Scott graduated from Kenyon College in 1983 with a BA in Economics. After early jobs as a clerk on several Wall Street bond trading desks, he worked in the online news and information business from 1985 to 2002. He held executive positions in an electronic information division of Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest newspaper companies from 1989 to 1995. He was based in Tokyo from 1987 to 1993 and in Hong Kong from 1993 to 1995. He moved to the Boston area in 1995 and joined Desktop Data, which became NewsEdge Corporation. In his most recent corporate position he was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge until the business was sold to Thomson Corporation in 2002.

Since 2001, he has used Meerman, his middle name, to distinguish himself from other well known David Scott’s such as the David Scott who walked on the moon as the commander of Apollo 15 (and whom he has met), the David Scott who is six-time Iron Man Triathlon Champion, and the David Scott who is a member of congress from Georgia’s 13th district.

Scott's ideology "the new rules of marketing & PR" is that marketing and public relations is vastly different on the Web than in mainstream media. He says that the "old rules" of mainstream media (which he asserts do not work on the Web) are about "controlling a message" and the only ways to get the message into the public domain using mainstream media is to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write about you. He says that the rules of marketing and PR on the Web are completely different. Instead of buying or begging your way in, Scott says anybody can earn attention by "publishing their way in" using the tools of social media such as, blogs, podcasts, online news releases, online video, viral marketing, and online media.

Scott is the author of several books:

• Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History (2010). Scott Kirsner, reviewing the book in the Boston Globe, mentions that the authors say they were inspired in part by an article in the Atlantic by Joshua Green.
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 2ed (2010) won praise in The New York Times and Computerworld reviews.

• World Wide Rave (2009). To promote this book Scott created several videos including one evocative of the joyous Matt Harding Where is Matt? series and a series of three in the workplace mockumentary style of both Ricky Gervais's The Office and the Art of the Sale videos. Comedian Tim Washer plays in two of these series: as victim in the Art of the Sale, but switching roles to oppressor in Riding the Rave.

• Tuned In (2008)
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR (2008). The first edition of this book was featured in the BusinessWeek Best Seller List and is published in more than 20 languages. Related to the book, Scott developed a one-day seminar called New Rules of Marketing, which is taught to corporate groups around the world.
• Cashing In With Content (2005)
• Eyeball Wars: A Novel of Dot-com Intrigue (2001)

Scott also wrote the foreword sections in The New Rules of Social Media, a series of books that he edits for John Wiley & Sons. The first three books in the series are:

1. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah
2. Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business by Steve Garfield
3. Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment by Jim Sterne

He has also publishes online:

• Several E-books

• A blog, Web Ink Now, which is ranked in AdAge Power 150 as one of the top marketing blogs

• Articles in Huffington Post

• Contributing editor at EContent Magazine

Scott serves on the board of advisors of HubSpot, Eloqua, VisibleGains, and Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz. He was formerly on the board of directors of Kadient (now merged with Sant) and NewsWatch (acquired by Yahoo! Japan).

Scott's hobbies include collecting space artifacts.

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