- 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
- 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