- Dissolving martech? Tech stack aggregation brings more power to marketing, more control to ITWas it John Lennon who wrote, “Imagine there’s no martech, I wonder if you can?” I may be misremembering that lyric. But it’s what came to mind when I saw the above chart. It’s ... read more
- Martech utilization problems: how to diagnose and remedy themMartech utilization sucks. At least that’s the conclusion one draws from Gartner’s latest 2023 Marketing Technology Survey, which includes the above chart. “Thinking about the totality of the capabilities made available by marketing technology, ... read more
- Martech stacks and staff are stabilizing, thanks to both better integration and budget pressureOne of the most interesting annual martech surveys out there is the Martech Replacement Survey produced by the team at MarTech.org. (Kudos to Chris Elwell, whose brainchild this was.) Every year they ask marketers: ... read more
- Conway’s Law vs. Inverse Conway’s Law and the future of build vs. buy in martechI’ve floated the idea of an Inverse Conway’s Law in previous posts before, but only in passing. So today I want to fully describe the concept, because I believe it is a useful way ... read more
- 3 possible scenarios for the future of martech in the Age of AIFor years, people have been prognosticating the collapse of the martech landscape. That all these thousands of different martech apps are going to be winnowed down to a handful of winners. For the past ... read more
- Countering 4 “myths” of tech stack dysfunction: shrinkage, martech, shadow IT, and utilizationWhy let data get in the way of a good narrative? Tech stacks are going to shrink dramatically. Marketing’s tech stack is bloated compared to every other department. Shadow IT is a scourge across ... read more
- Composability is already everywhere in martech today, you just may not realize it (which is a good thing)Lately, I’ve been excitedly talking about “composability” as a major new trend in martech (and business technology in general). But in the absence of defining it more precisely, the term has triggered some confusion ... read more
- Breaking through the noise getting harder? Here’s one marketing channel that’s getting more effectiveTo regular readers, it’s no surprise that I’m bullish on ecosystems. I’ve long advocated that platform ecosystems solve many of the challenges of an ever-changing, highly-diversified martech landscape. It’s also what I focus on ... read more
- The key point of Google’s “we have no moat” memo on generative AI is that ecosystems are the moatA few weeks ago, an internal memo from Google (or so it was claimed) was leaked that warned, “We have no moat.” Allegedly, it was written by an AI researcher at the company who ... read more
- Three pillars of The New Automation Mindset, for an age when anyone can automate anything with AII’m excited to announce a new book coming out this summer, The New Automation Mindset: The Leadership Blueprint For An Age When Anyone Can Automate Anything With AI. Written by Vijay Tella, CEO of ... read more
- 36 illustrated and insightful martech stacks from the 2023 Stackie AwardsI hope you had a wonderful #MartechDay yesterday. It’s one day a year — the first Tuesday in May — to expressly celebrate all the amazing martech and marketing operations pros who make marketing ... read more
- 2023 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: 11,038 solutions searchable on martechmap.comHappy #MartechDay to you! Today during our virtual Best of Breed Marketing Summit — you can still catch sessions on demand for this next week — Frans Riemersma and I released the 2023 edition ... read more
- From #MartechDay to a European martech tour, May will be martech-tacularOkay, so martech-tacular isn’t a word. It isn’t even a very good portmanteau. But it’s what I’m feeling as I prepare for a full month of spectacular martech adventures. The 1st Tuesday in May ... read more
- Exploring the 2nd order effects of generative AI in marketing and martechWhat an amazing time to be working in marketing and martech! Our entire industry is blossoming like the wildflower “super bloom” happening in California this spring, fed by the rain, rivers, and sunshine of ... read more
- Marketing ops careers are good today — and likely to get much better; here’s the latest data on these rolesIf you’re working in marketing operations, life is probably pretty good. 74% of marketing ops pros say they’re somewhat satisfied or extremely satisfied in their roles. Over half have been promoted or taken new ... read more
- How big is your tech stack, really? Here’s the latest data…It’s springtime, in the Northern hemisphere, and tech stacks are blooming. Zylo, a SaaS management platform that manages over 30 million SaaS licenses for its customers — more $30 billion in SaaS spend under ... read more
- Holy $#!&, two major martech disruptions just collided together: AI and composability
- Join us for the new Best of Breed Marketing Summit for this year’s #MartechDay (May 2)The first Tuesday in May is #MartechDay — a day to celebrate all the wonderful people working in the martech industry and the amazing practitioners who bring these capabilities to life in marketing organizations ... read more
- The future of martech apps is happening in SMB and the mid-market. Here’s why.We’re busy working on the 2023 edition of the martech landscape (interactive version at martechmap.com) that will be released on #MartechDay, May 2. Spoiler alert: if you were betting this would be the year the ... read more
- Composability and usage-based pricing go hand-in-hand for martech applicationsMartech software companies — and SaaS vendors in general — have a several different ways they can charge for their products. The classic SaaS subscription models have used seat-based and tier-based pricing. As a buyer, ... read more
- 15 reflections on martech and more from 15 years of writing chiefmartec.com15 years ago, sitting at a wobbly kitchenette table in our cramped apartment, on a frigid February morning outside Boston, I started this blog for marketing technologists. Of course, at the time, almost nobody knew ... read more
- Entries now being accepted for The 2023 Stackies Awards — what’s in your stack?Grab your favorite slide maker, martech pros. It’s time to show your stack. The 2023 Stackies: Martech Stack Awards are now accepting entries for the next 11 weeks — until midnight Pacific on Friday, April 21. There ... read more
- Tech layoffs? Great companies are actively hiring marketing technology talentIn my previous post, I boldly predicted that we’re on the verge of a whole series of martech innovations: AI, composability, AR/VR, even, yes, “Web3”. While I agree with the pessimists that 2023 will be ... read more
- 2023 will be a chaotic year for martech, yet the start of a massive wave of growthI’m going to start the year with a controversial prediction: we are at the beginning of a massive wave of growth in martech. The next 7 years of expansion in our industry and profession will ... read more
- A whirlwind tour of the new martech map, major martech trends for 2023, and how to manage it all in the year aheadYesterday, my brother-in-martech Frans Riemersma and I gave a tour de force presentation of the current martech landscape as it stands at the end of 2022 (now officially over 10,000 solutions!), five major trends that ... read more
- You can now filter the 10,000+ martech landscape by revenue, size, age and G2 ratingsIn today’s virtual event Martech for 2023: The (Really) Big Picture — full video will be shared tomorrow — Frans Riemersma and I released a major update to the interactive martech landscape on martechmap.com. We ... read more
- Tech stacks are still large, but orchestration can make all the differenceEver see the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon? Great story about the Apollo moon missions. I’m pretty sure it was in one of those episodes that I most remember the impactful difference between ... read more
- What to expect in martech in 2023 and how to harness it to your advantage2023 will be a fascinating but challenging year for marketing. Macroeconomic headwinds are colliding with rising customer expectations for better digital experiences. Martech stacks are consolidating under economic pressure. Yet at the same time, major ... read more
- Partner Ops: The forgotten ops that’s suddenly thriving in the ecosystem eratl;dr — The State of Partner Ops and Programs is a “must read” report for martech. A month ago, I wrote about how channel, partner, and ecosystem tech is one of the hottest categories in ... read more
- When is a martech stack too complex?At many companies — but not all — their martech stack has become too complex. Aside from the anecdotal evidence that I frequently hear on LinkedIn and Twitter threads, Gartner’s most recent Marketing Technology Survey ... read more
- Why there are 10,000 martech products that “kinda all do the same thing” (but not really)One of the perennial criticisms of the martech landscape is that “most of these products all do the same thing.” Send an email. Render a web page. Analyze some data. This criticism has grown louder ... read more
- Channel, partner, and ecosystem tech is one of the hottest categories in martech todayJay McBain, formerly of Forrester and now with tech analyst firm Canalys, is the world’s leading expert in partner, channel, and ecosystem technology. Where I’ve gone broad with the martech landscape, Jay has gone deep ... read more
- The 2nd Age of Martech has arrived, and it’s all about convergence in ecosystemsIn 2019, I hypothesized that we were on the cusp of a Second Golden Age of Martech. The defining characteristic of this new era was a shift from dichotomies to convergences: From suite vs. best-of-breed ... read more
- Are we “digital” yet? An algorithmic answer to a philosophical question“We’re entering a post-digital-transformation era, where companies are no longer planning to become ‘digital.’ They are digital.” I didn’t think that was a particularly controversial statement, which I wrote back in April while working on ... read more
- Think the martech landscape is big? Here’s the size of the software industry overallOver the 11 years that I’ve been publishing the martech landscape, as it mushroomed from ~150 solutions to ~10,000, I’ve seen many people react to it as an anomaly. “What is it about marketing that ... read more
- Marketers keep replacing major martech apps, integration #1 factor for replacementsMy friends at MarTech.org recently released their latest Martech Replacement Survey 2022, where marketers shared which apps they’ve replaced over the past 18 months, what their primary motivation was in doing so, and what were ... read more
- What are we automating in marketing and martech in 2022, and who is automating it?Apologies for the lull in posting. I took a long, much-needed family vacation — almost entirely digital-free. I’m now back in the saddle, recharged and reenergized about all that’s happening in martech. With a huge ... read more
- The latest data on martech and marketing ops careers, and an ode to spreadsheetsHalf of martech and marketing ops professionals received a promotion in the past year. More accurately, half of the 426 respondents to our 2022 Martech Career Survey, run in collaboration with the team at MarTech.org, ... read more
- Have we entered a post-agile marketing age?Catching up on my backlog of data and topics from before #MartechDay earlier this month — which featured the 2022 marketing technology landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the top of my list is the ... read more
- 32 illustrated martech stacks entered in The Stackies 2022: Marketing Tech Stack AwardsYesterday — #MartechDay, yay! — we released the global 2022 marketing technology landscape, after taking a year off in 2021. It grew a remarkable 24% to 9,932 solutions. To make it readable, we actually made ... read more
- Marketing Technology Landscape 2022: search 9,932 solutions on martechmap.comIt’s #MartechDay! I’m delighted to finally share with you the 2022 marketing technology landscape, a joint production between myself and Frans Riemersma of MartechTribe (and a whole bunch of wonderful contributors). Here are the key ... read more
- Martech is consolidating, but what will the 2022 landscape reveal?Next Tuesday, May 3 — Martech Day! — we’ll release the 2022 marketing technology landscape, along with a State of Martech report. You can be one of the first to see it and learn about ... read more
- 10+ ways to visualize your martech stackThis is the 8th year we’re running The Stackies. It’s an awards program that invites marketers to share a single slide illustrating their martech stack — the different apps and platforms they use and how ... read more
- Martech in the metaverse: 5 takeaways from a lively roundtable discussionWhat is the metaverse? What will it mean for marketing and martech? Last week, I led a roundtable discussion with three leaders of martech companies — Acquia CMO Lynne Capozzi, Wistia CEO Chris Savage, and ... read more
- The real build vs. buy question in martech is around talent, not technology“One of the things that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should in martech is the gap between the technology that is installed and the skills that exist in the organization.” In a ... read more
- #MartechDay: The 2022 Martech Landscape, State of Martech Report, Stackies, and moreThere’s a day for everything. Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. Sword Swallowers Day. No Pants Day. But there’s no official day on the calendar to acknowledge and celebrate the martech profession and all the wonderful, talented ... read more
- Share your martech stack illustration in the 2022 Martech Stackie AwardsI’m pleased to announce that the 2022 Stackies: Martech Stack Awards are now open for entries for the next eight weeks — until midnight Pacific on Friday, April 29. There is no fee to enter. ... read more
- It’s not the size of your martech stack, it’s your range of use casesBain & Company recently conducted a martech survey with 100 major consumer products companies. They evaluated these companies’ maturity on 30 different martech capabilities, including enablers such as martech product management and governance practices. They ... read more
- Okta reveals 5-year trend of best-in-breed apps; also, a kind request I have of youOkta, a leading identity platform that many companies use for single sign-on (SSO), has been aggregating the data of which apps their customers use for the past five years. Every year, they publish a report ... read more
- Matrixed Tech Stacks with Both Horizontal and Vertical Aggregation PlatformsLast year, I wrote about a pattern of aggregation platforms growing in martech stacks. The two key characteristics of an aggregation platform: It centralizes a cross-departmental capability (e.g., a cloud data warehouse).It grows in value ... read more
- The power of combinatorial innovation and 4 other lessons on the journey to 1,000 appsToday, HubSpot announced a milestone of more than 1,000 integrated apps featured in the app marketplace for its CRM platform. The call to better integrate martech is being heard. As you may know, I joined ... read more
- SaaS stacks keep growing. Is there also a relationship between choice and utilization?As an “armchair analyst” in martech, my favorite content comes from stack “aggregation” platform companies who publish the data of what their customers are actually doing. Unlike surveys that can be wildly biased and imprecise, ... read more
- 3 Big Martech Innovation Themes in 2022Hello, 2022! Or document.write("Hello, 2022!") to those still in codeland. Following my wrap-up of martech from 2021 — tl;dr a year in digital marketing that was experienced like a Twitch stream at 1.5X speed — ... read more
- 2021: The Year Martech Shrank — Just Kidding (A Year in Review)Congratulations on making it to the end of 2021. It’s been a long year for everyone as we navigated the ongoing pandemic saga. From the perspective of advancing digital business, these past 21 months have ... read more
- Data, Decisioning, Delivery & Design: A Framing for the CDP vs. CDW DebateThere’s been some interesting debate lately about CDPs vs. CDWs — customer data platforms vs. cloud data warehouses. If CDWs such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Redshift, etc., are becoming a universal data layer in companies, ... read more
- Half $1 trillion software in the cloud: feeding The Great App Explosion and Big Ops“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money,” the late US Senator Everett Dirkson apocryphally quipped. A few months ago, Gartner published the above chart with their latest estimates on cloud ... read more
- Higher order effects of automation in Big OpsFor the past year I’ve been talking about a shift from Big Data to Big Ops. In short, today’s challenges with business technology are less about managing a huge volume of data — Big Data ... read more
- The Composable Enterprise brings us into The Great App Explosion & Big OpsTraditional business thinking views change as risk, while composable thinking is the means to master the risk of accelerating change and to create new business value.”Monika Sinha, Research VP, Gartner That’s a quote from ... read more
- Commerce is the latest (renewed) frontier in martech, putting the revenue in RevOpsFirst, welcome to the freshly updated chiefmartec.com site — or, if you’re reading in this in your inbox, our freshly updated email subscription service, a big step up from RSS-to-email through Google Feedburner. What’s that thing ... read more
- Latest data on the size of tech stacks, er, app portfolios, and a philosophical question about shadow ITProductiv, a SaaS management platform (SMP), published a report on The State of SaaS Sprawl in 2021. Since Productiv’s software manages the tech stacks — or “app portfolios”, as they like to call them ... read more
- 29 visually striking martech stack illustrations from the 2021 Stackie AwardsEvery year, when the entries to the Stackie Awards flow in, I feel like the kid in A Christmas Story, excitedly opening up that present he’d be dreaming of. I am always delighted and ... read more
- Join us at MarTech next week, online and for free, and catch my keynote: From Big Data to Big OpsJoin us next Tuesday and Wednesday, September 14-15, for the latest MarTech Conference event — online and completely free to attend. With over 75 sessions, over 100 expert speakers, and more than 50 terrific ... read more
- 47 new martech companies from latest Y Combinator cohort — the counter-consolidation narrative lives onLast week, Y Combinator held their Demo Day(s) for their Summer 2021 cohort. This was a massive graduating class: 377 startups from 47 countries. You can read a quick overview of all 377 (!) ... read more
- Aggregation and integration: why 67% of marketers replaced a martech tool in the past yearMy friends over at MarTech just released their 2021 Martech Replacement Survey, revealing insights into what and why companies switch from one martech application to another. The top-line finding: there’s a ton of martech ... read more
- Follow the money: CMO budgets for martech and marketing operationsAs with crime and politics, if you want to reveal the real plot in marketing’s evolution, follow where the money is going. Hmm. That’s probably not the most flattering of metaphors. Okay, scratch that ... read more
- What are we automating in marketing and sales? A lotSurveys are nice, but they have their limitations. They’re swayed by who participates (selection bias) and the way those participants interpret your questions in their own minds — which varies wildly for reasons a ... read more
- 35 of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies are in martechLast week, Forbes published the 2021 edition of The Cloud 100 — their “definitive ranking of the best, brightest, most valuable private companies in the cloud.” The selection process involved an unpublished editorial formula ... read more
- The State of Marketing Operations or Can’t Find a Better MartechThe good folks at BrandMaker recently released a study of CMOs and their perceptions of The State of Marketing Operations. In short, marketing operations has risen from being “an overshadowed marketing function that worked ... read more
- The Quest for the Holy Grail: Martech EditionThere’s a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where God appears in the clouds — in delightfully unsubtle Monty Python fashion — and commands Arthur and his knights to seek the Holy ... read more
- Should you build or buy martech? Yes“Homegrown martech is like homemade pizza.” That’s the kind of quip I might have likely shot back a couple of years ago if someone asked me, “Should we build our own martech software or ... read more
- Are CMOs falling behind with martech? The C-Suite thinks so, and they may be rightA few weeks ago, I read a white paper produced by Rackspace Technology, How Applications Impact Customer Experience. (Spoiler alert: in a digital world, applications are customer experience, so you’d better make them delightful. ... read more
- 13 cringe-worthy martech dad jokes that are even worse than last year’sLast year, we celebrated Father’s Day here at chiefmartec.com by subjecting you, dear reader, whose esteem we otherwise value, to 7 really bad martech “dad jokes”. It was… well, possibly one of the least ... read more
- Metcalfe’s Mirror: Complexity in networks (P.S. your martech stack is a network)Fair warning: this post is pretty wonkish, even relative to my usual style. (Yikes.) Robert Metcalfe, the godfather of computer networks, famously stated that the value of a network is proportional to the square ... read more
- A 2×2 view of systems of record in martechThe phrase “system of record” has been bandied about in martech for years. In the absence of any other context, it’s usually assumed to mean the software that holds the authoritative (or “golden”) customer ... read more
- Aggregation Theory applied to martech stacksI recently wrote how martech stacks have arguably become virtual platforms. Even if you have a completely heterogeneous, “best-of-breed” stack, you likely have a set of products that work across your stack to provide ... read more
- Summer of Stacks: Opening the 2021 MarTech Stackie AwardsSummer approaches! (Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.) Fresh air, sunshine, and frolicking outdoors have never felt so viscerally appealing, after a seemingly infinite year indoors. I hope you get time to walk ... read more
- Is your entire martech stack becoming one big virtual “platform”?The Great App Explosion can’t be stopped. But it can be harnessed. A couple of years ago, I proposed a model of 4 layers of app integrations with SaaS platforms. Advocating for better integration, ... read more
- Wait, more martech tools create more manual tasks?!The good team at Airtable, whom I featured in my MarTech keynote, Marketing Superpowers: How AI & No Code Transform Every Marketer into a Maker, recently published the Airtable Marketing Trends Report based on ... read more
- Majority of marketing departments now use agile (and they’re more strategically aligned as a result)Okay, I was just kidding on April Fools’ Day with hyperagile marketing. Apologies to any of you who spent the past week planking through your team updates. But I am excited to share with ... read more
- Introducing Scram: Hyperagile Marketing Practices for a Hyperautomation, Hypergrowth WorldAgile management was born 20 years ago, to help teams operate better in a fast-moving, ever-changing, digital world. Agile originated in software development circles, with a bunch of programmers high in the mountains, and ... read more
- There are as many European-based martech products today (3,647) as there were globally in 2016I remember the mad rush to finish the 2016 marketing technology landscape five years ago, just in time to present it for my opening keynote at that spring’s MarTech conference in San Francisco. In ... read more
- 212 event-related martech companies. Make that 268. Wait, no, 316…I still remember fondly my young and innocent days a decade ago when I created the first marketing technology landscape. It categorized ~150 martech solutions — which at the time seemed epic in scale. ... read more
- Marketing Superpowers: How AI & No Code Transform Every Marketer into a MakerTwo days ago, I delivered my keynote for the latest (still virtual) MarTech conference, titled Marketing Superpowers: How AI & No Code Transform Every Marketer into a Maker. I wanted to begin with an ... read more
- A blossoming martech platform: IDC sizes the HubSpot ecosystem at $6.4 billion this year, $12.5 billion in 2024Our business model fundamentally is about creating more surplus outside us. We will only be long-term successful if people are making more money around us. That quote from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, from ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #12: Martech Wars on the WebOn its surface, the martech landscape graphic I’ve produced for the past decade has limited insights to offer. If you observe that (a) “there are a @&#$% of martech solutions” and (b) “the overall ... read more
- Don’t miss the FREE MarTech conference online next week, March 16-17It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted, as I’ve been heads down working on my keynote for the upcoming MarTech conference. It’s all about “no code” for marketers, and I’m seriously looking forward ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #11: The Great Unbundling with Benedict EvansThe Martech Show is back! Our latest episode is an interview with Benedict Evans, tech and media analyst extraordinaire, talking about his latest presentation, The Great Unbundling, and what it means for marketers and ... read more
- More evidence that the Golden Age of Salestech has arrivedJust last month, I wrote that salestech is the new martech, and that it’s supercharging both professions. Here’s more data to support that case. First, the 2021 Enterprise SalesTech Landscape above, produced by Nancy ... read more
- No code app creators, startups, and the future of enterprise marketingBubble is one the leading no code platforms for building web apps. The team at Blue Green and I dabbled with it a bit for producing The Martech 5000 online database last year, and ... read more
- Are stacks expanding? Yes. Are they best-of-breed? Yes.
- Any CMO who wants to understand how to really harness martech should read this bookHot off the presses, I just read Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio. It is, ... read more
- Salestech is the new martech, and it’s supercharging both professionsSalestech is hot. Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools has been tracking sales technologies the way I’ve been tracking the martech landscape. Her latest map of salestech reveals hundreds and hundreds of vendors in ... read more
- What a TikTok musical teaches us about the power of “no code” citizen creatorsAnyone can cook. Anyone can create. In August of last year, Emily Jacobsen, an elementary school teacher, posted a musical ode to Remy, the talented rat chef star of Disney-Pixar’s Ratatouille, on TikTok. ... read more
- Martech 2030 Conclusion: The Age of the Augmented MarketerEarlier this year, I collaborated with Jason Baldwin, global head of product management at WPP, on this project to describe five major trends in martech that would shape the decade ahead for agencies and ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #10: Lessons from a Fortune 50 CMO on Agile Marketing, Martech & MoreSeason #1 of The Martech Show concludes in Episode #10 with a terrific conversation with David Edelman, truly one of the the pioneers of modern, martech-powered marketing. David led the strategy and analysis practice ... read more
- Martech 2030 Trend #5: Harmonizing Human + MachineEarlier this year, I collaborated with Jason Baldwin, global head of product management at WPP, on this project to describe five major trends in martech that would shape the decade ahead for agencies and ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #9: The Tech-Savvy CMO — Unicorn or Universal?For this 9th episode of The Martech Show, I was delighted to have Rishi Dave, CMO of MongoDB, join me for a conversation about his experience as a tech-savvy CMO. Prior to MongoDB, Rishi ... read more
- Martech 2030 Trend #4: From Big Data to Big OpsEarlier this year, I collaborated with Jason Baldwin, global head of product management at WPP, on this project to describe five major trends in martech that would shape the decade ahead for agencies and ... read more
- Martech 2030 Trend #3: The Great App ExplosionEarlier this year, I collaborated with Jason Baldwin, global head of product management at WPP, on this project to describe five major trends in martech that would shape the decade ahead for agencies and ... read more
- Martech 2030 Trend #2: Platforms, Networks & MarketplacesEarlier this year, I collaborated with Jason Baldwin, global head of product management at WPP, on this project to describe five major trends in martech that would shape the decade ahead for agencies and ... read more