David Meerman Scott | Speaker

David Meerman Scott helps companies and organisations define strategies to grow business.

He spotted the online content revolution in its infancy and wrote five books about it, including The New Rules of Marketing & PR, the definitive book on the topic, translated into 29 languages. Now, he’s identified a seismic shift afoot in the 2020s. Overwhelmed by nonstop superficial online communication, people are hungry for something more: true human connection.

Smart companies and organisations are winning by leveraging fandom – it’s not just for celebrities anymore; it’s rocket fuel to grow business. David’s eleventh and latest book, Fanocracy, reveals the science behind fandom and how becoming becominghuman-centered instead of data-obsessed is key to attracting radical devotion around products, services, and ideas.

He establishes how and why people become passionate about the things they love and how any company can create a fanocracy to harness for itself the most energetic customer force in the world: die-hard fans. Companies and organisations of all sorts are doing it, including those from the most unlikely industries.

David’s high-energy presentations highlight strategies and success stories of business fandom using bold images and video to energise and inspire audiences. David’s ideas have captured the attention of respected firms and organisations all over the world –having spoken in over 40 countries and on all seven continents. His groundbreaking strategies don’t just slap new tools onto dusty old strategies –they reinvent the way to engage the marketplace.

The top-selling book by David is The New Rules of Marketing & PR, a Wall Street Journal bestseller in its 6th 6thedition with over 400,000 copies sold. It is available in 29 languages and used as a text in hundreds of universities and business schools worldwide. Real-Time Marketing & PR and The New Rules of Sales and Service have each broken new ground with fresh ideas.

David is co-author of Marketing the Moon (and contributing producer of the 2019 PBS documentary it inspired, Chasing the Moon) and Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead. David’s next book is co-authored with his daughter, Reiko, and reveals how the power of fandom – long understood in the celebrity world – can be harnessed by business. David is the pioneer of newsjacking, a business growth strategy so successful that it is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary: “In the space of a few short years, newsjacking has gone from an experimental technique to a staple in every social media-savvy marketing department’s arsenal. Its contemporary iteration, however, dates from the early twenty-first century, as first popularised by marketing and sales strategist David Meerman Scott”. David is a globalist with real-world experience building businesses and a sharp eye for the bigger marketplace. He moved to Tokyo at age 26 to establish the Japan office of a Wall Street Real-Time economic advisory firm. He worked for global real-time media companies in Tokyo for seven years and Hong Kong for two. David was Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder in the mid-1990s before moving to the Boston area, where he was marketing VP for two publicly traded U.S. companies. Losing his job following the sale of NewsEdge to Thomson Reuters delivered David the gift of reinvention as a strategist advising organisations on the new realities of agile, real-time business. David is a co-founder and partner in Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio. SignatureTones works with clients to create sonic logos and original music for use perfectly in tune with their brand. Sonic branding includes original music that is used in videos, podcasts, products and services, as walk-on music for speaking engagements, and in TV and radio commercials. David is an advisor to emerging companies who are working to transform their industries by delivering disruptive products and andservices. Besides delivering success as a member of the board of directors of NewsWatch KK (successfully sold to Yahoo Japan) and Kadient (successfully merged with Sant), and on the board of advisors of Eloqua (successful IPO in mid-2012 and sale to Oracle in early 2013) and GrabCAD (successfully sold to Stratasys in mid-2014), his current portfolio of advisory clients includes HubSpot, where he has served since 2007 (successful IPO in 2014); digital selling firm Vengreso; Mynd; Harmony; YayPay; SlapFive; ExpertFile; and InstaViser, as well as non-profits including the Grateful Dead Archive at University of California/Santa Cruz and HeadCount. He is also a strategic limited partner and advisor to Stage 2 Capital, a go-to-market venture capital fund investing in and advising companies to scale sustainable revenue and healthy growth.