• by Scott Brinker , April 15, 2010

This week, I'll be presenting at Search Insider Summit with an 18-minute, TED-style talk called "Rise of the Marketing Technologist." My premise is simple: marketing must control its technological destiny.

To achieve this, marketing cannot rely on the IT department, outsourced agencies, or marketing technology vendors to lead the architecture of its digital capabilities. Each of those players has a part, but marketing must be the director of the play.

There are now too many interrelated technical pieces to the marketing puzzle-and the formulation and execution of marketing strategy is too entwined with the rapid advance of new technologies-to leave marketing technology leadership in someone else's hands. Marketing must take ownership of that role.

But how?

It's time to embrace a new class of professionals in the marketing department: marketing technologists, who are trained software architects and engineers-but who also have a marketing orientation. They're passionate about applying their talents in pursuit of marketing greatness.

Do such creatures exist? Yes. They are a blossoming generation of web developers and web entrepreneurs, who by necessity and drive have become fluent in both disciplines. Many of them have already infiltrated marketing in an ad hoc manner. And they're ready to contribute at the next level up.

To lead this team, there must be a new senior marketing role: a marketing CTO, or chief marketing technologist.

The marketing CTO reports to the CMO, not the CIO-although the role will certainly coordinate with IT and, increasingly, with product development. The mission of the marketing CTO is to orchestrate and innovate the gamut of technologies that enable state-of-the-art marketing: from marketing automation to conversion optimization, from Web analytics to mobile analytics, from dynamic and interactive ads to iPhone and Android apps.

Most of all, the mission of the marketing CTO is to give the CMO the power to wield technology as a strategic marketing capability.

Marketing is only going to become more infused with technology moving forward. The forces of cloud computing, shifting media budgets, the trackability and transparency of digital media, and software economics have created a perfect storm of disruptive innovation. The result will be an explosion of new marketing technologies over the next five years.

Some of those technologies will be off-the-shelf applications-for instance, a landing page optimization product or a social media monitoring service-that marketers will buy (or, more likely, subscribe to as a service), configure, extend, and integrate into their operations. Other technologies will be platforms, from APIs on Facebook and Twitter, to new devices such as the iPhone and iPad, that will be blank slates on which marketers must build their own technology-powered inventions.

Even more advanced technologies, such as algorithmic marketing engines and a world of "linked data" via the semantic web, are on the horizon.

The role of the marketing CTO will be to help assimilate and manage these pieces, but also to connect the dots between them-and to use them to synthesize powerful new marketing strategies that weren't even conceivable before.

To be sure, not everyone in marketing needs to become a technologist-just like not everyone in marketing needs to be a "creative." But in the same way that creative is an integral part of marketing's worldview and culture, technology must become a fundamental part of its DNA.