- 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
- Martech 2030 Trend #1: “No Code” Citizen CreatorsEarlier 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: Introduction to the Decade 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 #8: The Martech Suite Strikes Back?Ben Bloom, a senior research director at Gartner who specializes in marketing technology management, joined me for Episode #8 of The Martech Show to share some surprising data from their latest report, Marketing Technology ... read more
- Big Ops: Converging Digital Ops Domains and ToolsetsOps is sexy these days. In martech land, it’s been a growing story around RevOps — revenue operations — that connects together marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops under one umbrella, often ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #7: Ecosystems and the Expanding SaaS UniverseYou think there’s a lot of martech out there. But it’s only a fraction of the total SaaS universe out there. This latest episode of The Martech Show features Jay McBain, Forrester analyst extraordinaire ... read more
- Martech 2030: Five Trends in Marketing Technology for the Decade of the Augmented MarketerFour months ago, I started a collaboration with Jason Baldwin, the global head of product management at WPP, to write a paper on the major trends in marketing technology that we believe will shape ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #6: The Six Disciplines of Agile MarketingFor the fifth episode of The Martech Show, we talked about five major trends of marketing technology. For this sixth episode, we discussed the six disciplines of agile marketing. For the seventh episode, we’ll ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #5: Martech Trends in Agency LandEarlier this month, my opening keynote for the (virtual) MarTech Conference covered five major trends in marketing technology that are already present today but will grow dramatically over the next 10 years in The ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #5: Avoiding Bias and BS in AI and Machine LearningOkay, the original title for this episode was, “Marketing Has a Data Farm: AI, AI, Oh!” — the kind of whimsical play on words that amuses me to no end. (I know, my bar ... read more
- 51 martech stacks shared in the 2020 Stackie Awards, beautifully illustrated examples of modern marketing toolsetsThis is the 6th year that we have run The Stackies as an awards contest that invites marketers to send in a single slide illustrating their marketing stack — the collection of martech tools ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #3: The Road from Marketing Ops to Marketing Tops (CMO)The latest episode of The Martech Show is now available for your viewing pleasure. It was a terrific session, with special guest Erica Seidel, executive recruiter and founder of The Connective Good, along with ... read more
- Integration is by far the most important criteria when selecting martech — and it’s changing the industryThe CDP Institute released their latest State of Customer Data report last week, and it revealed an important milestone in the martech industry: For the first time ever, the majority of participants (52%) described ... read more
- The Martech Show Episode #2: Insights from the CDP Whisperer — and his magical mystery puppet showThe second episode of The Martech Show is now posted for your viewing pleasure. It was a great honor to have David Raab, founder of The CDP Institute — indeed, the person who defined ... read more
- Bending Martec’s Law: 2020 has taught us we’re more agile than we thoughtHoly cats, 2020 has been a crazy year. And it’s not over yet. (cringe) But for all the terrible things this year has besieged us with, it’s also revealed something encouraging. We — as ... read more
- Watch the first episode of The Martech Show now: Why so many martech solutions?!We’ve shipped our first episode of The Martech Show — our new hybrid webinar-podcast series “where marketing and technology collide.” A big thank you to my two guests: Jeff Eckman of Blue Green, our collaborators ... read more
- The larger your martech stack, the better your marketing performance? MaybeI recently talked with Benjamin Bloom, senior director analyst for marketing technology and emerging trends at Gartner, around a report he recently published on Marketing Technology Drivers of Genius Brand Performance. (There’s a summary ... read more
- Announcing The Martech Show: Pilot episode on August 21 at 11am ET — join the live studio audiencePop quiz, hot shot. You find yourself with a ton of important martech topics to cover, an amazing roster of talented leaders eager to address those topics with their peers, and no venue to ... read more
- How marketing operations and martech professionals use “no code” toolsI’ve been on the trail of “no code” martech these past couple of weeks, covering event-triggered marketing automation as a no code programming paradigm and mapping a partial taxonomy of over 75 no code ... read more
- 3 overlapping patterns of “no code” martech and the rise of marketing makersI’ve been fascinated with the rise of citizen developers in marketing empowered by a rapidly expanding landscape of “no code” tools for several years now. Momentum is growing, and while there’s some philosophical debate ... read more
- Trigger-based marketing = event-driven programming with “no code” martech in every stackLast week, I shared some interesting stats on trigger-based marketing from a benchmark report by Blueshift. A couple of eye-popping, high-level findings: Email triggers are 497% more effective than batch emails Mobile push ... read more
- What the coastline paradox reveals about infinite software specialization (in martech and other fields)After three and a half months of working out of my basement, I was in desperate need of a change of scenery. Preferably somewhere with a lot of outdoor space for hiking and frisbee ... read more
- In The First Golden Age of Martech, the US marketing ecosystem grew 50% faster than GDPI’ve called the past decade of the 2010’s The First Golden Age of Martech. It was an explosion of both a new industry (martech) and a new profession (marketing technologists). I’ve spilled a gigabyte ... read more
- Why does the massive landscape of marketing services firms not bother people the way martech does?The large size of the marketing technology landscape stirs many emotions in the marketing community. Excitement. Frustration. Awe. Anger. Yes, anger. Just last week, I was hotly accused by someone on LinkedIn of stoking ... read more
- 7 really bad martech “dad jokes” for Father’s DayThe best part of being a dad? Well, okay, maybe not the best, but somewhere in the top five. A legitimate excuse for telling “dad jokes.” So to celebrate Father’s Day here at chiefmartec.com, ... read more
- Martech is meaningless without our humanityI’ve had a hard time writing about martech these past couple of weeks. So I’m just going to write what I want to say, what I need to say. The terrible injustice of the ... read more
- Proof of platform: SaaS companies have a median of 15 integrations each — app platforms have 500+As Forrest Gump might say, “Platform is as platform does.” Pandium, a fascinating kind of app-marketplace-as-a-service company, released a State of Product Integrations at the SaaS 1000 report this week. They examined integrations, public ... read more
- How platform dynamics explain The Second Golden Age of MartechAbout a year and a half ago, I wrote about 3 Trends Driving the Second Golden Age of Martech: Ecosystems, Experts, and (Citizen) Engineers. These are the big themes that I believe will shape ... read more
- Reflections on agile marketing by leading practitioners and analystsThe following is a guest post curated by Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas, sharing reflections from leading agile marketing practitioners and analysts on the findings from her latest State of Agile Marketing report. As we ... read more
- Platform dynamics driving martech app expansion and consolidation explained in one (relatively) simple modelLast month, I published the latest marketing technology landscape. It grew yet again, defying many a pundit’s prior prediction, swelling to 8,000 martech solutions. Upon its release, two things immediately happened: A bunch ... read more
- Forget the Martech 5000. Try the Martech 500 Million.Okay, there aren’t really going to be 500 million martech apps by 2023. And if there were, we certainly wouldn’t attempt to map them in a martech landscape. (Crikey, that’s a nightmare that will ... read more
- 7 amazing marketing stacks from Cisco, Infutor, Juniper Networks, Philips, Poly, Sargento, and USPSSpring is one of my favorite times of year in the martech industry. We release the latest marketing technology landscape. We share the latest data on martech careers and job responsibilities. We — in ... read more
- Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2020): Martech 5000 — really 8,000, but who’s counting?Welcome to the 2020 edition of the marketing technology landscape. Yes, it grew once again, by 13.6%, up to a total of 8,000 martech solutions. That’s after 615 from the 2019 landscape went away, ... read more
- Job responsibilities of 4 marketing technologist roles: marketers, operations, analytics, and makersAt today’s virtual Discover MarTech event, I’ll be digging into the latest data from our 2020 Martech Career Survey run in collaboration with the team at MarTech Today. We’ll have an official report out ... read more
- Digital transformation helps those who help themselves: self-service processes and toolsTEKsystems, who provides a lot of digital transformation services to Fortune 500 companies, recently released their 2020 State of Digital Transformation report. Since I’ve been cutting back on my all-night disco dancing at the ... read more
- 85 minutes of my best martech content for free, but with one small askLast month we canceled the MarTech conference that had been planned for this week in San Jose for, well, obvious reasons. We have now set our sights on hosting an in-person MarTech Conference in ... read more
- Latest data on agile marketing, at a time when we can really appreciate itThere are a handful of reports I eagerly look forward to every year, and Andrea Fryrear’s State of Agile Marketing is one of my favorite. The third annual edition is available now, and like ... read more
- SaaS adoption trends at the start of 2020 (yes, before all hell broke loose)Early in March, Blissfully released their 2020 SaaS Trends Report. As with previous data they’ve shared, the report is full of highly interesting findings based on actual SaaS usage — not just what people ... read more
- Canceling the MarTech Conference scheduled for next month and sharing our updated plans aheadHey, I hope you’re doing okay. A crazy and surreal time we’re in. The photo above is my new “office” in the basement of my house. Yeah, I’ve got a green screen set up. ... read more
- An epic landscape of 2,427 European martech solutionsTL;DR If you think the world of martech software has shrunk, take a tour of Europe. Everybody needs a hobby. Golf. Fishing. Home brewing. For some of us, it’s collecting logos of martech companies ... read more
- Happy Valentine’s Day tomorrow, dear martech’ersThere’s a logo landscape for everything. Even for lovers in a digital time. The above chart was published by CB Insights in their article 60+ Tech Startups To Enhance Your Valentine’s Day and brought ... read more
- Only 3 days left for the best price on awe-inspiring, mind-expanding, career-accelerating MarTech ticketsWith a headline like that, who can doubt that I’ve got marketing in my DNA? Seriously though, as you can see from the at-a-glance editorial agenda above — which doesn’t even include the couple ... read more
- The average enterprise uses 1,295 cloud servicesI’m used to getting a lot crap pushback on the scale of the marketing technology landscape. “7,000 martech vendors is way too much!” My gut-level, defensive reaction is to reply, “Hey, it’s not my ... read more
- The top 3 things marketers want martech vendors to improveThe good folks at Ascend2, a marketing industry research firm, recently released a study on Martech Stack Optimization. It’s the kind of report that I open with the enthusiasm of that kid from the ... read more
- Dr. Martech and Mr. Hype: A Transformational WebinarI spend a lot of time debating dichotomies with myself: The classic: is martech consolidating or expanding? Should you centralize or decentralize marketing, automate or humanize it? Should you practice agile or waterfall approaches ... read more
- Check out Red Hat’s customer journey marketing stackAs you know, we’re in the middle of awards season. Oscars. Grammys. Golden Globes. All fine trophies to be had. But my favorite kudos, of course, are The 2020 Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. ... read more
- Don’t miss the MarTech Conference in San Jose, April 15-17It might be the dead of winter right now, but spring is only a couple of months away — as is the next MarTech Conference, April 15-17 at the San Jose Convention Center. As ... read more
- Thank you, Clay Christensen, for everything you taught me about disruptive innovation and moreAs you probably have heard by now, Clayton Christensen — renown author, professor, and consultant on the topic of disruptive innovation — passed away late last week. I didn’t know him personally, but I ... read more
- A cool (and personal) example of a “2nd Golden Age of Martech” companyBack in September 2017, Toronto-based ScribbleLive acquired ion interactive, the interactive content SaaS company I had co-founded and served as president and CTO. Scribble had raised $50 million (Canadian dollars?) from a bunch of ... read more
- We’re crowdsourcing the 2020 marketing technology landscape — and will make all the data available to everyoneIt’s a new decade — and time for a new approach to the marketing technology landscape. Contribute a new or updated martech vendor here. Report an acquired or defunct martech vendor here. Download the ... read more
- What’s the current state of marketing technology and operations careers?Actually, I’m asking you. What is the current state of marketing technology and operations careers? This is my one-time-a-year pleading on my knees request to the martech community to participate in our survey of professionals ... read more
- The many splendid varieties of marketing technologists in 2020: martech roles and archetypesAt the beginning of the 2010’s, I wrote a post about the rise of the marketing technologist. It was the early days of a new, hybrid professional emerging: rare “unicorns” who combined IT skills ... read more
- A marketing stack organized according to The Periodic Table of MartechHappy New Year! To kick off 2020, I’m excited to share one of the first entries into The Stackies 2020: Marketing Stack Awards from Nexthink, an enterprise platform that helps IT departments deliver great ... read more
- Is martech headed for its “dot-com moment” in 2020?Tom Wentworth, a pioneering engineer-turned-CMO in the marketing technology space whom I’ve long admired, recently commented on a LinkedIn thread, “Martech is about to face its ‘dot-com’ moment. How many pet stores did we ... read more
- 83% of marketers rip-and-replace a martech app each year — here’s whyI’ve said many times that change is at the heart of modern marketing operations. It is at the very center of the “4 forces” diagram of The New Rules of Marketing Technology & Operations ... read more
- Enter The Stackie Awards 2020: Share your marketing stack with the MarTech communityIf there’s one marketing awards program where the entire industry wins, it’s The Stackies. Each year, dozens of organizations enter a 16×9 slide that visualizes their “marketing stack” — the collection of martech software ... read more
- The explosion of code — and “no code” — in marketing and martech, presented at TEDx Boca Raton
- Martech collaboration between marketing and IT, and the real impediments to martech successLast month, I declared that the 10-years war between marketing and IT was over. This was in response to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020 that showed a remarkable reversal in the relationship: IT went ... read more
- Two themes for martech stack leaders: collaboration and integrationThe following is a guest post by Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group and popular speaker and workshop leader at the MarTech conference series. The above graphic is Real Story Group’s Omnichannel Stack ... read more
- Your martech stack is probably 2X as big as you think it isThe editorial staff here at chiefmartec.com (looking in the mirror) are rather obsessed with martech stacks. What’s in them? How much is controlled by IT or marketing operations? How do marketers think of them? ... read more
- What do martech and the Portuguese navy have in common?About a month ago, I received an odd comment on my blog, “Martec’s Law was quoted by the Portuguese navy with respect to asymmetrical warfare. It is definitely a law now.” Huh? That mandated ... read more
- Why Lyft decided to build their own internal martech platformA few months ago, I read a fascinating article published by the Lyft Engineering team on Medium, Building Lyft’s Marketing Automation Platform. While we know there are a lot of homegrown martech systems in ... read more
- A martech milestone: IT leaders embrace the upside of “shadow IT”There are notable inflection points in the history of martech where you simply have to pause and say, “Wow, the world sure has changed.” Crossing more than 1,000 solutions on the marketing technology landscape ... read more
- The 10-years war between marketing and IT is overI was reading Gartner’s latest CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020 — spoiler alert: average marketing budgets have fallen to 10.5% of company revenue and the percentage of the marketing budget dedicated to martech slipped from ... read more
- Martech is now a $121.5 billion market worldwideMartech: 2020 and Beyond, a new report collaboratively produced by BDO, WARC, and the University of Bristol, estimates that the worldwide spend on marketing technology is $121.5 billion. Their report focuses on martech spending ... read more
- Your martech community needs you: opportunities to speak at MarTechThis is my bi-annual call for leaders, practitioners, and pioneers across the marketing technology and operations community to send in proposals to present at the MarTech conference. Our next event will be in San ... read more
- The (near) future of marketing is decentralizedIn Gartner’s most recent Marketing Organizational Survey for 2019 — how marketing leaders structure their teams today and how they expect them to change over the next several years — a remarkable finding popped ... read more
- Platforming Marketing: 8 P’s of Self-Service MartechThe theme of my keynote talk at the MarTech conference earlier this month was “platforming marketing.” (Watch a reenacted video of the keynote here.) I’ve spent much of my career thinking about two broad ... read more
- Agile Is Marketing, Matt LeMay’s excellent MarTech keynoteOne of our keynote speakers at last week’s MarTech conference in Boston was Matt LeMay, author of the excellent book Agile for Everybody and partner at Sudden Compass. After my opening keynote (reenacted here), ... read more
- Video recreation of my MarTech opening keynote: Platform MarketingWe had a fantastic MarTech event this week. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed and participated in it. My keynote was “Platforming Marketing” — how the next stage of martech maturity is about applying ... read more
- Is martech in the trough of disillusionment? I hope soYou’re familiar with Gartner’s iconic hype cycle, right? Pretty much every technology follows the same pattern of unrealistic hype in its early stages, followed by a crash of disappointment when those lofty aspirations fail ... read more
- The free MarTech Expo+ Pass: 40+ presentations and 70+ martech vendorsYou’ve already read about the incredible line-up we have for paid all-access attendees at the upcoming MarTech conference, September 16-18 in Boston. (If you haven’t, check it out — you won’t believe all the ... read more
- This perfectly captures the Herculean challenge of modern marketingOn the surface, this cartoon last week from Tom Fishburne, the talented Marketoonist, seems to be poking fun at the different “chief” titles that marketers and marketing-ish executives use. Ha ha, us mad marketing ... read more
- Join me and Jen Cannon of MarTech Today for a live (and lively) “Ask Me Anything” on Thursday, August 15The MarTech conference is coming up next month — check out our big (and I mean BIG) MarTech preview if you haven’t seen it yet. Nota bene: discount “beta” rates for tickets expire next ... read more
- Want to thrive with martech and marketing operations? Check out these 75 amazing MarTech sessionsMartech is marketing — at least an essential part of it. And MarTech is the place to master it. Next month in Boston, we’ll be hosting the latest and greatest MarTech conference, September 16-18 ... read more
- Is your martech leadership failing on SEO? ProbablySorry, but odds are you’re failing at SEO and probably don’t even realize it. That was the cold splash of water in the face that I got talking with Jessica Bowman, owner of ... read more
- McDonald’s drops CMO role and creates a new SVP marketing technology role (under the CIO)Normally, I don’t write about career moves on this blog. But an article that appeared in Ad Age this week about the upcoming departure of famed McDonald’s CMO Silvia Lagnado — and the company’s ... read more
- Want to innovate like Amazon? Here’s their formulaYou can’t escape Amazon in the digital economy. Now a trillion-dollar company, they have disrupted diverse sectors from retail to software development with a deftness and drive that’s admirable and alarming. They actually seem ... read more
- Martech is marketing, kind of like fixing things is home ownershipLast week, I staked the claim that “martech is marketing.” Whatever you think of martech and its relationship to marketing at large — or what you believe its relationship should be — it’s hard ... read more
- Martech is marketing: a wide spectrum of possibilities“Martech is marketing.” The MarTech conference recently updated its tagline to that phrase, evolving beyond our original motto, “Marketing. Technology. Management.” It’s not that the conference itself changed. But since we launched the event ... read more
- Check out the agenda for MarTech and reserve an early bird “alpha” ticketWow, now that’s an infographic! I’m excited to share with you the agenda for the MarTech, taking place in Boston, September 16-18. If you want to learn how to leverage technology effectively as a ... read more
- Of dinosaurs and meteors: 2 different (and contentious) models of technology adoptionBoy, did I kick a hornet’s nest. A couple of weeks ago, I shared an article from MIT Sloan Management Review, Implement First, Ask Questions Later (or Not at All) by Stephen J. Andriole. ... read more
- 4 amazing keynotes you won’t want to miss at MarTech in Boston this fall
- If the martech landscape is driving you to drink, maybe this will helpThousands and thousands of entrepreneurial vendors. A few giants that have consolidated portfolios of dozens of their own “best-of-breed” options, so a buyer could theoretically get everything they need from one source. A dizzying array ... read more
- Martech stack utilization is a misguided metric (when it’s disconnected from value)Back in the early days of martech, there was an apocryphal statistic that most marketers only used about 15% of the capabilities of their marketing automation systems. (I heard this stat thrown about for ... read more
- #ShakespeareSunday #MarTech EditionIn my never-ending quest to bring martech nerdiness to new heights — or depths — I played around with a few of these “adaptations” of Shakespeare on LinkedIn and Twitter a couple of weeks ago. ... read more
- An intimate evening discussion about five marketing disruptions (video)Christopher Douglas runs the Triangle Marketing Club, an energetic community of marketers (and students planning to become marketers) in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s one of those dynamic “connectors,” always bringing people together and enthusiastically ... read more
- Not all integrations are created equal: 4 layers of app integrations with SaaS platformsDisclosure: This is one of those rare articles on this blog that’s entangled with my work as VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. While it’s not specific to HubSpot — this is an issue and ... read more
- 5 MarTech takeaways: teams, product management, decentralization, marketing leadership, IT governance
- Missed the MarTech keynote? Here’s a recreation for youWeren’t able to make the MarTech conference in San Jose that we held earlier this month? I thought you might enjoy hearing a version of our opening keynote, which I recreated in Loom, covering: ... read more
- Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2019): Martech 5000 (actually 7,040)As Bill Murray would have said in Groundhog Day, “Well, it’s martech landscape day… again.” It has become an annual tradition at our spring MarTech conference to release an updated version of maybe the ... read more
- Marketing Technology and Operations Salary Survey 2019 results (free report)Our 2019 Marketing Technology & Operations Salary Survey has been released, and you can download a free copy here. Thank you to everyone who participated. For our analysis, we narrowed the data down to ... read more