Advertising Perspectives

Every 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 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

Last 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

My 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

As 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

Surveys 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

Last 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 The selection process involved an unpublished editorial formula ...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 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

There’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

“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

A 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

Last 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

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

The 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

I 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 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

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

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

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

Agile 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

I 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

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

Two 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

Our 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

On 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

It’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 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

Just 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

Bubble 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

It’s been my opinion, expressed in numerous editorials — hey, that’s what op-ed means! — that business technology stacks (and martech within them) are expanding and that they are increasingly “best-of-breed,” incorporating more apps ... read more

Hot 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 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

Anyone 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

Earlier 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

Season #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

Earlier 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

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

Earlier 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

Earlier 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

Earlier 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

Earlier 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

Earlier 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

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

Ops 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

You 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

Four 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

For 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

Earlier 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

Okay, 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

This 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 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

The 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 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

Holy 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

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

I 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

Pop 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

I’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

I’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

Last 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

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

I’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

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

The 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

I’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

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

About 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

The 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

Last 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

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

Spring 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

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

At 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

TEKsystems, 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

Last 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

There 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

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

Hey, 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

TL;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

There’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

With 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

I’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 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

I 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

As 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

It 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

As 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

Back 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

It’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

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

At 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

Happy 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

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

I’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

If 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

I love TED Talks. They have such a great format for packing a really interesting phenomenon, observation, or story into ~15 minutes of focused narrative. Giving one myself — even an independent TEDx Talk ... read more

Last 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

The 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

The 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

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