UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available.
There’s a lot of marketing technology in the world, my friend.
The 2015 edition of my marketing technology landscape supergraphic has been released, now with 1,876 vendors represented across 43 categories. To actually read it, you need a hi-res version (be prepared to zoom and scroll, and then zoom and scroll some more):
Marketing Technology Landscape — Hi-Res PNG (2800x2100px, 6.5MB)
Marketing Technology Landscape — Hi-Res PDF (22.5MB)
Even I was surprised that the number of vendors nearly doubled from last year’s edition, which charted an already-staggering 947 companies. This growth was partly due to new entrants, but also due to more thorough research:
And yet, amazingly, this is still not comprehensive. Counting marketing technologies is like counting stars in the sky — there’s always a higher resolution at which you could see more. Consider this the Mauna Kea observatory view, but not yet the Hubble telescope view.
Before I share some analysis of this, three important things to state up front:
1. Permission is granted to reproduce and distribute this graphic “as is.” Feel free to include it in presentation decks, embed it in blog posts, or publish it in other media. A link back here would be nice — the Google equivalent of a tip — but it’s not a requirement.
2. Please forgive my many errors and omissions. This is intended mostly as a high-level conversation piece, not a definitive encyclopedia of the industry. Dear vendors: if I failed to include your company, mis-categorized it, made a mistake with your logo, etc., I apologize. Please feel free to set the record straight in the comments at the end of this post.
3. I have enormous gratitude to many who inspired and enabled this project. My original inspiration for these landscapes came from the excellent LUMAscapes prepared by Terence Kawaja and his team. Other sources that I turned to in my research included VB Profiles, Crunchbase, Raab Associates, Digital Marketing Depot, Altimeter, Gartner, Forrester, SiriusDecisions, IDC, G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, VentureScanner, Angel.co, CMSWire, Vendorsi, and Email Vendor Selection. And a whole lot of Google.
And one, quick promotional pre-roll:
If you’re fascinated by this landscape — as a marketer, a technologist, or even a product developer — you should really come to the MarTech Conference in San Francisco this spring. We’re going to have 24 great sessions, packed into 2 days, by pioneering marketing technology practitioners and leading analysts and authors, explaining how to harness all this marketing technology innovation to deliver amazing customer experiences. You’ll be able to connect with 600 of your peers. And we’re going to have an independent exhibit area with 50 companies from across this landscape, in which you will certainly make some cool new discoveries.
The alpha rate (geek-speak for early bird discount) expires this Friday, and last year’s conference sold out. So if you want to attend, try to register by the end of this week.
Oh, and one more thing: as a little swag, every attendee will receive a special edition poster of this landscape. I know, it’s a small thing — well, not physically — but it would look great on your wall. (Heaven knows it’s not readable on an 8½x11 sheet of paper.)
Okay, let’s dive in…
“Nearly 2,000 Martech Companies?!? What does this mean?”
One early reviewer of this graphic said it gave her agita. Another called it terrifying. If it causes you distress, I apologize — that’s not my intention. (I should probably accompany this with the kind of disclaimer you hear on pharmaceutical commercials: “Talk to your doctor before considering a marketing technology regimen…”)
My intention with this graphic is to visually demonstrate four points:
- Marketing has unquestionably become a technology-powered discipline.
- The quantity of martech ventures is a barometer of how much marketing is evolving.
- The marketing technology field is heterogenous, with a very broad range of products.
- To thrive in this environment, marketing should steadily develop its technical talent.
When you consider the implications of those four points, the “technology management” piece of this is non-trivial — but it’s definitely not the biggest hurdle most companies face. The real challenge is changing how firms think and behave in this hyper-connected, always-on, customer-controlled digital world. The nature of marketing has exploded from an ancillary communications function to the Grand Central Station of customer experience. And the bar for delivering great customer experiences is rising rapidly.
That’s the real challenge. And most companies are still early in the maturity curve of such transformations. The difficulty of trying to sort out the marketing technology landscape is merely an echo of that revolution.
The good news is that most of the marketing technology innovations on this landscape are designed to help marketers conquer that revolution. They’re by no means miracle transformation pills (“instant relief, just add money!”). But when applied in the service of a well-organized, strategically-sound, executive-led digital transformation effort, these technologies are your friend. They can imbue your organization with superhero powers.
So please, don’t be disturbed by this landscape per se. We can navigate the technology.
But you should probably be daunted by the larger transformation of your organization that this landscape heralds — if you’re not, at least a little, you probably don’t yet appreciate just how massive of a management challenge that really is.
The Myth of Marketing Technology Categories
The most objectionable aspect of this graphic is its categorization. My choice of categories, the labels I used for them, which companies I placed in which category, etc., are all subject to debate. However, this isn’t just a problem with my graphic — this is a challenge across the industry (as any product manager for any of these companies will surely testify).
First, new categories keep emerging, often as rebellious offshoots from previous categories. For example, I charted “Influencer Marketing” separate from “Social Media Marketing” this year, because of the momentum of so many companies using that label. But it’s arguably a subset rather than a separate category, with enormous overlap between them. As product managers vie to differentiate their products, alternate labels and variations flood the digital airwaves. Most vendors wrestle with wanting to dominate a category of their own invention (“blue ocean”) yet compete in larger and more popular fields (“red ocean”). It makes for a frothy brew of ever-shifting category labels.
Second, many categories contain radically different kinds of software. Look no further than the “Content Marketing” category. Based on popular usage of the term, most people would agree there is a category of content marketing software. But when you examine all the myriad of products offered under that umbrella — production, workflow, curation, distribution, resource markets, analytics, etc. — you quickly realize they aren’t apples-to-apples: there are oranges, bananas, pears, and a whole exotic fruit basket in there.
Many of the products in such a category are complementary, not competitive. They’re not mutually exclusive. And they’re also not interchangeable.
Third, and a major source of confusion, categories of technologies and categories of “jobs marketers want to do” are often conflated (tip o’ the hat to Clay Christensen). But they’re not the same. For instance, almost all of the categories on this graphic have products that could be applied in a content marketing program. (In fact, if there is an overarching theme to the landscape, it’s that the “content marketing movement,” writ large, is the engine of the marketing technology landscape, and vice versa.) Marketers should strive for clarity about their “jobs to be done” and consider tools that help them achieve that, without getting too hung up on the category labels of the tools themselves.
And fourth, many innovative products have an architecture or a value proposition that inherently spans multiple categories. As Neeraj Agrawal of Battery Ventures said, “I think we’re still in the early innings, maybe the fourth inning” of this grand transformation of marketing. Indeed, many of the popular category labels that we use today — “marketing automation” — have baggage from earlier mental models of digital marketing. I believe it’s a really good thing that many entrepreneurs in this sector are inventing solutions that are untethered by those labels. But it does make them hard to categorize.
Given that, almost any categorization scheme is bound to be flawed. I’d be tempted to do away with categories entirely, but that would look something like this:
Not an improvement, right? So imperfect categorization is better than no categorization.
But you should certainly take my categorization with a grain of salt. In addition to the four existential issues raised above, which would confound any categorization strategy, I’ve got a whole additional dimension in which mine is flawed: I optimized for space.
To accommodate this industry-wide view on a single slide, I merged together categories that I believe share some strands of DNA (e.g., “Display & Native Ads”) that most reasonable folks would maintain as separate groups. If page real estate were not a constraint, I would have broken down these categories in a more granular fashion.
Also, in the interest of space, I worked hard to eliminate multiple instances of the same company. There are maybe a dozen or so companies who have logos in more than one category. For most, I forced myself to put them in just one, whichever one I thought was the most relevant. This woefully underrepresents many of these vendors who cross multiple categories. That’s just a limitation of my format, so please keep in mind that many of these companies have much more to offer than my low-fidelity graphic depicts.
However, a few marketing technology companies have suites and portfolios with so many tentacles across this entire landscape that I needed some way to communicate the breadth of their offerings…
The Multi-Category Marketing Clouds/Platforms/Suites
Generally speaking, there is no hierarchy of vendors expressed in this graphic. Any given category contains companies of wildly different size and maturity, often serving entirely different market segments (i.e., SMB vs. enterprise). Read no meaning into my positioning of companies within a category, or the slight variations in size of the logos. I simply arranged them to optimize for fit and — try not to laugh too hard — aesthetics.
However, one of the big trends in marketing technology has been the emergence of a set of “marketing clouds” that incorporate many capabilities from across this landscape under the umbrella of a single vendor.
Some are multi-billion enterprise software companies — notably Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Teradata. HP, Infor, Microsoft, SAP, SAS are sizable forces in this space too, even if their portfolios and positioning still have a ways to go. HubSpot and Marketo are both native digital marketing technology companies who are public with over $1 billion valuations. SDL and Sitecore are rising challengers, born from the web content management category. And Act-On, Infusionsoft, and Outmarket are leading representatives of the SMB incarnations of this marketing cloud strategy.
I put them in their own category, partly to acknowledge their relative scale, but also to avoid the redundancy of having their logos in dozens of categories. The Platform/Suite category is a visual short-cut for “operates in many of the categories on this graphic.” That’s why I didn’t include Adobe in Creative & Design or Oracle in Databases & Big Data, even though they are obviously each giants in those areas, respectively.
Many of these companies are remarkable because they have developed significant ISV ecosystems around their platforms — indeed, this is what makes many of them true platforms, and not just large-but-closed product suites. I’ve been an advocate of open marketing platforms for a while, and it’s been exciting to see so much progress on that front over the past year.
Admittedly, this may be a controversial category, as there are many other companies on the landscape who could justifiably qualify for it. For the most part, I relied on the analyses of Forrester and Gartner, and the vendors they evaluated in their latest marketing cloud and digital marketing hub reports, to determine which companies were included. So again: take my categorization with a grain of salt.
There’s also an interesting new flock of companies that’s challenging the model of these pre-packaged marketing clouds…
Marketing Middleware: Do You Want To Build A Marketing Cloud?
There’s a growing cluster of marketing middleware companies on this landscape — which includes five more specific categories: Data Management Platforms/Customer Data Platforms, Tag Management, Cloud Integration/ESBs, Identity, and APIs — that are advancing rapidly.
I call them marketing middleware because they were designed from the ground up to help interoperate many different marketing technologies from all across the landscape. Not of all the vendors in this group like that “middleware” label — in other industries, middleware doesn’t typically get much glory — but I mean it in a very complimentary fashion. Operating systems are a kind of middleware. Now, that may not sound very sexy at first, but when you realize that companies like Apple thrive on their OS X and iOS operating systems, which are beloved by their users, there’s definitely glory and sex appeal to be had at this layer.
Whereas many of the marketing clouds described in the previous section opened up their products to support ISVs as a follow-on, a strategic shift from their original vision of an all-in-one suite, customer data platforms (CDPs) and tag management systems were built with the purpose of multi-product integration in mind from the start.
In particular, most CDPs were built to be massive switchboards of data. They’re able to pull data from many different sources, in high volume, into a centralized repository. Here they correlate and connect the dots, striving to offer a more complete view of customers. In talking with CDP vendors, they often emphasize the large number of “characteristics” — essentially data fields, but possibly dynamic or unstructured ones — that they track for each prospect or customer. High-dimensional models, in data science lingo.
Depending on the CDP, they then offer different ways to act on that data. Some specialize in predictive analytics to dynamically score leads and drive marketing/sales alignment. Others aim to be multi-channel campaign management nerve centers. But what makes this model so interesting is that most of them then use other software to deliver those campaigns within each specific channel. So they integrate with an email service provider, a social media management product, a web content management system, etc.
In this way, the relationship between CDPs and marketing clouds can be complementary. It’s not unusual for a CDP to push and pull data to and from a CRM or a marketing automation platform. Indeed, they may rely on the channel execution capabilities of a marketing cloud to deliver through “the last mile” to the target audience.
But they dramatically alter the balance of power in the landscape. A marketer with a CDP may more easily bridge multiple marketing clouds within their organization. Or more easily switch from one to another. Or even “build their own” marketing cloud, so to speak, by using a CDP to coordinate best-of-breed products from across the landscape.
I lumped data management systems (DMPs) and CDPs into the same category mostly for space reasons. But also because they seem to be converging — DMPs and CDPs are the front lines of the collision between adtech and martech. The crude oversimplification is that DMPs were built around anonymous cookie data across broad digital advertising ecosystems, while CDPs were built around known customer records available from internal company systems such as CRMs. But they’re quickly overlapping. (Note Oracle’s acquisition of BlueKai, a leading DMP, and connecting it natively into their marketing cloud. Expect more marketing cloud companies to assimilate DMP and CDP software in the year ahead.)
Tag management systems are also a rising force in these middleware architectures. They started out by facilitating the myriad of scripts that people have to plug into their websites for tracking, optimization, ad serving, etc. But some of the more advanced ones are now taking a more active role in all the first-party data that they have direct access to through those scripts.
The whole field of cloud integration services that have blossomed in the past couple of years — plus the entrance of enterprise service bus (ESB) providers into the marketing domain — are more tools that further empower marketers to architect and manage a heterogeneous collection of marketing technologies. Some, such as IFTTT, let even non-technical marketers program lightweight event triggers and data routing on-the-fly.
Most middleware-based architectures do typically require a little more technical savvy to implement. But with the growing ranks of marketing technologists within marketing and deeper collaboration between marketing and IT, these more sophisticated marketing stacks are within reach of more and more organizations.
With Platforms or Middleware, Richer Marketing Stacks Will Thrive
Whichever approach you take — a marketing cloud with a strong ISV ecosystem, an open middleware-powered architecture, or a hybrid of the two — one thing is clear: while the marketing technology landscape is vast and varied, it’s slowly getting easier to manage.
Note that I said easier, not necessarily easy. It is still a complex environment. But with the relative stability of large public companies behind most major marketing clouds, the standardization of plug-ins to those clouds offered by their ISV programs, and the open architectures enabled by middleware, the vendor risk associated with most marketing technologies is increasingly being mitigated and controlled.
And at a high level, as a marketer, it is worth acknowledging that all this diverse marketing software out there is a good thing in many ways. More vendors means more competition among vendors, which gives greater market power to you. It tends to drive prices down and drive innovation up.
There’s also tremendous upside — so much opportunity to differentiate your business with creative use of the innovations rippling across this landscape.
And keep in mind, not all of the marketing technologies represented on this landscape are massive enterprise-wide investments. In fact, most of them are rather lightweight, software-as-a-service offerings that you can pick up for a specific purpose without even really thinking of them as “software.” As I’ve pointed out before, as marketers in web-based world, you probably already use 100 software programs today, most of them as ambient tools in your work.
But Are 2,000 Marketing Technology Vendors Sustainable?
Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s not simply a question of the number of marketing technology companies. It matters what kinds of companies we’re talking about.
Of course, there are not going to be a thousand Oracle-sized marketing software giants. There is a ceiling with the world’s GDP, and it’s certainly not all going to marketing tech. However, it is economically feasible to have thousands of small to mid-sized companies in a software market — the mobile app development world, which has millions of products, albeit most of them quite tiny — proves this is possible. In an increasingly agile world, it’s plausible that the structural advantages of small, nimble businesses may outweigh the disadvantages of their size. It’s David vs. Goliath for the digital century.
As I outlined in a post last year — What if 1,000+ marketing technology vendors were the new normal? — the dynamics of the cloud enable relatively small software teams to deliver enterprise-class solutions with unprecedented speed and a minimum of capital. As a result, software markets of the past may not be predictive of our future.
The fact that this isn’t limited to martech — we’re seeing a similar expansion of companies in fintech, legal tech, HR tech, etc. — suggests that this is possibly just the new state of software. In a digital world, more and more companies produce software as a part of their business.
What’s especially exciting in marketing technology, however, is that the “platformization” of marketing clouds to support ISV ecosystems and the independent interoperability afforded by marketing middleware may both serve as force multipliers to those cloud dynamics, enabling a very large and diverse universe of marketing software. Integration has been a big barrier in the industry up to now, but platforms and middleware are finally lowering it. An even greater flood of innovation may result.
To be sure, there will be acquisitions and consolidation — I believe that’s especially true at the platform and middleware layers. Even within more specialized categories, higher up in the landscape, there will certainly be a small set of winners in each, who outpace their direct competitors. Lots of companies will simply go out of business. Unquestionably, there will be outflow from the marketing landscape.
At at the same time, there will continue to be inflow too. New companies will constantly be forged, as eager entrepreneurs dream up ever better ideas. The consumer landscape itself will continue to rapidly evolve (the Internet of Things era is nearly upon us), offering fresh opportunities for disruptive innovation. Vertically-specialized software — e.g., marketing automation for law firms — will carve out new niches. (This is point #1 in a recent article on TechCrunch about The Enterprise in 2015.) And the blurring of the lines between software and services will make it easier for all kinds of companies to be, in some fashion, software companies with novel value propositions.
After all, this is a huge market. IDC predicts that the worldwide spend for marketing software in 2015 will be $22.6 billion — and by 2018, it will grow by nearly 50% to $32.3 billion. Supporting this growth has been approximately $22 billion of investment in this sector to date. With marketing overall being a $1 trillion industry, in the throes of being reinvented in every way possible, it’s likely that both of those numbers will rise even more.
So which will be greater, the inflow or the outflow?
Either seems possible to me. But at least on the immediate horizon, I don’t think we’re going to see a dramatic shrinking of this landscape. The landscape will change, for sure. What qualifies as “marketing” and “technology” under the umbrella of marketing technology will undoubtedly morph. But if mere quantity is the metric we’re measuring, I think it’s going to be a world of 1,000+ marketing technology companies — perhaps even a world of 2,000+ of them — for some time to come.
What do you think?
P.S. Disclosure: I am the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive, one of the 1,876 companies represented on this graphic. I included us in two categories, Interactive Content and Testing & Optimization.
While there are a dozen or so other companies that have duplicate logos on this graphic, I acknowledge this may be considered a slightly favorable treatment of my firm. In fairness, our product is a hybridization of those two categories (I wrote up the story of our pivot to interactive content and marketing apps last year). I also included every competitor or product substitute that I’ve ever encountered. As far as clever PR ploys go, the cost-benefit ratio of this as a promotional stunt for my firm seems dubious. However, I provide this disclosure in the spirit of full transparency.
Congrats on a mammoth effort. The discussion of CDPs as a kind of middleware enabling customers to create their own “marketing cloud” was quite interesting.
I think many companies will eventually find themselves going this way — even if they use one of the big vendor-built clouds — because of the desire to tack on best of breed solutions for some use cases and to centralize data from other systems which are inevitably outside any one vendor’s cloud.
Hi Scott,
Thanks again for this amazing Infographic.
Best Regards,
Engin
Nice to see Spokal make the list!
*applause*
Scott,
A great view into the growth (and fragmentation?) of the marketing stack. I appreciate your perspective on the middleware/CDP expansion and the distinction of CDP vs. DMP. With a strong solution at the core, marketers have lots of choices in what they use to achieve objectives across different channels.
As consolidation follows expansion in scapes like this, I can’t help but think what the 2016 version will look like.
Cheers,
Dan
HI Scott,
An amazing effort again. Wow. I completely understand your remark about the doubtful cost/benefit relationship of PR value at the end of the article, but I do think in that way you even underestimate what you do for the sector as a whole. That’ll come back to you some day, I’m convinced of that.
Few ideas for potential improvements (for next time):
– Europe is under-represented. This is of course partly because the vendors should make more noise themselves, but in more fragmented markets, that is more difficult, while the importance for these vendors for their markets might be more important than that of their US counterparts. Me and my team offer ourselves to support you in any way you would want to make use of our local presence to improve further. Let us know: you have a bunch of volunteers here ready to roll.
– Our own company VEMT definitely fits in the platform category….except for the $1B valuation criteria (we’re working on that detail 😉 Isn’t it an idea to create some indication of size in each category? Or split them up in large players and challengers? Now we are positioned in a specific category (which we are grateful for, let’s make that clear first), while we fit in at least 5 categories, but our size would not yet justify the attention of 5 logo placements (again, we’re working on that one). I’m sure that this is valid for many more companies, especially from Europe.
– Isn’t it an idea to open up all data behind this landscape, for example in a searchable database or alike? At least one of these vendors must have the visualization power, the analysis power and the budget to pick this part up and create something to make the sector ‘searchable’.
Regards,
Jeroen Nas
Thanks, Jeron!
Apologies if this graphic underrepresents European martech companies. I was trying to be geo-agnostic in my research, as I certainly agree that this is a worldwide phenomenon. Will gladly reach out to you for suggestions for better representing Europe in the next edition.
The “platform” category is a bit strange without dividing it into segments. Will consider better ways to visualize that — and the way in which the space is evolving — for the next edition too.
Hi Scott,
Looks like AppDynamics is missing in the Cloud section.
http://www.appdynamics.com
Fantastic effort once again Scott, congrats!
Terrific piece of work and analysis.
I think you’ve made the right calls in turning the tornado of marketing tech into a single slide — and you’ve been transparent about your methodology.
Vendors being vendors, most will want their logo in 5-10 different categories but that would get ugly fast.
Tech history would predict a big shakeout and a few big platforms absorbing many of these.
But as you say, new entrants may more than balance out the failures and acquisitions.
I think we’ve got at least a few more years during which knitting together best of breed solutions may be a better bet than going all in on one platform.
Long term, many of these companies will end up as bullet points in a feature list.
Exciting times.
Thanks for providing this service to the market and for your excellent analysis.
Thanks, Doug!
It will be very interesting to see how this space evolves. Certain a Great Collapse is reasonable prediction. But there are other ways this space may reconfigure itself over time — such as the platform/ISV pattern that appears to be emerging.
Thanks so much for including our data in your report, Scott, and for citing us in your articles! I’m glad our info was helpful to you in your research, and hope it is to your readers as well! (NOTE: I’m a proud employee of G2 Crowd.)
I found G2 Crowd to be incredibly helpful in my research. Thanks for a great service!
Excellent piece of work here. Thanks for all the efforts.
Looking forward to the poster Scott – it will be super useful to communicate the complexity and excitement of our space.
Thanks, Lou!
What a gigantic task this must have been. Congrats on both the amazing graphic and on your analysis of it, which is great in it self. Looking forward to keep on reading your analysis and attending your great MarTech conferences. Thanks!
Scott, exciting to see this revision. Quite a Y over Y expansion.
Request for company addition:
We (www.leandatainc.com) announced our lead automation and management suite last year and have quickly gained market traction.
Would be great if you could add LeanData to the Marketing Automation/Campaign and Lead Management category in future iterations.
Logo here: http://www.leandatainc.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/LeanData-Media-Kit.zip
Thanks! -Dan
Dan: Would love to get you guys listed on G2 Crowd as well! Would you mind dropping me a note at dhonigman-at-g2crowd? Thanks!
Thanks for letting me know, Dan — sorry we missed you in this edition!
Nicely done Scott. You know what would really be cool is to determine which company is leading the magic quadrant in each category. I’m looking for a few good national “value added partners” to add to my Oracle E-Business quiver and eco-system.
Would you have any insight on this to lend as well?
Thank you so much for accomplishing this feat….
Rob G
949 813 3503
I agree, that would be very helpful. Will consider how to do that (both the analysis and the visualization) for future editions. Thanks!
Marketing + Data + Technology = PROFIT
🙂
Scott,
Next year, sales coaching software (www.rivalry.com) should be considered in the sales enablement space.
Thanks!
Jon
Noted, Jon — thanks!
Very impressive and useful graphic for the second consecutive year. My only concern is that it looks like you’re saying “If you’re a marketing cloud vendor [of which I am one, of course], you get this one tiny area even though you probably play in 8-12 of these spaces,” which would be okay except that each of the marketing cloud vendors have different pieces of the puzzle. So grouping them like this doesn’t give a very clear indication of where their relative strengths are within the broader martech landscape. For example, it’s pretty silly to have a CRM category with Salesforce nowhere to be found, or Analytics and CXM categories without Adobe, etc. I get what you’re going for, but thousands of people will see the image without understanding the methodology and be confused. Curious to hear your thoughts on this. I continue to be a big fan!
Ben Gaines
Sr. Product Manager
Adobe
Thanks, Ben!
I’ll be the first to acknowledge this graphic is imperfect on so many dimensions, and the concern you raise is one that I’m particularly attune to.
The primary objectives of this graphic were to show the diversity of all the different companies who are developing software in the martech universe and to fit it into one slide. That mission ended up dictating a lot of other choices, and certainly limits its functionality. I feel comfortable offering this to the community as a “conversation piece” — and I think it is an interesting conversation — but its utility beyond that is minimal.
That being said, I did want to try to represent that companies like Adobe and Salesforce are qualitatively different actors in this landscape. I thought I was being clever by creating a separate category, limiting inclusion to a relatively narrow set of criteria (unlike the rest of the categories), and using a contrasting color to the rest of the landscape to call attention to it.
Admittedly, that has flaws too. But I’ll be curious to hear how people interpret that special category, when they look at this without the benefit of the explanatory post. I’d hope that Adobe would pop out more — as you should — than in my previous versions.
But I will continue to work on more creative solutions to visualizing this.
Sorry to see Kanban Tool (kanbantool.com) missing again in Team & Project Mgmt.
Oof, I’m so sorry. That was a production error on my part. I meant to include you. I apologize. 🙁
Very nice supergraphic! Glad to see DOZ made the list in the content marketing category!
My pleasure!
Great work Thank you 🙂
Thanks for another year of this, Scott. As usual, your writing and approach are both humble and very valuable. It’s an increasingly difficult task which will always open you up to second guessing, clarifications, etc. It’s also hands-down the best chronicle of the shifting landscape that I’ve seen. I appreciate the insights which accompany the stunning array of solutions. The work which has gone into the graphic and by every company with a logo on it is incredible.
Question for you: As this grows, the point you make about the number of sustainable companies is well made. With the compromises that have to go into charting them all, is the format itself sustainable? Is there a deeper, more exploratory tagged categorization/hierarchy which may make sense? That may make it more useful over time and maybe even easier to put together as a more living document.
Just a thought I had before even noting the gentleman from Adobe’s comment and your response.
Maybe 2017 will be VR-enabled 😉
Best,
Eric Schneider
Master Principal Sales Consultant
Oracle Marketing Cloud
Thanks, Eric.
I am in awe of all of the innovation happening across this landscape. And, as I mentioned in the post, this is merely a shadow of the innovation happening in marketing itself. Modern marketers are rock stars.
You’re right — a single PowerPoint slide is not the best format for a market of this scale. Or, more accurately, a single slide has a very narrow utility: helpful for making a point about the diversity of the industry in a PowerPoint presentation. 🙂
I am contemplating some more creative options for this landscape. Thanks for planting the VR seed. 😉
LOL! That’s certainly one use for it!
Fortunately, you’ve got a nice box of ISVs who supply dashboards & visualization (as well as the suite/platform vendors, of course).
I do remember asking you about your categorization last year and I’d say you’re being consistent. We’ll see if Brinker’s Law of Marketing Landscape Expansion continues into 2016.
Scott, thanks for going through the agony and ecstasy of putting this together. CIOs and CEOs need to see this so they can appreciate the enormous and continuing challenges faced by the Marketing Department of their enterprise. This is truly a case where the firm that can efficiently move relevant data throughout the organization “wins,” and the C-Suite needs to support Marketing’s ability to make a contribution to that efficiency.
The creative marketer is going to continue to have to take a back seat to the technologist marketer because there are so many moving parts to this challenge.
I can’t wait to see what this chart looks like in 5 more years.
Cheers and good luck in 2015!
Thanks, Joe.
I like to think that it’s a great opportunity for collaboration between creative marketers and technologist marketers. There’s a lot of work to figure out the best ways to harness this technology in the pursuit of compelling customer experiences. But I’m with you: the technology is a huge part of the marketing equation now.
Best wishes for 2015!
Hi Scott,
Congrats for this great effort. This landscape is really complete and will work as an important reference in the market.
I saw you include some brazilian companies. Where I present you 2 more DMPs in Brazil, http://www.latindmp.com.br and http://www.bullmerang.com.br both have relevant clients like Terra Networks (Telefonicas portal – 8 countries), FIAT and other multinationals.
regards,
C.Gallegos
Thanks — and thanks for letting me know about those two Brazilian DMPs. I definitely need to do a better job of presenting technologies from around the world. My international research needs some work!
Hi Scott
Dread to think how long it took you to pull all this together. It’s great and scary to see how many now operate in the content space
Could I trouble you and ask if you would kindly consider including Content Cloud in the content marketing space. wwwthecontentcloud.net. It is the only content marketing platform that has an award winning content marketing agency (Progressive Customer Publishing) behind it.
It’s a smart and intuitive SaaS platform with great functionality. Happy to talk you through our platform if you wished
Thanks again
Stuart
Thanks, Stuart. Sorry I missed you guys, and will keep you in mind for the next edition.
Impressive Scott. Very well done. I was wondering where you would put TV companies, vs. web video companies, on this stack? Both from an agency, media owner, and third party seller perspective, TV’s influence on this stack will ramp up quickly in 2015.
Thanks, David.
I completely believe that TV Industry 2.0 will be a major force here. Already a lot of innovation there, and it’s definitely a failure of this edition of my graphic that it doesn’t include it. As Shakespeare said, “There’s more in heaven and earth than is charted in your infographic.” Or something like that.
Would love to hear more about your perspective on that space, given your new role (congratulations, by the way!).
Very impressive list; thank you for collecting and sharing this information. This clearly brings to the surface the tasks of today’s CMOs – they have to make sense of this landscape and how to manage it. I think the job of marketers have been redefined into knowing, selecting, managing, directing, connecting, and reporting on all of these vendors in their companies.
You simply forgot UPSTREAM… tsk tsk tsk…
Sorry I missed Upstream Systems (?), Marcel. Noted for next version.
Scott – congratulations on a mammoth piece of work. Glad to hear that TrustRadius proved a valuable resource to you.
My take-away is that more than ever marketers need effective ways to learn what technologies make most sense for them. User reviews/ratings are playing an ever more important role in that regard. A couple of other things we’re working on are helping technology buyers discern how well products perform against specific use cases, e.g. among enterprise social tools, how well do they support high volume customer care vs. social intelligence or the various facets of social marketing. You’ll see this in our upcoming enterprise social media management buyer’s guide. Another thing we’re starting to publish is data on the evaluation frequency of different products by prospective clients, which is a proxy for market momentum (see: https://www.trustradius.com/articles/fastest-growing-smms-platforms-2014-q3).
Vinay Bhagat
CEO, TrustRadius
@vinaybhagat
Thanks, Vinay. TrustRadius was very helpful, not just in identifying potential vendors to examine, but being able to provide some third-party validation, even on smaller players. Best wishes for 2015!
Scott,
I have looked forward to viewing the annual marketing capability/tool map for the last 3 years. Thank you for the continued effort on keeping marketers informed and assisting us in rationalizing these technologies. As a former enterprise business architect and life-long marketer, I truly appreciate the infographic used to present the complexity of this ecosystem.
Thank you, Ely.
Good job Scott,
I use it as a main reference in my IT for Marketing course in the MSc in IT Strategic Management in the UPF university in Barcelona.
Armengol.
I’m happy to hear it’s helpful, Armengol. I love the sound of an “IT for Marketing” course!
Not seeing a category for Affiliate Marketing…..
Aye, I completely missed that Sebastian — one of many other categories that I didn’t have space for. Will see what I can do to address that in the next edition. But it is a further testament to how large this space is, given all the companies and categories that aren’t included on it!
I almost started commenting below and thought to run a quick search on the page to see if someone did mention this category. And indeed my good friend Sebastian did! Looking forward to see the next edition and hopefully be included!
I cant believe that we haven’t made it on the list. We should be in several of the sections. With over 4000 users worldwide and over 1000 in the US how can this be 🙂
http://www.apteco.com
Sorry, Simon — I am humbled by how many great companies I missed. Noted for the next version.
Looks a good list well done, please can you include Rise next year. http://www.rise.global
Thanks, Toby — duly noted!
Scott, this is great and so useful as always. I work in Latin America and one question I have is of all these solutions, which ones are truly global/multilingual and ready for any market?
Great question, Keith — and, unfortunately, one I’m not able to answer. My research on these companies is rather shallow. However, hopefully this is something that folks like TrustRadius and G2 Crowd will incorporate over time. Also check out Vendorsi.
Scott, I’ve enjoyed following the growth of this graphic over the years. It’s a great resource for starting research on new tools and vendors. Next time around, I hope you’ll include Connexions Loyalty in the Loyalty category. Our technology powers some of the largest loyalty programs in the world. http://www.cxloyalty.com.
Thanks, Mark! Sorry I missed Connexions — noted for the next version.
Nice piece of work, Scott. For your next iteration, netFactor should be added to the Lead Management segment.
Thanks, Bud. Sorry I missed netFactor — noted!
Scott this is amazing. I also love your 3 points up at the top! I’ve already referred a bunch of people to your graphic…I mean SUPERgraphic.
Thanks, Meg — greatly appreciate it!
Great job! Must have been fun working with all those logos.
WriterAccess should be on the list for content marketing,
http://www.inc.com/profile/writeraccess
Thanks, Glen. Sorry I missed WriterAccess — noted for the next version!
Hello Scott,
Thank you for putting this together. Not only was it informative, but it also showed the diversity of companies.
I am part of the Marketing team for Proscape Technologies, and I believe that we would be great fit under Sales Enablement. Would you please consider adding Proscape to this graphic?
We are a marketing app platform for enterprise-level businesses, specifically when they are focused on building apps rapidly or creating content that serves multiple channels. It is a complete platform for mobile engagement across all customer’s mobile moments.
For more information please visit http://www.proscape.com, but I am happy to answer any questions you may have.
Excellent post!
Sincerely,
Caitlin
HI, Caitlin. I’ve made a note to look at Proscape for the next version — thank you!
Hi Scott,
Thanks a lot for including Survicate – we did not expect to be listed. Great suprise!
Cheers
Kamil
My pleasure, Kamil. Keep innovating! 🙂
Scott, thanks for putting this together, looks really great! I think you forgot Annalect though 🙂
Sorry that I missed Annalect, Mike. Noted for the next version!
Scott,
One word: wow. unbelievable work and a very useful tool for all of us in the industry. I was very happy to see my company, Content Launch, included for the first time in the content marketing category. We’re very honored…Thanks for including us. I saw you speak at ADMA in Australia in July (I did the master class on content marketing there)…and meant to talk to you after, but you were swarmed with people. 😉 Look forward to coming to your conference in SF in March.
– Jon Wuebben, CEO, Content Launch & Author, Content is Currency
Thanks, Jon. I look forward to meeting you in San Francisco at the end of March!
same here!
Scott, huge thanks for pulling this together yet again and for your comprehensive research into the marketing technology landscape! Your previous 2014 Lumascape with 900+ companies inspired my own blog post where I explain why selecting marketing tools has become so complicated as a result of so many categories, players, and ultimately choices (and not to mention time / budget constraints). Check it out if you have a chance: http://www.9lenses.com/marketing-software-tool-selection-complicated
Thanks, Patrick — nice post! 9Lenses looks great too.
Scott, very impressive and valuable exercise. It would be brilliant if you were able to include our Lissted tool http://lissted.com in the influencer marketing section.
As a development I wonder if people might find it interesting to see how some of these tools/platforms relate to each other? As you mention consolidation and collaboration (both formal partnership and via API) are occuring, highlighting examples of such activity might help readers understanding of the dynamics of the market, indicating the impact user requirements are having on vendors strategic decisions. For instance in our area we’ve started to see this within categories and across them e.g. Lithium’s acquisition of Klout, Brandwatch’s acquisition of Peer Index and Appinions recently announced partnership with Oracle. I’m guessing there will be similar activity in other areas.
I wrote a post last week about what I see driving the changes in the social listening and influencer areas that you may find of interest http://www.showmenumbers.com/social-listening/why-brandwatch-bought-peer-index-the-future-of-social-listening
Thanks, Adam! Noted Lissted for the next version.
Thanks for the link to your post. Fascinating dynamics just within the social listening/influencer space. I agree — would be good to visualize more of the interconnections (technical and/or business) between the different companies across this landscape.
Is there an Excel sheet you can share?
Not yet — but agree, it would be helpful!
2nd that request. Cheers
I’d even pay for that, would be must have.
I really love your work on the evolving landscape. And what an outstanding growth in the companies since your first in 2011 (I think 🙂 )
I’m thrilled to check again in 2016 to see how many more will get to your graphic.
Thanks, Helena! It is staggering to me to see how much this (mostly) annual project has grown since 2011. Excited (and a little frightened) for 2016. 🙂
Hello Scott, do you have the companies, categories and logos available as a spread sheet?
We could make a visual SharpCloud public story of the landscape which may be a useful way to socialise and gain feedback on your content
Happy to work with you on this if you like to try it, great stuff.
Sarim
Hi, Sarim.
I don’t have the underlying data available in a form I can share at the moment, but when that comes together, I’d be interested in seeing what a SharpCloud public story might look like for this.
Great stuff Scott, whenever you’re ready. The story will allow you and your community to socially build the content and discuss vendors etc in context.
Let’s talk more when you have the data available, cheers.
Great work Scott, It’s getting harder to find all the logos and even harder to find the right categories they fit in. As a service provider, it reminds me of the problem we have keeping up with all the new entrants and making choices as to which to recommend to our clients. I think the biggest question we’re being asked is which of three key directions to go; stick to individual best of breed solutions, move towards one of the suites or avoid the dilemma by choosing a SaaS provider and let them deal with the tech side and just focus on the customer side.
The other big takeaway is that when I see the mural and how it continues to grow each year, I am reminded of the explosion of back end software that appeared a decade or so ago. Now we have Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Everything is niche. I suspect we will see the same thing happen in front end or what Forrester calls business technology. It may take a few more years of ever increasing logo murals, but eventually there will be winners and losers. And when the market consolidation settles down, it will be time for the next cycle of disruption.
Looking forward to seeing you at Martech, everyone in this industry should attend.
John
Thanks, John — look forward to seeing you again at MarTech at the end of March!
Fantastic job as ever, Scott. I think you’ve done a very good job explaining some of the implications of “marketing middleware”. It’s pretty clear that marketers will need some way to coordinate everything.
Thanks, David. I loved your most recent post on Customer Data Platforms — the category that you first identified in that cluster. A really fascinating set of companies and capabilities emerging there. I’m looking forward to your presentation on them coming up at MarTech!
Thank you Scott for including Full Circle CRM in this year’s infographic. 1876 is a lot of vendors! In the interest of setting the record straight, Full Circle should be in the Performance and Attribution category.
Hi, Bonnie. I agree — sorry about the mix up. Noted for the next update. Thanks for letting me know!
Hi Scott, great job compiling this list and as always the depth of your research is admirable. Studying this landscape infographic is one of the first steps many of us marketers take in order to make sense of, and evaluate our many options.
As Jeroen Nas mentioned in the comments above, Europe is somewhat underrepresented, for a variety of reasons.
As a European vendor, we’d love for you to consider MarketGoo (www.marketgoo.com) for inclusion in your next Landscape Supergraphics, in the SEO category. Happy to answer any questions you may have on it!
Thanks, Larissa. Sorry that I missed MarketGoo! Definitely agree that I need to do a better job with representing the European marketing tech ecosystem — many really fascinating companies. I’ve made a note on MarketGoo for the next version.
Great graphic. I’ve been following this since the very first one. The graphic is very useful to discover companies/tools new to me. But it is a bit tedious to then try and look them up online (particularly if their logo/word-mark isn’t clear). Is the list of companies on the list available in is text format?
Stay tuned! 🙂
In reviewing the landscape I noticed WiderFunnel (www.widerfunnel.com) was left of the Testing & Optimization list.
I’m a big fan of Chris Goward at Wider Funnel — I think he’s one of the smartest people in the conversion optimization space. In fact, he’s coming to speak at the next MarTech event on some of his conversion optimization frameworks. But I wasn’t aware that Wider Funnel had a technology product of their own, which is what this landscape is focused on. If I’m mistaken though, I’d be happy to add them in the next update.
Thanks! This is an amazingly comprehensive graphic. Great analysis as well. And a big thank you for including Forewards. As a startup any coverage is a big milestone, and this one is no different.
Nice work Scott. You are missing Emarsys – we’re 15 years in, 13 global offices, working with 5/7 of the world’s largest online sellers. We’d fall into the platform / suite category, covering Email, Personalization & Recommendation, Customer Intelligence and most recently added, Search & Social Ads.
Hi, Luella. I do have Emarsys on the landscape, although I may have miscategorized you. I had them in Marketing Automation/Campaign Management.
As I mentioned in the post above, my categorization approach is particularly flawed when it comes to companies like Emarsys that are contributing in multiple “categories.” Will see what I can do to address that better in the next edition.
Thanks for reaching out!
Fantastic – we made it! Yes, many fit in multiple categories but that’s not a challenge I would envy! If you have a list of who you’ve included, that would probably be helpful to add here. Cheers for the reply.
Hi Scott, take a look at http://www.clinch.co and http://www.zoomd.com both missing on the chart!
Noted — thanks, Mario!
Good stuff. You might want to put TurnTo (www.turntonetworks.com) into Communities and Reviews.
Ah, indeed — thanks, George.
Scott what a great infographic and I can only imagine what work went into it so I applaud you.
Just a request to include our UK based tech company which now has customers in over 112 countries getting realtime feedback and rewards. https://www.survey-me.com/ along with our free app to get realtime feedback on mobile. https://www.survey-me.com/download-app
I would suggest for the Interactive Content section.
Well done once again
Thanks for letting me know, Nicola. I’m very excited about the Interactive Content category. I’ve made a note to look at survey-me for the next update.
Impressive job! I can only imagine how much time it took to research and sort this information.I was curious why SharpSpring was not included with HubSpot and Marketo.
The “Platform/Suite” category is the only category on this landscape that was gated by scale. While that certainly opens up a whole new level of debate (what qualifies?), I’d say that one obvious qualifier would be public marketing technology companies with $1 billion or higher valuations, such as HubSpot and Marketo.
I love SharpSpring, and I hope they get there. But they’re definitely included in the marketing automation category at that backbone platform layer of the landscape.
Great great job!! Kindly disappointed though the Pollfish (http://www.pollfish.com), one of the fastest growing mobile monetization networks is missing from the list!
Sorry I missed Pollfish, Andreas. I’ve made a note for the next update.
Hey Scott, would like you to consider including DeltaX (http://www.deltax.com) in Search & Social Ads section the next your updating this. DeltaX fast-growing cross-channel ad-platform with deep integration into Google Adwords, Bing ads, Facebook Ads and others, middleware capabilities that make it channel and device agonistic and allow integration with some of the backbone platforms. Keep up the good work!
Hi, Ravi. I’d be happy to consider DeltaX for the next update — thanks for letting me know!
Hi Scott… can you add Friend2Friend (http://www.friend2friend.com) in social media marketing area? Thanks! Impressive work!
Noted, Alice — thanks!
Scott, two things:
1) You are amazing! This list is very comprehensive, well thought out and a great overview. Thank you for putting your time into this and sharing.
2) I LOVE how you engage with your community in the commentary.
Ali Ghafour
Founder @viafoura
Thanks, Ali. It’s a labor of love. Glad others find it helpful!
Hi Scott,
Always look forward to you publishing this. It’s a great public service for the industry, igniting many discussions and showing how diverse and innovative the industry can be when it puts its mind to it.
I’ll make a quick point of clarification – Datalicious (www.datalicious.com) is the analytics consulting agency that makes the tag management system, SuperTag (http://www.datalicious.com/supertag-full-service-tag-management/).
We’ve also launched the OptimaHub marketing analytics platform (http://www.datalicious.com/singleview-power-customer-insights/), servicing our clients worldwide.
Thanks Scott. I believe you will be in Sydney this year. We will reach out to catch up for a chat while you’re in town 🙂
Cheers
Daniel
Hi Scott. Impressive and mind blowing work! Would love for you to include http://www.linqia.com in the influencer marketing category next edition. Thanks!
Hello Scott, I came across this supergraphic on Twitter. It is humbling, exciting and scary at the same time looking at all the clutter (!) in this space. Great job creating this!
I may have missed their logos but was curious about 2 companies that are making a big splash globally in the customer analytics and data products areas.
1. Fractal Analytics (www.fractalanalytics.com)
2. Palantir (www.palantir.com)
What are your thoughts?
Scott,
Maybe you would like to add a new category – Localization? It’s an important part of general picture 🙂
Hi Scott,
Exciting to see this terrific revision and analysis.
Request for company addition:
We (www.cool-tabs.com) announced our new important feature to measure the performance of Facebook pages last year and have established ourselves as a platform for social media marketing with apps to create campaigns in different social networks.
Would be great if you could add Cool Tabs to the Social Media Marketing and Interactive Content category in future iterations.
Logo here: http://cool-tabs.s3.amazonaws.com/prensa/prensa.zip
Thanks! – Marta
Hi Scott,
Amazing research! Really informative. Do you have a searchable spreadsheet with the names of all the companies by category? I’d love to be able to quickly check out a few companies I know but not exactly sure how you may have categorized them. It’ll be a useful tool to be able to know who you think they competitors are.
Thanks!
Shing
Hi Scott,
What a fantastic infographic! A beast of a project really. I would love to request an addition if possible. Mag+ is a mobile publishing platform that should certainly be included in the Mobile app development & marketing section.
Mag+ serves 800+ clients throughout the world with 3,000+ apps. The apps range from enterprise sales enablement tools for companies like EMC, Unilever and Merchant Warehouse to university recruitment apps, to magazine apps like the award-winning New York magazine.
Thanks so much, Scott!
Hi Scott,
fantastic graphic… You should think of maybe creating a USA and european version as there are some technologies more common in other continents/countries.
And you should have a look at apteco.co.uk
This company is offering software for marketing data analysis and marketing automation.
Cheers
Florian
I would add Bluenose to the list. Customer Success Platform will likely be a defined category in 2016 as more businesses move to SaaS: customer onboarding/retention is going to be a very vital link in the chain, the way marketing automation drove growth in enterprise customer acquisition.
Wow, mammoth task! But I was looking for DIY market research technologies and couldn’t clearly find them. Maybe a category for next year.. We have been supplying Marketers for 3 years now and is a vital part of the marketing toolkit! I know the industry is growing rapidly, as are suppliers.
Frontleaf should be in the Customer Experience section (http://www.frontleaf.com)
Hi Scott,
Thank you for producing this every year. After finding this last year, I’ve really enjoyed following your posts and emails. Thank you for adding Listrak to the list for 2015. I found us in the personalization category. Could we also be included in the email category in 2016, that’s where we started in the late 90’s and still remain strong!
Thank you,
Joe
Joe Nicholas
Product Marketing Manager
Listrak
Scott, I’ve been following you for a few years. Another awesome, and ever growing, chart. Congrats!
It would be awesome to see Agency Spotter (maybe under Community & Reviews or Vendor/Data Analysis) on your chart. http://www.agencyspotter.com
We’re bringing transparency to the ever growing marketing and advertising agency space including everything from ad agencies, digital agencies, design firms, and marketing research companies.
If you need to hire a service agency to do marketing, digital or design, Agency Spotter is a free place to start that can save you a ton of time and provide you with more confident decision making via reviews and leveraging your own network more effectively.
Thanks for considering adding us and for your fantastic insights.
Brian
In my opinion the Marketing Technology Landscape is an outstanding tool.
Your effort in keeping it updated is remarkable and I wrote an article in Portuguese about it – http://bit.ly/tecnologias-de-marketing. Thanks for the inspiration.
Best regards from Portugal.
Thank you Scott for this amazing endeavor. It’s very useful year after year.
In regards to the 43 categories, do you have a document that has their definitions? We would like to send out a survey to our marketers and find out which is the most valuable to them for enablement.
Best,
Jaemi
Very impressive work Scott!!
Next year it would be great if you could consider IntelligenceBank Marketing – Australia’s Asset and Resources Management company that has sold over 25,000 seats to a large number of top Australian companies as well as government departments.
Cheers,
Dom
Great post + Infographic !
I’m actually conducting a research regarding the growth of SaaS, IaaS in the B2B realm, is there any chance I can get a list of the company’s in the info-graphic.
You will have my eternal graduated and the first draft of the research
May I also ask for a list of the companies? My daughter is interested in the filed of marketing technology and would like to research locally-based companies.
I am left wondering which segment in the Marketing Experiences category will grow the quickest? And which one could possible grow too quick and eat itself alive. I guess the opportunities are almost endless with niche based focus. Thanks for the great research and infographic.
Well very nice article and slides but i believe in making our own slides is the best thing not just copying other ideas and methods try to make with your own studies and knowledge
Hey Scott, pretty epic list! Would have loved to see SocialSign.in on the list, but no hard feelings. If you’re curious to learn a bit more about what we do and can spare 10 minutes, read this blog post we published today.
http://blog.socialsign.in/2015/02/10/creating-cohesive-customer-journey-using-socialsign/
Also, have you given any thought to making this searchable somehow? Did I miss that ability?
Thanks for this! Clearly a lot of research went into it so for that I definitely say good work! I’m surprised you gave mobile and mobile/apps such little space. There is SO much growth here with smartphone usage rapidly increasing worldwide.
It would also be great for next year to add embraase and Applanga to your Mobile App Dev and Marketing sections–although I think next year those might need to be separated out. Keep up the good work!
Hi Scott,
Great work once again. As I was studying the graphic this year I was thrilled to see Envoke.com included in the Marketing Automation / Campaign & Lead Management section, which is exactly where I would have put us.
I can hardly imagine how much effort it was to go through each space, find each vendor and decide where they most belong.
Your blog post to go along with it provides thoughtful analysis of the space. Thanks for your ongoing effort. See you in San Fran!
this list is incredible! great job on compiling all of these companies. it’s mind blowing to see the explosive growth and diversification / specialization among all these marketing products popping up. thank you so much for including exposely as an influencer marketing platform on this list, really appreciate that.
influencer marketing and automation seem to be the hot topics of 2015. excited to see where this all goes! if anyone wants to chat on these topics, feel free to ping me 🙂 http://exposely.com
well cascaded…huge effort,give 360 deg view to understand the market share and popularity of different segments of technologies/vendors
Great work Scott, and an impressive list!! For your next take at it, I recommend including Yieldmo (www.yieldmo.com) under Mobile Marketing or Display & Native Ads. Terry has Yieldmo in his Native category, but the adtech is better defined by Mobile Marketing. More details in an AdExchanger piece here: http://adexchanger.com/mobile/yieldmo-were-a-content-ad-company-its-a-new-animal/
Thank you Scott for a great list all in one place. Good job!
Hi Scott
I raise my hat!
This is like monk’s labor! Or ”un travail de moines” (in french)
Warm regards from Montréal, Qc
Audrey
Hi Scott, thank you for putting this together. Could you please share which tools or software you used to create the infogrpahics? Thanks!
Scott, this is quite an amazing list again this year! Very impressive.
As a side note, we’d love to see the Experiture Marketing Platform on the list under email marketing, marketing automation, or marketing campaign management. Even so — this is great work — and we hope to be included in the future.
If you’re curious to learn a bit more about what we do — feel free to head over to Experiture to Learn More or to See a Demo:
http://www.experiture.com
Please let us know if there is anything we can ever do for you – and keep up the great work!
Scott, thanks for putting this together yet again. Very useful in showing clients how complicated the marketing world has become. Lots of “moving parts.”
This is great. I’m throwing it in a slide deck for a presentation next week (with a reference of course), but noticed that Oracle Content Marketing (formerly Compendium) is not in the Content Marketing section. I came to Oracle through that acquisition (disclaimer), but wanted to give you yet another logo to squeeze in. 🙂
Hi Scott,
This is most impressive and helpful. Thank you!
The sheer size makes it nearly impossible to get everyone. Please consider App Data Room for the Sale Enablement category.
Impressive work of great value. Very nice!
If I may, I’d like to suggest our company in the dashboards/visualization section: http://dashthis.com
Best regards,
Stéphane
+1 vote for DashThis. Great tool!
Hi, I may be going too far with this but i have found the perfect service http://www.inboxman.com he meets perfectly my needs I have 100 000 subscribers so far and giving all the features that I’m offered stats, location, segments, Omni channel and many others with a pricing that low I’m fully satisfied hope it does the same for you too.
Excellent one. It may include social bookmarking and Feedreader tool topic.
getpocket… etc
Feedly… etc
This is a great map and excellent piece of research. Thanks for putting it together. We don’t see ourselves on the high res, but we could be overlooking it. Assumed we’d fall in both social marketing and loyalty. Thanks.
Great list. I use the excel all the time.
Please also add us to your next list – AdNgin – Ad Revenue Optimization and Testing
A mind-numbing chart that shows the explosive technological investments that are being made in the content marketing space. What’s really going on is a feeding frenzy to be the next IPO or big money flip! This is not what Content Marketing is about or what makes it successful. Content Marketing is really about creating an effective strategy that provides useful, entertaining and informative content that meets the needs of customers and results in brands achieving their business goals!
A great list and shows the amount of competition among them and understanding what it is that makes them unique.
One question that seems to pop up alot is the amount of Marktech each business has and the lack of understanding resulting in tech being under utilised.
Will there soon be a marketing technology motherboard?
I dont envy resizing them.
Thanks, Scott, for this amazing chart- I’ve already used it in a presentation, to demonstrate how hard it can be for newbies to navigate this space. To add one more to your list next year, check out http://www.heardable.com . We’ll be in your Web and Mobile Analytics section, as we rank brand strength online, and allow users to perform competitive analysis of their website and mobile (and social and SEO, actually), vs. competitors. When I blog about the presentation in July, I’ll include the link back to here.
Great article Scott, I enjoyed your very diplomatic rationalisation of what, where, why and who was represented in the chart!! No doubt someone still found reason to complain 😉
A very insightful article about the current martech landscape, one that has provoked much further investigation on my behalf.
You have an enjoyable writing style and I look forward to checking out more of your content.
Cheers,
Simon.
Great work Scott! What an effort it must be to put this together and fit it all on one page. An art form! Hey, one suggestion now that there are so many vendor logos mashed into a single view, is there anyway you could produce on your site a text file with just the vendor names and the category they are in. Personally, I would find that very useful.
Nice work!
But what could make it mega useful is making simple spreadsheet with company names, website, industries, categories and one sentence summary what they are doing.
That would make it super easy to search through.
Also if you make it as a google spreadsheet you can put another sheet called “To Add” where people can add any company with a description and only thing you’ll need to do will be verifying it and copying it into the main sheet. Let others do the work so more work can be done.
The martech adtech convergence is complex. See our fun take on things, with a Game of Thrones twist. http://bit.ly/1g2IJ5D
Thanks as always Scott for the great breakdown of the industry. For next year’s chart, make sure you include CustomShow in Sales Enablement (http://www.customshow.com) – although how you’re going to fit everything onto one image by next year is a good question!
Hey Scott,
Would be awesome to see Brightpod on the project management and collaboration list. Brightpod takes the chaos out of managing marketing projects and helps marketers focus on what matters.
Scott, awesome job. Yet another suggestion to add: Mblast (www.mblast.com) under the audience and market data category. +1 for the idea of a downloadable spreadsheet! Great work, and nice contribution.
Great job on creating this – it must’ve taken a lot of research and patience to put this together! I’d like to suggest Infinity (www.infinitycloud.com/) under the call analytics/management category if you are going to make a new 2016 versionl
Thanks a lot! Is there a raw tabled data? Like year, title, category, url? Would be cool to play a bit with visualisation how the categories changing over the years.
Great landscape! Kochava would be a nice add to the mobile analytics/attribution players!
Herculean effort – I will use it to show the scope of businesses behind marketing technology to my clients and audience. Thanks
Hi Scott,
Great work, great landscape! I’d like to suggest our company in the Mobile Marketing section: http://notifica.re , it would be awesome to be in the next edition.
Thanks,
Robert
Where in the MarTech landscape can I find vendors that support couponing? Just trying to figure out if coupon vendors have been included (ex: RevTrax)
Great job! Add SalesTalk to the sales enablement players … thanks!
Scott,
I have enjoyed seeing your Marketing Technology Landscape infographic for years, and I’m delighted that you continue to update, expand it, and make it available for everyone to use. No small task. So, many thanks for this great service to we marketers. As the landscape continues to grow, it would be interesting to see two things:
(1) I would love to see a dynamically-rendered version (html5?) that might allow zooming-in-and-out to see more/fewer — kind of telescope-like — so (perhaps) the biggest players in a given category are most visible, but zooming in on specific categories might bring others (perhaps smaller/newer platforms and technologies) into view.
(2) As you’ve noted, many of the products/platforms are difficult to categorize, as many are cross-category. When evaluating options, it’s challenging to do apples-to-apples comparisons within a category, then further complicated by the cross-categorization. What would be extremely helpful: An evaluation tool based on the vast amount of info you’ve collected (perhaps expanded by additional research). I envision being able to select and prioritize various categories and/or criteria, then seeing which technologies best fit and how they might (or might not) connect with others, sort results by pricing/costs, reviews, company size, capabilities, limitations, features, APIs, data-handling, etc. Maybe it’s a simple database query tool, or perhaps it’s a robust “build a marketing machine” design tool. Begs for a kickstarter campaign to build an unbiased marketing technology evaluation tool, funded by marketers, for marketers, no?
Thanks again for your service all these years,
Jim
Scott:
Long time follower, first time post. This is a brilliant and a well informed write up. Thanks for the effort, its useful on so many levels and i think my necks tired from nodding in agreement as I read it fully.
Keep it up, great service to the industry.
My best,
David
One more Project Management to add to that graphic:
Mavenlink
Hi Scott,
If it’s possible to add Wriber (wriber.com) to the Content Marketing category, I’d sincerely appreciate it.
Thank you,
John
Hello Scott,
It would be great to see Accent Technologies, a Sales Enablement software company, on this list: http://accent-technologies.com/
Thanks!!
Hey Scott
Great visual. Awesome effort to pull it all together. I’d really like to have Dynatrace considered in Web/app analytics. If you check Gartner and IDC you’ll see its the clear leader in terms of market share.
With Keynote now integrated it’s even more compelling.
P.s captivated by your tech stack post and tomorrow I’ll be building mine!
Cheers and thanks for a great blog!
Dave
It’s incredibly amusing to see everyone trying add their own company to your list.
Anyways, great job with the supergraphic Scott.
Shows its value.
Great effort and service, Scott. Appreciate it.
Not wanting to be left out, request addition of Goombal (www.goombal.com) as an Event Lifecycle and ROI management platform under your Events and Webinars category.
Appreciate it!
Thanks
Vinay
Thank you for putting together such an amazing infographic and making it available to the general public.
Hi Scott, thanks for another year of assembling this great graphic. Could you include Ematic Solutions (http://www.ematicsolutions.com/), in the Email Marketing category for your next go around? Appreciate it!
Thanks,
Tarik
Scott, Thank you for putting these together, I refer to them often. Would appreciate being included in the Communities and Reviews section in the next go round. http://www.antenna.is
Thanks,
Christopher
It’s January 2016 now! If you update this you will have the undying gratitude of a whole bunch of people!
Amazing chart, Scott! Would you kindly incorporate Votion (http://votion.co) into the Interactive Content space? Greatly appreciated and would love to see a 2016 version as well and happy to share around.
Thanks so much!
Craig
Hey Scott,
I saw you speak in Boston recently and really enjoyed your session. With nearly 2,000 organizations listed I can imagine the level of effort to put this together. I couldn’t find Sitefinity from Telerik (www.sitefinity.com) in the WCM/CMS space, so I thought I’d bring it to your attention.
Best,
Robert
Hi Scott –
Thanks a ton for putting this together. Been useful in showing my European C-Suite the vast land of mar-tech options there are out there. Would love to have Xink (http://www.xink.io/) up for consideration for the 2016 list. The email marketing category I’d imagine – a little different than the others as we focus on helping marketers automate email signatures across enterprise firms.
Thanks again for putting this together!
Cheers,
Eric
Massive effort to pull this together and probably even bigger effort to keep it up to date! Just FYI, you’re missing Europe’s biggest 2 ratings and reviews vendors – one for independent / trusted reviews (eKomi) and the other open portal for unverified reviews (TrustPilot).
(Full disclosure – I’m with eKomi, but it’d be churlish to miss out on TP as well!)
Hi Scott,
I was wondering whether on your next infographic you could include RedEye (www.redeye.com) we are a digital marketing company specialising in email marketing and would love to be featured within the email marketing section!
Amazing work though!
Hello!
Not found in your collection platform for email marketing Expertsender although it is widely known. Here is her website: http://www.expertsender.com.
I would also like to draw attention to sirvis Agilemail which allows you to generate letters to the content during the opening, instead of threads. Site: http://www.agilemail.ru.
Thank you!
My hat is off to you for pulling all this together. Really impressive. I didn’t see bpm’online in the CRM section, however. Hope they get included in 2016 as they have a CRM that serves marketing, sales and service all in one platform. Check it out: http://www.bpmonline.com
Where can we get the definitions of the various categories? Any help on this will be much appreciated!
Scott,
Thanks for helping us seeing the light out of the tunnel.
We would be happy to be featured into the “Data Management Platforms/Customer Data Platforms” set,
As Being Sirdata, a Third Party Data Provider. More info at http://www.sirdata.com.
Awesome infographic! Thanks so much for taking the time on this. I’m a bit surprised CadmiumCD isn’t in the events, meetings and webinars portion of the graph though. Definitely should add this software company that’s been catering to event planners and marketers for over 16 years now!
WOW!!! It has already been two years since the publication of this post and I had never seen or heard anything about a “supergraphic”. I loved it!! Thanks for sharing stuff like this man, great content!
Please allow me to introduce myself as a Freelance Picture Researcher working for book publisher Routledge. We are a publisher of academic textbooks and are currently in the process of publishing a new edition of our book Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Technologies Fourth Edition, by Francis Buttle and Stan Maklan. The book will be printed in hardback and paperback formats. The book will also be produced in eBook format as a verbatim digital copy of the printed work (i.e. it will be used in the exact same context as in the printed work and without alteration) We would like your permission to include an image of yours in the book.This is now the fourth time that we are contacting you about this request. Could you please confirm that that we are okay to proceed to use the image? Apologies for the urgency but if we don’t hear back from you in the next week we will need to assume that it is okay to go ahead and use the image, so that we can move forwards with our production team.
With kind regards, Camilla Gammelgaard-Baker
Great article, thanks! Massive effort to pull this together and probably even bigger effort to keep it up to date! Performance Management System is very important for a business to improve.