by 2018. I saw an even gutsier forecast from I think a venture capitalist investor who said it’s going to be 10 times the growth in 10 years, so we’re going to be north of 100 billion in this space. Do you have a forecast, or do you have a view of, I guess, the general direction you see the MarTech macro-environment going?

Scott: Yeah, I don’t feel like I’ve done enough quantitative research to put a mythical number on it, but I think from a trend perspective, I would agree with both of those predictions, essentially saying that we are going to be seeing double digit growth in market technology for at least the next 5 years, if not the next 10 years.

Adam: So will the landscape fit on an A3…I have it printed out on A3 paper on my wall at the moment, how big will we get?

Scott: You know, it’s funny, one of the questions I ask myself, I’m wrestling with that is when someone asks, how many marketing technology companies can there be in the world? I always come back to them and say, “Well, it depends on how you define marketing and how you define technology.” Because here’s the thing, is what we were just saying earlier, as marketing ends up touching all of these other different departments, there’re all those different capabilities across all of them. And the other side is when you talk about technology, I mean it’s one thing to say, “Okay, well how many Oracle, Adobe, IBM size companies are there going to be in the world?” Just doing the math, there’s going to be a relatively small number of that scale, but when you start talking about any entrepreneurial set of people who might do one piece of something really well that plugs in to help a set of marketers…I mean we live in a world where it feels like almost every company out there is going to have software components that they might offer as part of their products or services. And so, if you take the boundary of marketing to be very large and you take the bar which you consider someone to be offering a technology product of some kind, yeah I don’t know.

Adam: Who knows?

Scott: It could be pretty large.

Adam: Yeah, that’s great. Look Scott, thanks so much. It’s been really interesting discussion in which I’ve learned a lot and I hope the audience have as well. As we wrap things up with Scott, we like to just lighten things up just a little bit at the end of these podcasts so are you set for the EchoJunction quick-fire round?

Scott: Hit me.

Adam: Here we go. Okay. Scott Brinker, if you could only use one social network for the next 30 days, for any purpose, which would you choose and why?

Scott: Definitely Twitter. I feel like Twitter, I don’t know about the rest of world, but to me it feels like one of the social networks where the marketers of the world really do converge. It’s one of few places where the marketers of the world are forced to keep their remarks to 140 characters or less, so how do you beat that?

Adam: There we go, great answer. Okay, question two, Scott, what’s the most influential and impactful business book you’ve ever read?

Scott: I think the most impactful has been “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. That is such as great way of thinking about adapting lean and agile to a business. Everyone should read that.

Adam: Okay. That’s great, I’ll link that up in the show notes as well. And finally, and most importantly, if you could only take three items to a desert island, other than food and water, what would you take?

Scott: Well, probably a satellite phone, but that’s the pragmatic side of me. Yeah, I don’t know, a satellite phone, a big stack of notebooks, and a pen.

Adam: So the infographic not specifically taken?

Scott: That’s probably why I went to the deserted island, to get away from it.

Adam: That’s right. Look, Scott, that’s fantastic. Thank you so much again for being on the EchoJunction podcast. Scott, I’ll obviously link up to your blog, but are there any other places you want to send people to find out a bit more about what you’re doing online?

Scott: So yeah, my blog, chiefmartec.com, and also if you want to take a look at my company, ion, I-O-N, interactive.com, we produce software for interactive content that you might find interesting.

Adam: That’s great. Thank you once again Scott for being on the EchoJunction podcast, that’s been fantastic.

Scott: Thank you Adam.

Adam: There we go ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Scott Brinker. I hope you enjoyed that interview, I certainly took a lot out of it. And as you can hear, that world of converging CMO and CIO and the Gartner stat, by 2017 CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs, that is Scott’s domain. And if it’s a topic you want to dig deeper into, I really would encourage you to check out some of Scott’s blog posts and various pieces of analyses and insight that he’s got on his website at chiefmartec.com, it’s linked in the show notes.