When Marketing Never Slows Down
Welcome to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence.
On today’s episode, Scott Brinker joins Sara Payne for a candid discussion on the accelerating pace of marketing and the impact of marketing technology and AI on today’s business environment. Widely known as the “Godfather of MarTech,” Scott Brinker brings his nearly two decades of expertise through his Chief MarTech platform and numerous bestselling books to help us navigate the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of speed, strategy, and creativity in modern marketing.
Is marketing really moving faster, or does it just feel that way? That’s the key question Sara and Scott unpack, digging into the effects of digital transformation and AI on content creation, expectations, and, importantly, the human cost of relentless urgency in the field. They explore the implications for marketing leaders, the hidden costs of always-on activity, and how to build sustainable rhythms that foster both creativity and strategic impact, especially in healthcare.
Join us as we examine how marketers can balance agility and discipline, use technology as a force for focus rather than just acceleration, and reclaim space for deep thinking to build brands rooted in trust and authenticity.
Key Takeaways
The Double-Edged Sword of Marketing Velocity
Scott underscores that the rapid pace of marketing goes far beyond AI, it’s rooted in years of digital transformation and an explosion of touchpoints and technologies. While these innovations enable marketers to do more, faster, they introduce significant costs, particularly by eroding critical time for reflection and strategic thinking. The challenge: can the human mind keep up with technology’s pace? (04:24)
The Cost of Speed: Creativity, Strategy, and Burnout
Both Sara and Scott warn that constant urgency often leads to a shortcutting of the creative and strategic process, resulting in decision fatigue and burnout. Marketing effectiveness isn’t just about reaction time; it’s sustained by discipline, iteration, and making space to revisit projects with fresh eyes. Short-term responsiveness should not eclipse long-term impact. (06:21)
Discipline and Cadence Trump Perpetual Chaos
Adapting concepts from agile development, Scott advocates for operating rhythmic sprints, structured backlog, and focused delivery cycles to help teams juggle changing priorities without succumbing to perpetual interruption. Sarah Payne echoes the need for discipline, emphasizing the importance of being intentional about what merits urgency, and communicating clear priorities across organizations. (12:30)
More ≠ Better: Activity vs. Impact in the Age of AI
The proliferation of AI and automation threatens to amplify “activity for activity’s sake.” Scott urges marketers not to simply fill newfound time with more execution but to protect it for higher-order thinking and true innovation. Drawing parallels to software development, he notes that an avalanche of new features or campaigns rarely translates to better outcomes if it’s not grounded in value and customer impact. (24:31)
Scarcity of Trust and Attention: The New Differentiators
Looking ahead, Scott predicts that as technology further reduces the friction of activity, human attention and trust will become the scarcest and most valuable assets for brands. The organizations that excel will be those who invest in building genuine relationships and deliver consistently on customer-centric outcomes, focusing less on technology for its own sake and more on understanding and serving their audiences with authenticity. (27:01)
Thank you for joining the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. The future of healthcare depends on it.
About Scott Brinker
Scott Brinker, dubbed the "godfather of martech" by AdAge, has been analyzing martech and its impact on marketing for more than 18 years as an analyst for chiefmartec. He served as VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot for 8 years, building their technology partner program. Before that he was co-founder and CTO of ion interactive, a pioneering no-code platform for interactive content. He authored the best-selling book Hacking Marketing and co-authored the best-seller The New Automation Mindset.
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Sara Payne [00:00:09]:
Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, Sara Payne. Is it just me, or does it feel like the pace of marketing has significantly accelerated in recent years? We're creating more content, we're supporting more channels, Responding to more requests, and somehow every project is urgent. AI has certainly accelerated that trend, but I don't think AI created it. It simply lowered the friction to creating content, which changed expectations almost overnight. Today's marketing leaders aren't just expected to produce great work, they're expected to produce great work immediately. As content becomes easier to create, the hardest part may be knowing what deserves our time, our creativity, and our urgency. That's the topic that I want to focus on today.
Sara Payne [00:01:02]:
What happens when the speed of marketing starts to outpace the speed of thinking? To help us unpack that question, I'm joined by Scott Brinker. Through his Chief MarTech platform, he's spent more than 18 years analyzing how technology is reshaping marketing. He's the bestselling author of Hacking Marketing, co-author of The New Automation Mindset, and was dubbed the Godfather of MarTech by Ad Age. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Brinker [00:01:31]:
Delighted to be here with you, Sarah.
Sara Payne [00:01:33]:
Yeah, I'm thrilled to have you. You've got just an amazing background and perspective on this. So thanks so much for joining me today. Scott, what do you think is happening? Does marketing actually move faster today, or does it just feel faster?
Scott Brinker [00:01:49]:
I kind of feel like it's my fault. That's not entirely like my fault, but— You know, like collectively the marketing technology space, I think is to blame for, you know, this acceleration and in a variety of ways. I think you're right to say that AI is certainly contributing to it, but it's not where it began. You know, pretty much ever since we moved into this like digital era, you know, of marketing, a couple things happened. First of all, On the audience side, on the consumer side, you know, this sort of explosion of touchpoints, the immediacy of having so many of these interactions happen through digital channels, you know, there was just a demand and an acceleration on that side. And then on the other side, you know, technologists, entrepreneurs started coming up with all these, you know, great and innovative marketing technologies, you know, to help marketers be able to produce more, faster, serve it, engage it, which again, you know, a lot of upside, uh, to that. But I think I'm so excited for this discussion because, you know, there's a cost, uh, to that.
Sara Payne [00:02:59]:
Yes.
Scott Brinker [00:02:59]:
It's a cost that I don't think we like typically calculate, which is like, okay, you can accelerate these engines and the technology can keep up. The question is, can like we keep up from like an actual, like mental thought perspective of like, do we really have our hands on the wheel?
Sara Payne [00:03:18]:
Yeah. Well, it's funny you say that because that's exactly where I was going to go next in the conversation is what is the cost of operating at this pace? Because there, I believe there are several.
Scott Brinker [00:03:30]:
Yeah. Well, I mean, to me, I think the biggest is, well, there are several. You know, the one that comes most immediately to mind though is this reduction in time to think, to reflect.
Sara Payne [00:03:44]:
Right.
Scott Brinker [00:03:45]:
You know, marketing at its core is such an art as much as a science. You know, it's really trying to put yourself in the shoes of your customer, your audience, you know, understand them, really be able to think about how does your brand engage with them, you know, and this isn't something that we can get from quick glances at ever-changing dashboards and Excel spreadsheets. You know, it requires a certain almost anthropological, you know, commitment to like really understanding and thinking through this. And when you like squeeze that time out, you know, just because you can get machines that will spit out answers to you doesn't actually mean we like internalize that.
Sara Payne [00:04:25]:
Totally agree with you on that. I mean, there's also plenty of science that suggests that giving things time to, there's the anthropological piece of this. There's also the setting something, working on a body of work for a period of time, setting it aside and coming back to it, whether that's taking a walk around the block and giving your brain that sort of ability to have other stimulus and then coming back to it, how you can see something from a different perspective. And are we shortcutting that process, whether it's from a strategic perspective or Or from a creative perspective if we are moving at this pace.
Scott Brinker [00:05:04]:
Yeah. You know, there's a great book by the economist, I believe his name is Daniel Kahneman, called Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow about this idea of having 2 systems of thinking. You know, one that's a very reactive, immediate thing and the other that's more reflective. You know, and I kind of feel like there's some parallels to that. You know, in marketing, it's great that we have so many of these digital systems that have that sort of thinking fast, like that immediacy ability to react in the moment and move at the speed of data, move at the speed of the tech. But that's what the technology has been so focused on. And it's like pulled us gravitationally into always thinking around those systems and optimizing them versus this other thing of like, you know, the thinking slow, the sort of like synthesizing what this stuff means. Yeah, as you say, like even the ability to Set something aside, walk around the block, come back to it, look at it with fresh eyes.
Scott Brinker [00:06:01]:
I mean, when we do this, we actually really do appreciate it. It's very intuitive. Like, my mind's like, oh yeah, actually that does tend to work better for me. But boy, in the day-to-day pace and cadence at which marketing seems to run right now, man, it's just so easy for that to get optimized out of the system.
Sara Payne [00:06:21]:
Absolutely. And I, you know, there's obviously a human cost to it as well, right? That can come in the form of, burnout or decision fatigue, right? Just that having to keep up with that pace. But I wanted you to share maybe some of your personal experiences with this. And are there things that you will intentionally slow down for, right? Like, as you think about this personally for you, right? And also then put yourself in the shoes of marketing leaders, chief marketing Officers, are there things where we should be more intentional about slowing down our pace?
Scott Brinker [00:07:06]:
Yeah, I mean, like you know, so my role now is essentially as a full-time analyst in the martech space, and you know, the role of analysts is an interesting thing. It's like you know both on one hand, you know, wanting to be able to have that time to reflect and analyze and synthesize things, but there's also just the commercial reality of okay, well, you know, are you engaged in the conversation? You know, LinkedIn is a wonderful example of, you know, a treadmill for these things. And so it's like a perfect example of something where every day on LinkedIn, certainly in marketing and martech, hundreds of conversations firing up and what's this latest thing and people are seeing this trend. It can be very tempting to want to just sort of like, oh, well, I should jump in on this. I should weigh in on this, you know, but all that takes energy. All that takes, you know, mental capacity, you know, and you can easily fill your entire day and then an entire week of those days and an entire month of those weeks, you know, just sort of like cycling to almost the immediate response. At the end of the day, that's not actually where a lot of value gets created. You know, at least from an analyst perspective, you know, the only way I really create value is the degree to which I am able to like step back and sort of see like, okay, there's a larger pattern here.
Scott Brinker [00:08:23]:
There's a whole bunch of noise. Can we sort of like, you know, pull out the signal from the noise? And that is a process that does not lend itself to like, oh, I just look at it and instantly the answers appear out of heaven. You know, it's one of these things where you're like, all right, you look at a pattern, you sort of come up with a hypothesis, you start to see a few things. All right, now that hypothesis doesn't seem to hold. And you're like, you just sort of have to iterate through that. And I suspect having spent time with many marketers, You know, this isn't entirely dissimilar to, you know, when people are thinking about, you know, their campaigns and their strategic evolution. There can be this urgency to want to like, you know, respond to the moment, you know, on some particular trend or there's a competitive move or, you know, sales team is like, okay, we need something like right now.
Sara Payne [00:09:14]:
Yes.
Scott Brinker [00:09:14]:
You know, but if you don't actually set aside this time to really think through like, okay, what do we, What are we trying to consistently represent into the market, you know, about our business? How are we creating a brand, you know, that people can recognize as a consistency? It has an authenticity to it. And that's the sort of stuff that, yeah, you just can't do it in a snap. You have to be able, you know, to invest time in that.
Sara Payne [00:09:48]:
Yeah, there's a word that comes to mind as you're saying all of this. And it is, it is discipline. Right? I mean, it has been even— it has been a forever reality, it feels like, that marketing will get— I'm gonna use the word interrupted by things that weren't planned, right? Whether it is a sales team request, whether it is a Major initiative, new something that happened in the marketplace, a reaction to a competitive announcement, right? Like, that's forever been a thing. And yes, it's been accelerated by marketing technology. But what you're talking about is the discipline as a marketing team, as a marketing leader, to know what are those core things that we are going to consistently deliver against, right? Like, we've told the organization these are the 3 things or the 4 things that everything we do is going to ladder back to. And yes, we are going to need to respond to those real-time things. But not losing focus still on that consistency and that ability to come back to, we told the organization we were going to deliver against these things, right? And being able to maintain that discipline As these requests are coming in.
Scott Brinker [00:11:13]:
Yeah, no, I love that way of framing it. There was a movement a number of years back, it sort of has fallen out of favor, about this concept of agile marketing.
Sara Payne [00:11:23]:
Yeah.
Scott Brinker [00:11:24]:
Which was essentially taking, you know, this agile software development process, you know, that the super short version of it is like, you know, we organize a set of priorities, we then for a limited window of time, a sprint, Yeah. A few weeks, you know, we go through, we iterate. At the end of that, we evaluate what was done. We then like make decisions, priorities for what we do in the next sprint. And one of the things I always really appreciated about adapting that to marketing is the fact that yes, okay, things change in marketing, you know, both from an internal perspective, but frankly, even just externally, like, you know, you put things out in market, You know, you learn and, you know, your audience and your customers change and they morph. And so you need some sort of mechanism to be able to adapt. But it makes a really big difference between you say like, okay, the way we adapt is on any given day, people just throw stuff at us and we'll pick it back, you know, versus saying like, okay, we've got a process where like, you know, absent anything that is like truly on fire, like put this in a backlog. We're in the middle of a 1 or 2-week sprint to focus on actually delivering something.
Sara Payne [00:12:30]:
Right.
Scott Brinker [00:12:30]:
that we promised we're going to deliver. At the end of that sprint cycle, we're happy to look at the priorities and rejigger what do we do for this next sprint cycle. But it creates some sort of cadence that just says like, okay, not everything is a change the priority in any given hour. It's more of like, well, we can adapt the priorities over a week-by-week or, you know, couple-week basis. But that there's some discipline to saying like, listen, we actually need to carve out space to be able to execute whatever the last priority was and be able to deliver it well.
Sara Payne [00:13:02]:
Yeah, I mean, structure, cadence, those are, I think, really important frames here because I think what marketing leaders need to do is create these healthy sort of operating rhythms for their teams and their organizations that protect strategic thinking, that protect creativity, but also honor to your point, the things we said we were going to deliver. Like, we need the time and the space to be able to go do that. And just like anything else in life and in business, it is, you know, priority comes in against other priorities. Like, what are we going to do? Sure, sure. Fires. Yep. Fires happen and we need to adapt and be agile against that. But also managing the expectations of the organization too, as these things are happening.
Sara Payne [00:13:51]:
So anyway, as you were talking about that, I was thinking about, you know, this concept of of creating healthy operating rhythms for the team and actually letting people know what that looks like, what that process is going to look like. You have a new request against that are going to potentially upset the initiatives or the priorities we're working on right now. We're going to have a process for how we work through that. And this is what the cadence of that is going to look like.
Scott Brinker [00:14:20]:
Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. I mean, the whole thing for me about agile marketing is It didn't really matter to me exactly what the specific process was or what the specific cadence was. Like, you know, those are all sort of details that from one organization to another, you might have what works best for you, but having some sort of process, some sort of structure, and that it has at least these sort of 2 different modes of, there's the mode of prioritizing things, and then there's the mode of actually focused execution and delivery on those things. And if you let the two of those things just blend into primordial soup on a day-by-day basis, it's just really hard to get stuff done. And man, there's just, I mean, I feel so much for marketers. I'm not a marketer myself, but I love marketers. And one of the reasons why is, I mean, they're just, you know, such creative, optimistic, like as a categorically, like, you know, marketers in so many ways to me, like really do drive, you know, the heart, you know, of like a customer-driven business. But boy, what we've been asking of marketers, I mean, just take it from the technology perspective.
Scott Brinker [00:15:36]:
I mean, my full-time role here is trying to just keep track of changes in the technology landscape. And I can't do it.
Sara Payne [00:15:44]:
Yeah.
Scott Brinker [00:15:45]:
I mean, I do this 24/7 and I can barely keep up, you know, for marketers who actually have a real job and things they have to deliver. But at the same time, they're having to develop some sort of way of like, okay, how do I just keep aware of how things are changing and how do I adapt it and what do I adapt? It's just, it's almost hard for me to imagine any other profession in business that has been asked to sort of expand its scope of responsibilities and the, just the volume of things it's being asked to learn and how to evolve its discipline. Sales certainly hasn't changed that fast. You know, finance hasn't changed that fast. Even software development, the tools and the technology have advanced a lot, but sort of the structure and the scope of what people are doing, it's been pretty consistent. Marketing, oh my goodness, like the surface area, it just continues to grow.
Sara Payne [00:16:40]:
Yeah, I know. I love that you said that because, you know, people might want to just go back to this last 30 seconds and just hit it on replay a few times, because I think it's a little bit of a therapy session of like, thank you, Scott, for saying that out loud, because we certainly all feel it. You know, and I think another thing that comes up for me in this whole conversation is that we run the risk of confusing activity with progress, or rewarding responsiveness more than effectiveness. And I'm not saying responsiveness isn't important, but, you know, at what point does speed start to override quality or the strategic lens on something, right? And that, I mean, that is the balance that we're all trying to strike right now.
Scott Brinker [00:17:37]:
Yeah, it's interesting. So many of the stakeholders around marketing are, you know, like when they're coming to marketing, The asks are very like, you know, this, it's urgent, it's immediate, it's all this. The one stakeholder who is on the opposite end of the spectrum very often is the CFO and the finance team, because actually they're like, listen, we actually really don't care what you're doing. All we ultimately care about is this actually delivering impact, you know, and effectiveness and results, you know? And again, this just becomes one more challenge for, you know, marketers is they spend so much of their time dealing with these stakeholders who actually aren't looking at it through the lens of the long-term effect of this. They're looking through the, like, oh, I want to scratch this itch right now immediately, you know. And then at the end of the quarter, they have to go and talk to the CFO. It's like, okay, well, talk to me about, you know, the effect. And then, you know, like, well, I would have liked to, um, you know, but these were the 5 billion other things we got scattered on.
Scott Brinker [00:18:34]:
It's hard. And so, I almost sometimes wonder the degree to which the CFO is actually much more of an ally the CMO in like, you know, creating this sort of discipline of like, how do we make sure we're staying focused on delivering the impact to the business? And that the CFO will actually like back that up.
Sara Payne [00:18:55]:
Great. That's such a great point. Yeah, I know. I love that. And perhaps more of those conversations need to be happening in building that bridge and that allyship, if you will, between marketing and finance department. You know, you're talking about you are, as an analyst, watching everything. And this is a full-time job for you. And this is even difficult for you to keep up with.
Sara Payne [00:19:25]:
And you could just, you know, quote unquote, singularly focus on that. I'm wondering, I'm going to ask a little bit of a rhetorical question. I think I know the answer to this. But then there's another question behind it, which is, A, is there any chance marketing slows back down? But the question behind that is, are you seeing anything in the development of marketing technology that will potentially assist with adjusting the pace? Right? Or, or, you know, is there a point at which these tools can help facilitate the ability to focus on the strategic, like automate, automate the responsiveness factor. And I'm not pro— I just want to say I'm not pro-automation on everything. That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm just suggesting, is there a pipeline where you see that the technology that has been accelerating this pace comes back around in our favor?
Scott Brinker [00:20:24]:
Well, I think that's where a lot of the hope is with AI. You know, I mean, this first generation of AI has Actually, to your earlier point, boy, talk about over-indexing on activity over, you know, effectiveness. You know, it's just been this like, use AI, use AI, you know. And, you know, maybe to some degree that is the right thing to do because it forced everyone to try and like just sort of dive in and start to understand this stuff. But that's not as sustainable, you know, with this model.
Sara Payne [00:20:51]:
No.
Scott Brinker [00:20:51]:
And I think people are, you know, I feel like the AI fever is starting to break a bit and people are like, okay, What's the actual impact? Where can we be applying this that, you know, really makes a difference? And I think the hope for folks is that, okay, there is a lot of these things that were very time-consuming work for marketers, like, okay, how do I gather this right data? How do I analyze it? You know, if I want to do like some sort of competitive analysis, you know, like, you know, a bunch of stuff that we just had to do very manually, very time-consuming, and the AI is actually pretty good at and keeps getting better. You know, I think the important thing here is like, okay, if you have AI that's helping to give you back a chunk of time, then like how defensible that chunk of time you've just gotten back is to invest in more of that sort of strategic thinking, strategic leadership of marketing, rather than like immediately turning around and like, okay, well, you know, now that I could do this competitive analysis, in, you know, like 30 minutes instead of 3 days, why don't I do 10 more competitive analyses?
Sara Payne [00:22:00]:
You know, it's like, I feel that. I feel that. And I think, I think you're right that I think we're starting to hopefully pull back and correct from this, you know, sort of explosion in use of AI. And, and, you know, we learned a lot and, and I think maybe we're recalibrating. But that's such a great point, right? Have we reached the point of no return from a pace standpoint where the time that I got back, am I going to use that for a slowdown strategic exercise initiative or creative versus doing 5 more of the really speedy competitive analysis that I just did. I mean, that's such a great point.
Scott Brinker [00:22:56]:
I mean, it's interesting because my background was as a technologist, you know, and sort of my whole career has basically been sort of applying technology and technology thinking in marketing. And one of the things that even led me to that whole agile marketing movement was I feel there's actually a lot of parallels between software developers and marketers. You know, a lot of the dynamics that software developers went through with their accelerated of things. And so in some ways, I almost see them as like canaries in the coal mine of things that marketers can both learn some of the dangers from, but also possibly see like, oh, well, maybe there's a path out of this. And like, for example, here with software development, the past year and a half in particular has had this huge explosion with AI coding of people have been able to accelerate software development by Literally like 5x, 10x. It's crazy. So they're like now shipping, you know, all these new products and features and capabilities, and everyone's super excited about that. But it's not been going on long enough that people are like, well, wait a second, is all this stuff we're shipping, is it actually making a difference? Is it like improving the business? Are we growing customers? Are we making them happier? And actually, in many cases, they're finding out, like, for instance, product companies who are doing this, You know, all they've done is basically by exploding the number of things that they ship, made it completely impossible for any of their salespeople, their customer service or success people, or their customers to even be able to explain what the product does or how it does it or what's not, you know, it actually ends up like harming them.
Scott Brinker [00:24:31]:
And so you're starting to see in the software development side, a bit of reflection of like, okay, well, maybe measuring our success by just the volume of things we're shipping Maybe this is not the right framing for it, you know. And so I'm sort of hopeful as that lesson, you know, in the, you know, uh, filtrates through that world, that there are parallels to this marketing thing of just, you know, being able to do more marketing activities with AI is not necessarily the way to actually increase marketing impact. In fact, it might actually be exactly the opposite. It's taking time away from the things that really create impact.
Sara Payne [00:25:11]:
Yeah, no, it's such a great point. More is not necessarily better. As an analyst, of course, you often do predictive thinking and predictive pieces and, you know, with the crystal ball in front of you, Scott, 5 years from now, what will separate great marketing organizations from The average ones.
Scott Brinker [00:25:36]:
All right. I will disclaim trying to predict what the next 5 years is going to look like in today's world.
Sara Payne [00:25:44]:
Maybe we make it 2, Scott. We can make it 2.
Scott Brinker [00:25:47]:
Whatever it is. I will give you my best guess.
Sara Payne [00:25:50]:
Yes.
Scott Brinker [00:25:50]:
But I stopped short of claiming it's a prediction.
Sara Payne [00:25:53]:
Totally realize this is like an impossible question.
Scott Brinker [00:25:57]:
But I got to say, like, you know, it's To me, I look at it as in many ways, like business and marketing is ultimately driven by scarcity. You know, it's like, okay, when you have abundance in one area, something else becomes scarce. It's just sort of these like trade-offs. And I think, you know, in where we're headed in an AI world, some of the things that are becoming scarcer is attention, trust. Yes.
Sara Payne [00:26:26]:
Trust.
Scott Brinker [00:26:26]:
You know, like people's ability to trust in what they are, you know, the value we are increasingly placing, you know, on human relationships is actually having quite a good renaissance, you know, on this. And so my suspicion is, while I do think AI is going to continue to advance, we're going to see it, you know, applied and deployed in, you know, more and more, you know, use cases. I actually think, yeah, we will see as a counterweight to that, Just, yeah, the value of like trust and human relationship and human attention, that's gonna be the scarce thing that we're gonna value even more. And I think great marketing, great brands are really gonna be able to like, you know, lean into that as, you know, what they're strategically trying to focus on.
Sara Payne [00:27:14]:
I totally agree with you on this one. We talk a lot about trust on the podcast. And, you know, Edelman has dug into this with their, their trust barometer, if you will. And it has been declining, steadily declining the past few years, you know, across industries. And that is the thing that is very scarce right now and is something that brands need to be putting a lot of attention to. Um, also agree with you on, uh, the, the importance of, of human relationships. Uh, I think we're, we're even seeing that now with, um, in-person events are becoming sort of the, the in-it thing again, and not just large group, but like sort of small, you know, intimate gatherings of, of people to share knowledge and ideas and, uh, and thinking. So, um, I love that.
Sara Payne [00:28:12]:
I think you're spot on with that.
Scott Brinker [00:28:14]:
Great.
Sara Payne [00:28:14]:
I think we're gonna see it sooner than later and hopefully just gets richer on all of these things, right? Hopefully that trust barometer starts going back up again and that we as marketing leaders and brand leaders can see some success in changing that. Another question for you is, we kind of got into this a little bit, but where should healthcare organizations in particular embrace velocity and where should they resist it?
Scott Brinker [00:28:49]:
It's interesting. So, I would say I'm not a domain expert, you know, in the healthcare space in particular. So, consider this from a layman's perspective view on that. But, you know, one of the things about 2 things about healthcare that I think are really interesting for AI. One, just the volume of information out there and the degree to which that information changes and updates. That feels like a phenomenal opportunity for AI because, I mean, certainly human-wise and the human ways we've tried to maintain and track all this stuff, yeah, it just, there's too much. And so AI is very good at that. I think the other thing that I'm very intrigued by is the other thing AI is really good at, is it is about connecting dots across datasets that are, again, just hard for us as humans at scale to see.
Scott Brinker [00:29:47]:
And because health is one of those things that is, so it seems to me, so interdependent on different things, I think applying AI in helping deliver better engagement and better outcomes for people is very promising. And that's not opposed to the trust dimension and the human connection component of that being invested in equally in parallel. Like, they feel like they can complement each other in that context.
Sara Payne [00:30:18]:
Yeah, totally agree. Totally agree with you on that. I think it's important too to talk about leadership expectations, right? Because the the expectation for pace, for speed often comes from the top, right? And I will ask this question broadly and your answer could be about speed or it could be about something else. If you could change one expectation that executives have of marketing today, what would it be?
Scott Brinker [00:30:52]:
That's a great question. Well, I mean, To me, I think the focus is on outcome, you know, and in particular, making sure that you're looking at that through a balanced scorecard perspective of how the customer, how the client, how the audience, you know, viewed that outcome. You know, the easiest thing for us to get is, you know, the, you know, things like sales data, you know, retention data, you know, engagement data. And those are good things for us to focus on, you know, from an outcome metric perspective. But to me, like some of the best organizations, they're really finding ways to like factor in like, okay, and how did the customer actually feel about that? How'd the client actually feel about that? You know, through the customer client's metric of what matters to them, you know, are we delivering? And I feel like that is where the expectations need to be focused on.
Sara Payne [00:31:53]:
I mean— Yeah.
Scott Brinker [00:31:54]:
So many companies, they talk at a very high level about being customer-centric, which is a very nice and noble sentiment, you know, but if you don't put the incentive structures in place, if this isn't the way in which you're actually holding people accountable, you know, on things that align to that, then it becomes, yeah, you know, something that ends up nice in the mission statement, but like the actual day-to-day operation and cadence is, you know, a slave to entirely different I love that.
Sara Payne [00:32:23]:
That's such a great point. And are we investing? Are we prioritizing investments in not only measuring that we're living up to their expectations, but that we know what they are to begin with, right? Like that, right? So, it's a metric thing and it's a front-end insights. And, you know, are all of the things that we are building as a customer-centric organization Actually, you know, informed by the voice of that customer? Have we invested to be sure that we know what those insights are?
Scott Brinker [00:32:57]:
Yeah. You know, and I'll just volunteer this, you know, yeah, I'm a martech analyst. My entire world has been focused on marketing technology. I will absolutely say definitively, it is never the answer. You know, the technology is the easiest and smallest piece, you know, of this equation. And history is just littered with example after example of people buying these very sophisticated marketing technology tools and then just failing miserably because it was never about the technology. It was about, you know, the process, the strategy, the way in which the culture of the organization, you know, is working. And so, yeah, even though I'm a martech analyst, I'm like, Spend much less time thinking about the tech.
Sara Payne [00:33:43]:
Yeah, no, I appreciate you saying that. And you heard it here, folks. Scott's trying to put himself out of a job. So, you know, take his advice.
Scott Brinker [00:33:50]:
Very small. Yeah, it's a small part of the equation.
Sara Payne [00:33:55]:
No, and to the earlier point too, when we started this conversation, you— I heard it here, folks. Scott said it's his fault. that the pace of marketing is accelerating so quickly. So if you have hate mail, make sure you address it to attention—
Scott Brinker [00:34:11]:
Yes, consider me the avatar for the entire martech industry.
Sara Payne [00:34:14]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, Scott, I think that's a great place to end the conversation today. So many great insights. Really appreciate your perspective on this. Where— what's the best place for people to get in touch with you if they want to reach out?
Scott Brinker [00:34:27]:
Yeah, well, thanks for having me. Really enjoyed the conversation. My website and newsletter is at chiefmartech.com. That's Chief Martech. without the H at the end. Brilliant or terrible branding decision, you decide. And of course, I'm also on LinkedIn.
Sara Payne [00:34:43]:
Yeah, check him out on LinkedIn. Lots of great content there. Thanks again, Scott.
Scott Brinker [00:34:47]:
All right.
Sara Payne [00:34:48]:
Thank you.
Scott Brinker [00:34:48]:
Have a great day.
Sara Payne [00:34:49]:
And thanks for joining us on the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence because the future of healthcare depends on it. We'll see you next time.
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