Advertising Perspectives

How do you know you’re at the peak of a Hype Cycle? When means outweigh ends. Martech professionals and marketing ops leaders are being driven to apply AI in marketing — use it for ... read more

For 13 years of the ever-expanding martech landscape, conventional wisdom has predicted that our industry would consolidate. That conventional wisdom has failed spectacularly. Or more accurately, the conventional wisdom of the software industry from ... read more

In our recent State of Martech 2024 report — which is free and now fully ungated — Frans Riemersma and I analyzed a ton of transformation happening across the martech industry, from the AI-powered ... read more

Take a guess at filling in the blank here: ___________ is to AI Agents as Data is to AI Models The answer, as you likely surmised from my headline, is APIs. Let’s discuss why ... read more

For years, the conventional wisdom in martech has been: the fewer apps in your stack, the better. It’s obvious, right? By reducing the number of apps, you will save money, have a better user ... read more

Yesterday we celebrated the 10th annual Stackie Awards as part of #MartechDay. Every year for the past decade, we’ve invited marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates their marketing tech stack and ... read more

Happy #MartechDay to you! On the first Tuesday of May, we celebrate the martech industry and all the talented marketing technologists and marketing ops professionals who work in it. Cheers to you for all ... read more

The CMO Survey, a bi-yearly study of trends and perspectives from CMOs run by Duke University, Deloitte, and the AMA, has been one of the keystone research projects in the marketing industry for over ... read more

If you only attend one online event this year… well, then it’s clearly not 2021 anymore! But this one is worth it. I guarantee you will be surprised, if not shocked, by what ... read more

Tech stacks are large. The empirical stack data we recently shared from Zylo, a leading SaaS management platform, showed that even after a year of belt-tightening, the average SMB (500 employees or less) still ... read more

First, one more reminder: please take our Martech Composability Survey this week. When you see the questions, I think you’ll agree that having a statistically significant dataset for a “no BS” view of this ... read more

First, a quick ask: please take this 5-minute survey on martech composability. We’ll share the full results back with everyone. I bet it will be very interesting. Thank you! Okay, back to today’s post… ... read more

It’s that time of the year. The Northern hemisphere looks forward to spring. The Southern hemisphere looks forward to fall. And everybody in martech and marketing operations looks forward to the annual Stackie Awards. ... read more

Dear marketing readers: hang in with me here. I have a point. Promise. I started programming as a kid, writing multiplayer games for dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) — a precursor to the web ... read more

“Everyone within Publicis will become a data analyst, an engineer, an intelligence partner, with all the information they need at their fingertips to supercharge client growth.” Publicis Groupe made that bold statement last week ... read more

Welcome to 2024! I expect this will be a transformative year in martech. The Martech for 2024 report we published last month (video presentation) covered several of the major trends underway, such as aggregation ... read more

Last week, Frans Riemersma and I published our Martech for 2024 report, an in-depth analysis of the evolving martech landscape in the gen AI era and the underlying forces of aggregation and composability that ... read more

There was a meme circulating around social media last week of an agency marketer rambling in a “thought leadership” interview on TikTok. I have no idea if it was parody or real. Or more ... read more

Want to know what 2024 has in store for martech? I’m not talking about wild-eyed, hand-wavy, link-baity prognostications that proliferate in every year-end prediction season like that one Mariah Carey Christmas tune. I mean ... read more

At last count, there are over 11,000 products on the martech landscape. And while it’s been a tough couple of years for many SaaS companies, forcing industry consolidation through acquisitions or shutdowns, the number ... read more

Was 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 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

One 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

I’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

For 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

Why 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

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

To 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

A 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

I’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

I 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

Happy #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

Okay, 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

What 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

If 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

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

At the start of the year, I predicted 2023 would be a chaotic year for martech — yet the start of a truly massive wave of growth for the industry. My inner critic argued ... read more

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

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

Martech 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 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

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

In 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

I’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

Yesterday, 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

In 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

Ever 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

2023 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

tl;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

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

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

Jay 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

In 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

“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

Over 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

My 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

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

Half 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

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

Yesterday — #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

It’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

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

This 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

What 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

“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

There’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

I’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

Bain & 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, 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

Last 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

Today, 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

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

Hello, 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

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

There’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

“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

For 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

Traditional 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

First, 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

Productiv, 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

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