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"Most of marketing is not a verifiable domain. You can't outsource it to the agents. You need the humans." - Scott Brinker
Scott Brinker, creator of the Martech landscape and former VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, joins Jacqueline for a no-holds-barred conversation on AI's real limits in marketing, and why the industry's confidence in what AI can do may be its biggest liability. This is a genuine stress test of some of marketing technology's most popular assumptions: that AI can replace human judgment in vendor selection, that content governance is someone else's problem, and that consolidation is always the safe bet.
The episode opens on the concept of synthetic certainty: AI outputs that feel authoritative but can't actually be validated, and builds from there into a broader argument about why marketing, as a non-verifiable domain, is more defensible than people fear. Scott draws a sharp line between tasks AI can handle reliably and decisions that require taste, context, and stakes. The stakes get real when he calls out the single most dangerous assumption in martech right now: that full-stack consolidation is the goal. Spoiler: handing your entire marketing operation to one vendor isn't simplification. It's surrender.
Timestamps
00:57 — Synthetic certainty unpacked: why marketing is not a verifiable domain like software engineering and what that means for job security
04:57 — Where AI actually breaks down: a vendor evaluation scenario and why attribution models are "delusional"
12:33 — The AI content governance gap: 103 of 163 respondents doing zero verification, and whether this becomes an industry credibility crisis
22:59 — The three-bucket theory of marketing roles and which bucket AI is about to crush entirely
26:42 — The most dangerous assumption Martech operators are making: why full vendor consolidation is a trap, not a goal
33:46 — Seventeen years of mapping the landscape: what the 2011 version of Scott would find shocking about vendors, brands, and the future of martech research
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Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
Scott Brinker (00:01.836)
Yes, you're it's just you and nothing else.
MSoM Podcast (00:05.138)
Great, okay. Yeah, I still no idea. Yeah. Water break, you're killing it. Are are you liking that? You don't know what the questions are gonna be?
Scott Brinker (00:15.702)
No, I mean again, I I think it's the natural I mean, hopefully the answers I'm giving are helpful.
MSoM Podcast (00:20.604)
No, they're great. They're great. okay.
Okay. Alright. In the last episode, I introduced the idea of synthetic certainty. AI outputs that feels like answers or that feels like answers but can't be validated. And you started to respond. Let's pick right back up. Is synthetic certainty something you're witnessing, especially because you're from on the research side of things? Like are you seeing folks come up with things they claim to be authoritative and and real and factual?
It's just not. It's Chat Chi P T.
Scott Brinker (00:57.586)
in I've been in social media and Martech for the past you know 20 years. So I'm absolutely used to people coming up with all sorts of things that claim to be authentically true. I'm like, I don't think that's true. but let me let me actually twist this around though because this is why I think this is actually a great
MSoM Podcast (01:05.725)
Very fair.
MSoM Podcast (01:12.86)
Yeah. There's a lot of misinformation out there, unfortunately.
Mm.
Scott Brinker (01:25.08)
The concern about jobs and how they're changing and what jobs are most at risk, you know, the the easiest way to boil it down like, my goodness, can AI just do my job? and sometimes the example a lot of folks are looking at here is what's happened in software engineering, where the sort of work that a lot of people did in software engineering that now, my goodness, you just set the agents up and tell it what you want and it goes off and does it. And it's actually really very good at it.
Turns out there's still actually other ways in which engineers are, you know, building on top of that. But that scenario is like very scary to a lot of people because, you know, I mean, marketers can think about like, well, I think about the tasks and what I do, man. Boy, I spend a lot of time on those tasks. If AI is just doing it, what's my, you know, role? One of the reasons why I think marketing is more defensible for the human involvement in that is because in contrast to engineering.
Like software engineering is what they call a verifiable domain. You know, I can say, like, all right, build me a program that does X, and I can tell the AI, build it, and then test it. Here's the evaluation criteria where I want to then know that it actually works. And the AI will build it. It will try to debug it. It'll be like, yeah, now this doesn't work. Let me try it again. now there's other things broken. Okay, let me try it again.
And it can just go off and do that on its own and eventually when it what it produces pass all the tests and say, Here, great, it's done, it's verified.
Most of marketing is not a verifiable domain. you know, like the the the counter to that would be like, hey, send an email to Jacqueline, you know, to persuade her to buy our product. Okay, well, what's the AI gonna do? It's like, well, all right, I'll send you this email, that can work, I'll send you this other one. I will send Jaclyn 50,000 emails until I finally find the email that, you know, hey, this is email that worked. Right. That's you know, again, it's a little bit of an exaggerated scenario, but it's not that far off. Like we just we
MSoM Podcast (03:10.459)
Yeah.
MSoM Podcast (03:18.727)
Logic's not there.
Scott Brinker (03:24.098)
So much of marketing, you know, not the tasks of marketing, you know, but the really, you know, strategic role of like, how do we build marketing over time that works well? You can't outsource it to the agents. You need the humans because yeah, you you know, the synthetic yeah, the the fact that the agents would have like you know, like this synthetic confidence, you know, what they're doing doesn't help you. In fact, actually quite the opposite. It it hurts you.
MSoM Podcast (03:38.577)
You can't outsource taste or curation.
Scott Brinker (03:52.952)
it it c it'll kill your brand.
MSoM Podcast (03:56.508)
Well it it's giving you the output of an average and you don't want to be an average company, do you? And I really see marketing as kind of the social science versus of course coding is the computer science. Like it is actual science in some capacity. There's math, it's binary, versus there's a recent ec like economics, if you get a prediction right like 40% of the time, you are the best in class. and so agreed on all of the above.
So I've got a scenario that is a real one I want to talk about where AI actually breaks down and maybe there is more job security than folks are concerned about. So for example, a client is asking me to use AI to evaluate six different vendors across 90 different data points and criteria. Walk me through where Claude, ChatGPT, you name it, would break down, not just theoretically, but in the actual output and where does
certainty here becomes synthetic. Ineffective.
Scott Brinker (04:57.858)
Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny, this is the first thing that comes to mind is why don't get me wrong, I think attribution is a useful tool directionally, but for years the people who are like, yeah, I've got this attribution model and it just tells me, you know, I'm like, that is absolutely delusional and it's delusional for a whole bunch of reasons, not the least of which is y you have a subset of data.
You do not have all the data. You do not have all the context of which all that data is, you know. anyways, before I go off on that rant, you know, it comes back like, okay, well when you're talking about like, okay, I've got 90 criteria here, first step is like, okay, where do I actually get the authoritative data for each one of those vendors on each one of those criteria? And then
I'm gonna assume I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, even if you find that data, it's not all like perfectly quantified of like, you know, what's your average millisecond response time on it? No, it's like, how do you handle this sort of campaign, or how you do this? So people are gonna use language that is highly interpretable, highly varied, you know. Yeah. I mean, and that's assuming that they're s accurate, you know, even if they wanted I'm not saying they're trying to lie, but even like
MSoM Podcast (06:03.845)
Much more semantic based.
Scott Brinker (06:12.108)
You know, as anyone who's been in marketing has tried to, you know, keep keep track of all your content and keep it updated and you're sp yeah, there's a lot of content out there that just isn't that. And so, you know, getting the data, interpreting the data is I mean, that alone feels like okay, you you just aren't gonna fully automate that. But the level above that of the context, what isn't in the data?
MSoM Podcast (06:15.108)
Sugar coating.
Scott Brinker (06:41.708)
That would actually, as a human, really matter to you in which experience you would choose. I mean, again, I know we're talking about UI isn't necessarily the same battlefield it once was, but it's it's a non-trivial piece. So, like, how do you quantify, how does an agent quantifiably verify is this a delightful user experience or not? I would just propose at the moment that's not.
where AI is at. So, you know, this is why you would have humans who would say, like, okay, let me actually hands-on, you know, don't give me a canned demo. I want to actually walk through these scenarios and feel and see and touch what it's like to do that. And hey, listen, there could be disagreement. Like, you know, one set of people might be like, we love the way this flows with, you know, product A. You know, another team would be like, you guys are smoking crack.
You know, the way Product B does it is, you know, like so much more elegant, you know, because there's so much preference and context that that goes into that. And so again, I'm to use AI and AI research as a feeder and one of the components of you know bringing something like this together, yeah, by all means, use all the tools at your disposal. But
The list is long of of things that like are gonna fall outside of that, rel reliability, you know, of what the AI is feeding you back. And so
MSoM Podcast (08:17.003)
The certainty doesn't stay certain in that regard.
Scott Brinker (08:19.266)
Goodness, yeah.
Poof.
MSoM Podcast (08:23.77)
I'm glad it it makes me feel better 'cause I've actually faced this exact scenario. and it was a bit of an existential crisis where this client I was like, Why can't you just use AI for all of this? And I'm like, Then why did you hire me?
Scott Brinker (08:38.69)
Yeah, good luck.
MSoM Podcast (08:40.671)
Yeah, exactly. Like, okay. it all worked out, it's fun. But it was an interesting the first time I've experienced that moment where I was like, Mm, you can't judge customer support of solely an SLA CSAT score. Like, that doesn't always tell all the truth. And so
Scott Brinker (08:59.51)
No, no, but you know, what a great learning experience though. Because I mean, again, like I can have empathy for, you know, again, executives who are particularly those coming from, you know, decades of just previous experience. It's such a different world. And so I'm not actually gonna pick on f someone for like maybe legitimately asking the question of like, well, why can't we just have AI do this? It seems to answer my other question so well.
MSoM Podcast (09:09.505)
yeah.
Scott Brinker (09:24.13)
But to actually then be able to do the exercise of like, here's why this is gonna miss on this, is actually the exact sort of insights that executive really needs to learn because it's not your your risk isn't actually just with the vendor evaluations. The risk is how are you going to deploy AI in the ways to engage with your customers? And if you don't develop that sort of intuition of like, okay, what's the surface area that the AI can do and do reliably? What's the stuff that we need to do other ways?
MSoM Podcast (09:49.9)
Yes.
Scott Brinker (09:53.838)
and yeah, I mean you can be forgiven for not having that automatic I like how else do you learn about this stuff? You just have to dig into it.
MSoM Podcast (09:55.126)
Yeah, like what's our special sauce versus
MSoM Podcast (10:00.66)
Exactly.
You're completely right. Okay. So the most underadopted AI use case from your survey, out of the seventy seventy.
MSoM Podcast (10:17.817)
I'm trying to reinterpret it. the most underadopted AI use case in your entire survey out of 70 is using AI for vendor selection and sec management. It's very relevant. Eighty-eight out of the hundred and thirty-three respondents aren't doing it. And you call it the cobbler's children problem. But is the harder truth that AI genuinely can't do this yet, or nobody wants to?
Scott Brinker (10:35.351)
Mm-hmm.
Scott Brinker (10:42.906)
well, all right. So actually I think a lot of those use cases have some similarity there in the sense that there's a big difference between using AI as a part of a use case and outsourcing the entire use case 100% to AI and you know saying a prayer to, you know, you know, the gods of open AI. you know, I think it's ac absolutely valid to be like, you know, hey, listen, I want an AI agent that's gonna track.
All of the major vendors, you know, that I have in my existing stack are under consideration. And I want to tracking like news announcements or things that are coming out on forums and like alert these things to me. I mean, yes, I should be able to use AI to get a lot more intelligence around things. That's very different than saying like, yeah, the the AI just picks our tech stack for us. I haven't looked at it in ages.
MSoM Podcast (11:31.13)
Right.
Scott Brinker (11:31.864)
For some reason it keeps sending all of our money to you know the Frontier Lab, but I'm sure it's making those decisions, you know, perfectly in an unbiased and rational way.
MSoM Podcast (11:39.608)
Yep. No, it's funny. It's like, well, all of a sudden the cobbler now has 15,000 plus shoes to choose from to deal with. So exactly.
Scott Brinker (11:49.07)
Yeah, you kinda need AI.
MSoM Podcast (11:53.932)
Alright, so if we're not verifying our vendor choices with AI, we're definitely not verifying our content. Which brings me to the data point in this report that I couldn't shake. And it happened has to do with the government governance gap that we kind of talked about previously, but really want to double-click. 103 out of 163 respondents are doing nothing. They verify the AI generated content they're producing at scale. Horror shock, for me, not a fan.
And for me that's not a governance gap. It's basically that it's just absent entirely. And so at what point does this become an industry level credibility problem or just an individual company?
Scott Brinker (12:33.964)
Yeah. I mean so there's there's more than one possible explanation to go with that data. you know, one is that yeah, they're just letting these AIs run loose and create this content and publishing and not having any sort of checks and balances to it. And not inconceivable some people are doing that, but I think we can all sort of like intelligently like Yeah, you know.
MSoM Podcast (12:58.485)
I mean, we've seen the bad examples already out in the world.
Scott Brinker (13:01.986)
I think the more realistic interpretation of that is right now a lot of that work still has human in the loop. that the verification mechanism is actually a human that's gonna review it and decide, you know, do we wanna do this or not? I think as we get to the level where we want more and more of this to be automatically generated, which we're obviously gonna wanna do because like the whole like hyper
Personalizing, you know, individual emails or pages or things to individual, there's no way you'd be able to have the human review all those. And so we're gonna need to get that. My expectation would be as we move more in that direction, the the realization of how important it is to have the right technologies to be able to govern and monitor and evaluate that stuff dynamically too. that that that will then rise accordingly. So I would be.
MSoM Podcast (13:33.832)
Always the goal.
Scott Brinker (13:58.472)
surprised if we don't see that gap start to close over this next year, but you know, I've been surprised before, so
MSoM Podcast (14:06.839)
Fair. Speaking of surprising, 73% of organizations now have a formal AI policy, which is great because it's up from 52% in 2024. Progress. SAS found that only 8% have full confidence in their governance readiness, which is very scary. What do you foresee filling that gap and who is gonna be overseeing it?
Scott Brinker (14:14.733)
Who
Scott Brinker (14:31.649)
I mean
Scott Brinker (14:36.226)
I think the history of Martech, and probably the history of technology, is the technology is never the barrier. It's always the change management, you know. And I know that's now become almost a bit of a cliche term because we throw it around, but it is like it is really hard. I mean, it is all change management. you know, when you have people, when you have an organization.
MSoM Podcast (14:54.038)
It's always the people. Yeah.
Scott Brinker (15:03.404)
You know, and so I think on one hand, for there to be the case that, yeah, okay, more and more companies have now put in place a policy. and at the same time it be true that the vast majority of the people in the company don't have, you know, full confidence in there, don't fully understand it, you know, you're sort of like, Well, yeah, first of all, they most companies probably aren't doing a very good job of bringing people along on that journey and I
It's it's more than just training, it's enablement, it's you know, it's building it into the culture. There's a lot of hard work that gets done there. And you know, a lot of companies I think are not doing as much of that as they should. But even for those companies that are, you know, again, this isn't the sort of whenever you have humans like this, this isn't the sort of thing like you know, software you just throw a switch and you're like, Okay, well, yesterday you weren't enabled, today you are enabled, problem solved. You know, it just
It just takes time, you know, for this stuff to sink in and we have to experience and live it, you know, and stumble and fall and learn and pick ourselves back up. And so that while we keep trying to accelerate this because we're under the pressure of the technology accelerating so fast, it does feel like there's just a the there's a limit to how fast you can accelerate the change management before it's just like.
It's just not gonna move any faster than that. And so the fact that there is that gap not surprising. And again, I'm not sure that it's
Terrible in the sense of like, yeah, you guys are all just doing this wrong. Like, I just don't know that you could close it any faster.
MSoM Podcast (16:46.762)
Very fair. So we've been talking about a governance gap, but I think there's also more to it beyond just content that we've been referencing. It's about jobs, roles, and what we're actually telling people their careers look like in this industry. And there's some tension. So Tejas Manahar, who is the co-CEO of HighTouch, he says marketing will be among the least affected by AI count reductions. It's fundamentally a role of taste, judgment, and creativity. Wholeheartedly agree with that. Meanwhile, Anthony Rodeo
Is it Rocho Rodeo?
Scott Brinker (17:19.042)
Worldio, yeah.
MSoM Podcast (17:21.557)
Okay, like I've met him, I just don't know his last name. Fair. I'll do my best. it wouldn't be the first time I screw up the name of a the last name of a leader at Growth Loop. David Jostin. I said Justin, and he did not say anything until the end. I was like, David. okay, sorry. However, Anthony Rodeo, the co-CEO of Growth Loop, is
Scott Brinker (17:22.754)
Well, Chrysalis, Chrysalis, Chrysalis, tomato, tomato,
MSoM Podcast (17:48.637)
In the similar framing, but in this same report he's saying that marketing isn't verifiable. You can't iterate on it like code. It's that whole social science versus computer science component. And is the real reason marketing jobs are safer just because that feed loop feedback loop is broken, or what actually happens when casual AI starts closing this gap?
Scott Brinker (18:11.436)
Yeah, well, I this is a little bit of what we were talking about earlier. is there's some of that gap that I just don't think can be closed. Like it's you know again, I can't send you 50,000 emails to figure out which one finally actually motivates you. that that gap is never closing. you know. Well actually now that I wonder if you have an agent and our agent, might they have 50,000 interactions, you know, to figure out which one aligns them.
MSoM Podcast (18:23.666)
You better not.
Scott Brinker (18:40.282)
All right, that's a thought experiment, we'll save for another day. but in the marketing world as we know today, it's it it's not an option. I mean, I guess here's one of the hard truths about this is will there be jobs in marketing? I feel very confident in saying yes. I feel like just like the scope of things to be done. I mean, we didn't dive
MSoM Podcast (18:42.299)
Ha ha ha.
Scott Brinker (19:08.728)
too deep into it, but heck, even this whole thing around context engineering, value engineering, my God, if you just l start to peel that back a bit, you realize we've got years and years of unlimited amount of work to be done there to make it better. so it's like I I feel very bullish that as an industry, the demand, you know, it will evolve the kinds of demand and what we do, but I I think the demand is is going to be very strong.
MSoM Podcast (19:22.526)
Yes.
Scott Brinker (19:36.93)
Challenges, of course, there's one thing to look at these things collectively. It's another thing to look at it individually. And this goes back to the change management thing of like you see it already with I'm sure you have, you know, you talk to a lot of marketers, a lot of people in marketing. There's some who are really pushing the boundaries of this, you know. you know, they're learning, they're experimenting, they're doing stuff in cloud co work. It's, you know, they're just, you know, and
MSoM Podcast (19:51.794)
Yeah.
MSoM Podcast (20:02.299)
There's some cool stuff happening.
Scott Brinker (20:02.378)
Most of those people you look at and you're like, okay, you've got a lot of job security at this point. There's you know, but then you probably also know a lot of people who aren't that, you know, and they're they're scared of it, they're like not quite sure how to get started. and I think those folks legitimately like they they should be concerned. because the skill set and the kind of tasks that we're gonna expect of marketers is going to evolve.
And yeah, I mean, I don't want to be flippant about it, but I think the the only way out is through. if if you really want to be in marketing, you have got to push towards where these things are evolving to. And that's gonna mean getting out of your comfort zone. It's gonna mean going back to school in a, you know, like not there's no school that teaches this stuff anymore, but you know, like going back to school from a mental model of how to do it and
MSoM Podcast (20:54.758)
Exactly.
Scott Brinker (21:01.174)
I think the people do that, you know, have very strong opportunities moving forward. I am worried that a lot are just gonna resist it and I I'm I'm concerned on their behalf that it's tight.
MSoM Podcast (21:07.718)
It's a
MSoM Podcast (21:15.056)
Yeah. I mean the real risk is just not and being curious. do you foresee any other marketing roles that of those who just don't decide to learn about?
Scott Brinker (21:29.698)
Sorry, you cut out a bit on that. So I I was trying to interpolate what were those three words in the middle? I'm like, no, I better not like take a guess on that one.
MSoM Podcast (21:31.614)
sorry. my bad.
MSoM Podcast (21:39.319)
No no no you're good. the question is, we so those were those most likely are the most risk the risk averse folks are the ones who are most at risk. And so yes. Are there any other roles or parts of a marketing team you think would also be at risk? And do you think it would surprise people?
Scott Brinker (21:49.122)
Yes, ironically.
Scott Brinker (21:59.47)
Well again, the reason the risk-averse ones are at risk is because there's a whole bunch of tasks in marketing that are steadily being eaten by AI. And so if you're defining your role based on the tasks, then you are at risk. if you shift your role as to like, okay, what actually needs to be done? How do I evolve to the next layer of what this is? I think you're in a better position.
You know, I mean, I'm trying to think of a a a great concrete example of this. Like I I've I used to show this diagram over the past year where I was talking to people about the will AI eat my job question. And I said, like, okay, well I'm gonna oversimplify and say marketing falls into three buckets. There's strategy and creative, which is what everybody thinks marketing is, and we do prize it. Historically we've not spent a lot of calories on it. Instead there's this
Middle bucket of production and analysis work. All the work done to support that strategy in creative. And while we don't always value that tremendously, that's where the vast majority of calories have been spent. And then, you know, there's this third bucket I would say represent of you know marketing ops and Martech, which also in the grand scheme of things, generally not very well, you know, funded, not where the glory you know, has been, unfortunately.
I think in a post AI world. Yes, no. Well, all right. So here's my hypothesis. In the, you know, post AI, the after AI, you know, world, that production analysis thing is the thing that just gets completely crushed away. wow, I think and that there I always pause and say, like, the unwise executive will say, like,
MSoM Podcast (23:27.762)
Yeah. It sh it should be more glorious in my Let's Go.
Scott Brinker (23:56.824)
Great, I've crushed, you know, my costs in production analysis. Let me cut my headcount by half and pocket the difference. and the reason I think I'd be incredibly unwise is because that efficiency crunch has absolutely zero competitive differentiation. Every single company on the planet is going to get the benefit of that. So you you're not taking anything to the bank there. You know, so the question really becomes, how do you redistribute?
reallocate those resources. And the two things that to me make a ton of sense is like, wow, we can now on the strategy and creative side, like do things that just they were gonna be conceivable, you know, much less practical, you know, before. and then on the other side too, you want that marketing ops and marketing tech capability.
That is the foundation that then makes that, you know, strategy and creative like team truly be able to go wild and do so in a way that's stable and reliable and performant. and so, you know, when I look at through that frame again, I appreciate the fact that there's a lot of marketing jobs that were in that production and analysis work. And those tasks are being eaten away by AI.
MSoM Podcast (24:52.877)
Ha ha.
Scott Brinker (25:16.182)
I almost feels a little choose your adventure if you want to go the strategy and creative side, you know, and figure out how you leverage these tools to just start doing more and more amazing things. Or hey, there's plenty of demand here that we're gonna need on the context engineering side with you know, like marketing ops is going, you know, if if that's more of of interest to you, lean into that. but if you're thinking like, hey, this thing where I'm like manually cropping images and cutting the end, yeah, that that that's going away. so.
MSoM Podcast (25:46.641)
Agreed. I guess to summarize it all up, it's evolve or die, and that's both as an individual, as a worker, but also as a company. Overall. That has remained the constant, regardless. I mean, you know, Darwin was right, about a number of things.
Scott Brinker (25:55.028)
Yeah, Darwin. Damn it, Darwin, you know.
MSoM Podcast (26:07.281)
For better and for worse. Yes. Okay, I want to close with a couple of questions that I think every practitioner is thinking about, but either too scared to say out loud or too scared to ask you directly. What are the most dangerous assumptions Martech operators are making right now?
Scott Brinker (26:08.44)
For better and worse, yes, yes indeed.
Scott Brinker (26:25.335)
Mm-hmm.
MSoM Podcast (26:35.839)
the one that's going to cost them an eighteen month.
Scott Brinker (26:42.638)
I'll say my
My pet peeve on this, which I've had for a while and I think is as relevant as ever, is I always hear marketers say, like, can't we just have this stuff consolidate? Consolidation, consolidation. This is what this is we want. Please, Lord, consolidate this market. And I get it, because the fragmentation, you know, the confusion, there's a lot of good reasons for that. And so, yes.
A certain amount of consolidation is a good thing. Where I am surprised some people don't sort of take things to its logical conclusions. You're like, no, what I really want is just to be able to get all this stuff from one vendor, and this one vendor just does it for me, and I don't have to worry about any of that. And you're like, well, isn't that a wonderful state? Your whole marketing organization is now a hundred percent dependent on this vendor.
Lovely up until the next renewal cycle. And they're like, yeah. And by the way, your prices are going up 20%. And the renewal cycle after that, you they're going up 50% because hey, you know, we gotta eat, you know. and you are just completely locked in. And yeah, there's probably some profanity I could use, you know, on it. But
MSoM Podcast (28:04.399)
I mean you can go ahead and use it. We do sensor.
Scott Brinker (28:09.102)
You really want to be that vendor's bitch, right? I mean, I'm just saying that's that that that that's what it comes down to there, you know. And so, yes, a certain amount of consolidation, I agree, is a good thing for the industry within your stack. Simplify as much as you can. But I think it's very important going back to that advice we were talking about earlier, of keeping some optionality, you know, and the ability to support change in the future.
MSoM Podcast (28:14.061)
Y you're not wrong. You're not wrong there.
Scott Brinker (28:36.172)
You want to retain a certain amount of optionality within your vendor set, or you lose you lose the control, you lose the leverage. And there's been the IT world went through this. you know, back in the 80s and 90s, we we saw that movie. for marketers, you know, in all fairness, like this is a net new set of responsibilities, you know, for them. And it might seem like, yeah, that's just the shining city on a hill of, you know, all from one vendor.
MSoM Podcast (29:05.87)
Well, don't get me started on when IT is the one who chooses.
Scott Brinker (29:06.062)
Just just pause, you know, and be, you know be strategic about how you approach consolidation would be my advice.
MSoM Podcast (29:15.611)
That's why I'm so bullish on modularity and it just has most sense. also gives you more leverage in negotiation. But I digress. Okay, this one's spicy. The report is sp no, no, this one this this one this one's spicy. the report is sponsored by seven vendors who each have a stake in its conclusions and its claims.
Scott Brinker (29:27.074)
that one wasn't? okay, all right. three chilies.
MSoM Podcast (29:41.634)
How do you protect your editorial independence? And did any sponsor push back on something that was in the report?
Scott Brinker (29:48.62)
Yeah. So the way we do that is we just we don't let them see any of the editorial. literally all the sponsors like got their copy of it on Monday. and it was the final version. Now the way we try and split that by the way, is
MSoM Podcast (30:04.334)
Sorry to interrupt. Can we just say they got it the day before it was publicly released just because it's going out next week. Sorry. It it's a annoying thing.
Scott Brinker (30:08.855)
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah, so like the you know the sponsors don't have any say in like the core editorial list. They don't even get to see it. we we we send it to them the day before it's released, the final design version. Like beer, by the way, here's your copy. the way we balance that is the sponsorships really come down to, you know, three things. you know, they come down to a certain branding thing of, you know, logos and links and stuff like that.
we do you know the webinar event associated with this. that is when people sign up for that, that's a lead generation mechanism. You know, for the report itself, we've stopped treating that as a lead generation mechanism, that's just widely distributed for free. But the third thing we give sponsors is this this interview, like, okay, listen, we will work with one of your executives, you know, one of your experts, to like let's talk about what you're seeing and and that we don't run that as a
Gotcha interview. you know, they retain editorial control over there. They're like, nope, I didn't like that question. I didn't want to do that. I'm like, okay, you don't have to answer that. we try and advise them as much as possible. Like, listen, if you want things that people are actually gonna read and enjoy and this, like, don't make it a sales pitch. But the idea was to give sponsors a place.
where they really do have narrative control over how they want to voice their perspective, you know. But there's a space for that, and it's different than, you know, the rest of the report. Now, one of the this is always a fine line for any company that is serving both vendors and brands.
MSoM Podcast (31:40.718)
Sure.
Right.
Scott Brinker (32:00.504)
To walk to like, you know, ha ha how do you balance that? I will tell you my personal approach to that is there is nothing we do in these reports that is in any way trying to rank vendors, say this vendor is better than that vendor, this is the way to go. We d frankly, we don't even give you like any sort of
heuristics of like, and here's the heuristic we think you should use to rank vendors, because that heuristic itself could be biased, you know, in all sorts of ways. what we're really trying to do in these reports is like, let's talk about changes that are happening at a level you know above the vendors. Still entirely possible there's non-zero flow from like, hey you talk to enough vendors, you know, those ideas are gonna pop in. But generally the nature of what we're trying to do is
MSoM Podcast (32:41.943)
Yeah.
Scott Brinker (32:54.392)
We we think f far enough out of that space that even if we are being influenced that way, it doesn't actually change the narrative or the way people would start thinking about making vendor decisions. But I don't know. That's my take on it. But I this it's it's definitely an area where I'm happy to be transparent that I think it's a very messy thing in the market and
MSoM Podcast (33:16.852)
Yeah. Well I think what you described is what action analyst relations is and should be, and it's rarely followed. So I'm glad we could clear that there. Okay. Fair fair. okay. You've been mapping this landscape for seventeen years. What does the twenty twenty six
Scott Brinker (33:28.716)
Yeah, no, no. Actually this is one of the least spicy questions compared to some of the other ones. I'm like, no, that one's easy to answer.
MSoM Podcast (33:46.598)
No, that the twenty eleven version would find shocking not about the technology, but about the people.
Scott Brinker (34:01.1)
The vendor side or the brand side?
MSoM Podcast (34:05.792)
Both? E really either in terms of what you would prefer to talk about. We'd do both.
Scott Brinker (34:11.158)
All right. Okay. Well, on the vendor side, when we started that in twenty eleven, the dominant strategic model that the vendor industry believed was we are going to consolidate this all down into a handful of products. because that had been the playbook in the history of enterprise software. Not entirely an unreasonable extrapolation, say, like, yeah, so we should be able to do the same thing with you know, Mark Act.
I think what was very surprising to everyone, but especially those vendors, is the explosion of what was able to be created and the speed at which it moved and the variety in which it moved completely outstripped any conceivable notion of saying, like, yeah, just a whole one company could build this all. and it really took to about
The middle of 2015, 2016, 2017. That's sort of where you finally saw a shift in the industry where the vendors sort of pulled back a bit from a just buy our suite, there is nothing else. These are not the droids you're looking for, to something that was like, yeah, by the way, we've got a platform, we've got an ecosystem, you know, like, sure, we're gonna give you most of everything you want, you know, in our suite.
MSoM Podcast (35:22.281)
Yeah.
Scott Brinker (35:34.336)
Anything else you want is out there and it integrates. and that was I think really the acknowledgement of like, yeah, no, this is this is bigger than what any one company can chew, bite off and chew.
MSoM Podcast (35:44.777)
For sure. Well, and it's it's kind of like you can't really have an everything company. Not everyone can be Herod's where you can buy anything and buy it to a high degree and best in class component. Both either yes, agreed. Exactly.
Scott Brinker (35:59.202)
We haven't seen one yet. Well, some of these frontier labs, you know, you do wonder wonder what their aspirations are like, you know, but yeah, we we haven't seen it yet.
MSoM Podcast (36:11.051)
It's true. is there a version of Martex future in which what you do in terms of research and analysis and really kind of taking a big broader brush to understanding what's happening becomes irrelevant? Like do you see that possible possibility and are you rooting for that so it's more democratized and transparent or are you rooting against it? Or neither?
Scott Brinker (36:39.47)
MSoM Podcast (36:43.723)
I know I have my opinion, but
Scott Brinker (36:43.896)
So for me personally, like, you know, you know, I'm getting some gray hair here. So I'm you know, expecting that, yeah, this industry gonna keep carrying on in all sorts of wonderful ways long after I've decided to you know, sit on a beach somewhere and go fishing. I think the see, I actually just pulled that metaphor up. I actually don't want to go fishing. you know, my my
MSoM Podcast (37:02.644)
I'm gonna need to ask where you want to go fishing and what you want to catch, but we can do that.
MSoM Podcast (37:09.936)
no, I love fishing.
Scott Brinker (37:11.084)
My dream retirement is like, you know, we're an apartment in New York City. So it's the antithesis, you know, of fishing.
MSoM Podcast (37:16.99)
Don't blame you. Don't blame you. That's that's my dream to get back there.
Scott Brinker (37:21.854)
All right. Excellent, excellent. so anyways, the short version is no, I think this falls into this category of non-verifiable domains where we really need the human dimension of, you know, it's not just about trying to synthesize these things in some sort of abstract way. It's like how do you actually connect with people to help that narrative be absorbed?
and you know, again, in all modesty, like I don't think I'm actually particularly good at this. I I happen to have like, you know, some so some depth from all the time I've spent doing MarioTech, you know, but I'm sure there are people much better than me, you know, at being able to connect to an audience and and deliver that.
MSoM Podcast (37:52.468)
Yes.
MSoM Podcast (37:59.376)
That is a l no. Strongly disagree with the entire the entire industry disagrees with you right now. So
Scott Brinker (38:11.372)
Well but I think that skill, you know, is like it it's gonna be more important than ever because it really does feel like again, these meta themes of we're gonna be in a state of constant change. Change is the hardest thing for us to do. That is the ultimate constraint, you know, on so many of the things we wanna do. So like people who can help individuals and organizations and industries through that change, I just
MSoM Podcast (38:27.604)
Yes.
Scott Brinker (38:39.0)
Think the demand is going to exceed the supply, at least as far into the future as I'm capable of seeing, but.
MSoM Podcast (38:50.538)
Yep, we're on the page. Okay. Last question that we ask everyone. Who is someone we should have on the podcast? Parentheses. Preferably a senior woman leader, because it's really hard to find them.
Scott Brinker (39:02.05)
okay. I I actually do have a senior woman leader who you should absolutely get on this podcast. Kelly Sarabin, who is now the director of technology partnerships at HubSpot. so she's working on my team. She's now essentially taken on the role that I had. my goodness. And she's so much better at it than I ever was. but she's brilliant and she really like gets the ecosystem dynamics of this.
MSoM Podcast (39:22.922)
Amazing.
MSoM Podcast (39:27.956)
Too humble.
Scott Brinker (39:31.702)
you know, now she thinks more broadly than just Martec, but take the intersection here. she would be a phenomenal person to have on your podcast.
MSoM Podcast (39:40.852)
will take you up on that introduction. And first of all, just thank you so much. It's always an honor to speak with you and see you, but also to have you come on the podcast and be my inaugural interview since going independent. And where can folks find you and follow along with all of your learnings and insights?
Scott Brinker (39:43.744)
Absolutely.
Scott Brinker (40:05.816)
Thank you for having I'm very honored to be your inaugural guest. you know, LinkedIn, SJ Brinker. and then if you want to go to cheapmartech dot com, that's cheapmartek without the H at the end. Brilliant branding or horrible branding, you decide. but you know, then you can sign up with my newsletter.
MSoM Podcast (40:24.901)
feeling you should buy the the one with the H to redirect. Okay. Good.
Scott Brinker (40:28.526)
I I I did do that, but yeah, you know. yeah, I'll I'll I'll give my mayor culpas on my branding choices.
MSoM Podcast (40:36.681)
Is there anything else you want to highlight, like download the report or anything like that?
Scott Brinker (40:45.644)
I mean, yeah, you can connect off at chiefmaritech.com to find those things. But yeah, no, just thanks thanks for having me. And yeah, I mean, thank you for all the work you're doing. I mean, this is it it is just one of the things I love about this industry is yeah, the the tech is changing, it's possibilities, it's you know, there's creativity, there's innovation, there's whole bunch of things to love for that. But the community of people who really hear at the heart.
Of helping the world understand this stuff and move it forward. It's just full of so many like good souls and talented people. And so like you and Juan and I'll just it it I get a lot of joy just being a part of this community with folks like yourself. So thank you for all you're doing.
MSoM Podcast (41:23.945)
Agreed.
MSoM Podcast (41:32.626)
Take Of course and take that AI. You can't be as chaotic as us. Okay, I'll stop the recording.