Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2016)

97 Comments / Marketing Software / By / 7 minutes of reading

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2016)

UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available.

I’m posting this from the 2016 MarTech USA conference in San Francisco — a fitting venue to release the 2016 marketing technology landscape supergraphic. (Finally!)

You can click on the image above for a larger version — which you’ll obviously need in order to be able to see anything more than a colorful blur. But if you really want to zoom in and explore the landscape, you should download one of the hi-res versions here:

2016 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (PDF)

2016 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (1,200dpi JPEG)

Three important notes before we dive into some discussion:

  1. I expressly grant permission to reproduce copies of this graphic in any media, digital or physical, as long as it is reproduced “as is” and in full. Feel free to share it in blog posts, presentation slide decks, reports, or any other vehicle where you would find it helpful.
  2. I must disclaim that this graphic is only my personal approximation of the marketing technology landscape and is surely rife with errors and omissions. It is intended only for discussion purposes. (Vendors: if I did not include you or you feel I miscategorized you, I apologize — please set the record straight in the comments thread below.)
  3. I want to acknowledge the key sources of data I used in my research to build this graphic: CabinetM (who was kind enough to give me a report of their whole database!), Capterra, G2 Crowd, Google, Growthverse, LUMA Partners, Siftery, TrustRadius, and VB Profiles. I used these services both to discover new marketing tech companies and to triangulate my categorization schema. As always, I owe a large debt of inspiration to Terry Kawaja, the godfather of vendor LUMAscapes.

Whew — 3,874 marketing technology solutions on a single slide

As mind-boggling as it is, the marketing technology landscape grew even bigger. I’ve fit 3,874 marketing technology solutions on to a single 16×9 slide — almost twice as many as last year.

I say “solution” instead of “company,” because some companies are included multiple times in different categories. The big enterprise software firms — Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP — have the most instances of their logo on the page, but there are others too.

I loosened my restrictions on “one logo per page” a little bit to better reflect vendors who sell solutions in many categories across the landscape. But given space constraints, I was still pretty miserly about putting most companies in only one category — usually the one that seemed to be primarily represented on the home page of their website.

I estimate the de-duped count of logos is closer to 3,500 — approximately 87% growth over last year. That’s really amazing when you consider how large the landscape was last year already.

Here’s a recap of the evolution of this landscape:

Evolution of the Marketing Technology Landscape

You can view and read about the earlier versions of the marketing technology landscape here: August 2011, September 2012, January 2014, and January 2015.

Note that these are not stricly apples-to-apples comparisons. In each landscape edition, I have adjusted the categories — added some, removed some, redefined others — and varied my heuristics for inclusion. We’re living in a rapidly changing industry, and I treat this landscape as a living document that continues to evolve to the environment.

In particular, for the 2016 edition, I removed most of the “infrastructure” categories that were in the 2014 and 2015 editions — databases, cloud infrastructure, big data, web dev — because while they’re important to marketing, they’re more general purpose in nature. And I really needed the space. But I also added new categories.

Here’s the breakdown of the number of solutions in each category:

Category Counts of the Marketing Technology Landscape (2016)

The top 5 largest categories, by number of solutions included, are:

  1. Sales Automation, Enablement & Intelligence (220)
  2. Social Media Marketing & Monitoring (186)
  3. Display & Programmatic Advertising (180)
  4. Marketing Automation & Campaign/Lead Management (161)
  5. Content Marketing (160)

I know, most of these categories are extremely broad. You could do an entire landscape solely on the subcategories within content marketing (and, indeed, people have). My goal with this landscape is to give you the 50,000-foot overview of the entire space — which forced a trade-off with granularity.

6 Marketing Technology Capability Clusters

This year I restructured the entire way the landscape is organized. The 2014 and 2015 editions were laid out with a kind of “stack” metaphor — infrastructure and platform systems at the bottom, experience and operations applications on top.

This represented my belief that marketing technology would logically coalesce around a single platform in any given organization — with a small oligopoly of platform providers competing for that starring role — which would then be augmented by a collection of more specialized applications that would plug into that platform as third-party solutions.

However, that “one platform to rule them all” model has not materialized in a lot of marketing departments. (Although smaller companies are more likely to have a single solution.)

Marketing Technology: Platform to Multi-Platform

Instead, many companies have multiple platforms in their marketing technology stacks. It’s not unusual for them to have one vendor for their web experience platform, a different one for their marketing automation platform, another for the CRM, and so on.

This has become more viable for two reasons:

  1. Almost every vendor in the space has invested engineering resources in making it easy (or at least easier) to integrate with the rest of the marketing technology ecosystem. Most marketing tech products now come with plug-and-play support for the major CRM and marketing automation platforms.
  2. The category of products known as iPaaS (integration-platforms-as-a-service) — along with new generations of tag management and other “marketing middleware” solutions — has grown significantly, making it easier to connect most or all of an organization’s marketing technology to a common data exchange backbone.

iPaaS Category in the 2016 Marketing Technology Landscape

This has empowered marketers to select “best of breeds” solutions and avoid vendor lock-in with a single marketing technology provider — and, indeed, many are now successfully embracing that more open and heterogenous approach.

6 Marketing Technology Capability Clusters

So I felt this year’s marketing tech landscape should reflect that shift. Instead of a platform-emphasized “stack” metaphor, I decided to organize the landscape around 6 marketing technology capability clusters:

  1. Advertising & Promotion
  2. Content & Experience
  3. Social & Relationships
  4. Commerce & Sales
  5. Data
  6. Management

With many of the marketing teams I’ve met with, these seem to be the clusters that most often divide key vendors in a multi-platform environment. It’s also where practice expertise — the skillsets of different marketers and marketing technologists — seems to vary the most from one cluster to the next.

A dynamic environment with few simple explanations

I’m sure many people will have opinions about this new landscape, and there will be a range of theories about its nature and its future.

I’ll follow up with more thoughts about this myself too, after reflecting on the feedback. But my current thinking about “the nature and future of martech” is mostly captured in these three posts I wrote last year:

But with all theories, however — mine as much as anyone’s — I would just caution that this is a complex space. Visualize the interference pattern of many waves colliding together. There are many different forces acting on this space in parallel — accelerating digital disruption across the whole of humanity as the massive, overarching one. As a result, I believe it’s hard to fit everything into a single, simple explanation.

For instance, “consolidation,” while certainly true to some degree, is an oversimplification on its own. Some marketing technology vendors are exiting (“consolidation”), yet still other new ones continue to enter and innovate:

Marketing Technology Vendors Enter and Exit Dynamically

One thing is certain though: marketing technology is a fascinating space.

ion interactive on the Marketing Technology Landscape

P.S. In addition to my role as editor of chiefmartec.com, I’m also the co-founder and CTO of a marketing software company myself — ion interactive, which makes an interactive content platform for marketers.

Naturally, my own company is included in this landscape graphic, but only once. You can find us in the upper left corner of the Interactive Content category box.

I’ve also included every competitor that I’ve ever heard about in that category box as well — 101 of them, by my count — in the interest of keeping this graphic as neutral and as unbiased as possible.

Tweet
Share
Share
WhatsApp
Pin

Get chiefmartec.com directly in your inbox!

Subscribe to my newsletter to get the latest insights on martech as soon as they hit the wire. I usually publish an article every week or two — aiming for quality over quantity.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Related Posts

97 thoughts on “Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2016)”

  1. Abhay Ghatpande

    Have you considered making the database behind this public? It will be immensely useful to create some apps and analytics around it.

    Reply
  2. Jeff Winsper

    Scott – Once again, well done. I’m glad you kept Black Ink ROI software its rightful place with Marketing Performance and Attribution category. Thank you. Maybe you can convert this into a live Twister event at MarTech? 🙂 Good luck at the show.

    Reply
  3. Shilpi Sharma

    Scott, It is not an easy task to categorize 3500+ vendors. Appreciate the effort you and your team have made to inform & educate the fraternity. You have kept few acquired companies (for ex. Data Song got acquired by MarketShare and then MarketShare got acquired by Neustar) as independent logos in Marketing performance & attribution bucket; would love to know your thinking behind that.

    Reply
  4. Demorie Agabekian (@DemorieC)

    Scott – So glad to see you completed it and great to see MarketLinc included this year! “Feedback and LiveChat” is one category MarketLinc can fit in, as LiveChat is one of the tools we use. However, “Sales Enablement” is a more apt description of what we do. MarketLinc is able to convert digital shoppers who would benefit from a human touch, by pairing real-time digital personalization with human-to-human interactions (e.g. over the phone) at critical moments in their buying journey. Thanks for encouraging us to clarify in the comments. 🙂

    Reply
  5. Iain Simpson (@irsdigital)

    Scott, WOW! Really appreciate this post and you having taken the time to put some context around the numbers. Thank you. It is terribly important for marketers to keep up to speed but with some 3,800+ products and services listed here the size of the challenge appears vast. I would certainly see value in building a database service with reviews and case studies. Excellent output.

    Reply
  6. Jeffrey Evans (@Tarquin61)

    Let me add to the congratulations for the latest version of the Marketing Technology Landscape. As a marketer this scares the pants off me! I have a limited budget to invest in technology. Where do I invest? What is going to give me the best bang for my buck? What technology will allow me to create engaging customer experiences, and be able to demonstrate a compelling ROI and increase the lifetime value of my customers? It seems the multi-platform over point solution is building a compelling case, but life was easier back 2011!

    Reply
  7. Steve Mintz

    Thanks Scott! I have been looking forward to the release of this every year for the past three or four. I love to see how Martec is changing and evolving, and appreciate your commentary along the way. I second Abhay. Would love to see the data behind this in a spreadsheet as searching some of the more dense categories can be difficult.

    Reply
  8. Ashley Jessen

    That is an incredible graphic. Just the mere fact that you categorised them all so neatly is pretty amazing, let alone putting all 3500+ marketing logos in one graphic…that really tops the lot. I bet you didn’t think this was going to be the case when you first started this ‘small’ project. Great work.

    Reply
  9. junior

    Thanks a lot for this big picture. I just started in the IM world and is a little bit overwhelming when you realize the tons of apps and programs you have to deal with.
    Congrats and thanks again!

    Reply
  11. Francesco Balduini

    +1 for making the database public, so we can create an interactive version of the tool (or at least we can filter on what technology we are interested in and get links quickly).

    thanks for your great work!

    Reply
  13. Jeff Hirsch

    This is both fantastic and overwhelming. I am sure trying to get a company that fits many places into one bucket is quite a challenge. I know at our company, SundaySky, you have started an argument that is likely to go on for a long time. There are the advertising and content folks alone have been arguing for hours about where we fit

    Reply
  17. Ali Baran

    Thank you this is amazing scope to see all the marketing tech platforms. I would love to see top 10 market share of these service platforms in all categories. Is there any link or publication about this information ?

    Reply
  20. Vinit Tibrewal

    Awesome, Scott, for you’ve worked hard. We, at FirstHive, are also working hard everyday to add more power to our cross-channel marketing software. It feels good when your work gets recognized, but it feels GREAT when it happens within three months of product launch. We must be doing something right at http://www.firsthive.com

    Thanks for highlighting ‘FirstHive’ under “Advocacy, Loyalty and Referrals” category.

    Reply
  22. Taylor

    Great graphic. But I think Zoho should be added to Email Marketing (Zoho Campaigns), Collaboration (Zoho Docs, Zoho Writer, Zoho Show, Zoho Sheet), Projects (Zoho Projects).

    Reply
  27. Vito Svans

    Fantastic work! I am curious as to what the criteria is for being considered? I see that there are a few noteworthy companies that have been excluded in the Advertising & Promotion space… such as. Collective, Exponential Interactive and Teads

    You might consider adding Exponential Interactive (http://www.exponential.com/), Exponential unified it’s display, video and mobile advertising divisions (Tribal Fusion, Firefly Video, Adotube, and Appsnack) at the beginning of 2015.

    Reply
  31. Chris Grant

    This is so valuable. I’m going to build some in-house activities around this chart and also doing our own marketing tech stack. It’s going to be a really good internal communication tool and we might learn a few things about ourselves.

    Reply
  35. Letty Ernst

    Awesome slide!! Incredible data. Are you making the back end available, or a spreadsheet for searchable logos?

    Reply
  38. Ty Martin

    Reminds me of the Law of Accelerating Returns. Good stuff!

    Here are some suggested additions:
    – Ad Bacon (http://adbacon.com): Combines data from multiple sources to deliver actionable optimization recommendations to digital marketing teams [Search & Social Advertising]
    – Bid Skillet (http://bidskillet.com): Develops predictive signals to help retail brands & agencies optimize product advertisements, even when historical data is scarce [Predictive Analytics]

    Reply
  41. Lane Fox

    Well done Scott!

    I definitely agree with your viewpoint on the shift towards multiple vendors and your 6 marketing technology capability clusters organization.

    Reply
  42. Keith Harmeyer

    This is remarkable, Scott – and remarkably valuable. Thank you for sharing with all of us. We will give you MASSIVE credit and attribution when we use this in our training and keynotes – which I’m sure we will!

    Great, great work!
    Keith Harmeyer
    Partner
    SmartStorming.com

    Reply
  43. Suhas Kumar

    A fantastic ‘ready-reckoner’ for a variety of uses. An absolute must for any and all marketing technologists out there. Kudos on the painstaking effort,Scott.

    Suhas Kumar
    Entrepreneur/ Business and Marketing Consultant
    LinkedIn: Suhas SKumar
    Twitter: @kumar_suhas

    Reply
  44. stkatsi

    Great work Scott and thank you for that! I can’t imagine your patience for puting all the logos. 🙂 Maybe you could have more data about AdTech in the future (DSPs and SSPs and more). Again thank you for that.

    Reply
  45. Zach Saltzberg

    Hi Scott,

    I’d like to add my congratulations to another valuable graphic well-done! Thanks for creating this each year, it’s helping drive a much needed conversation and you’re doing a fantastic job.

    I’ve also noticed in the comments that 100’s more companies are requesting to be added next year! While you’re at it, would you please consider adding Syndeca Platform (syndeca.com) to the Interactive Content category?

    Our platform provides “visual commerce” experiences (like shoppable catalogs and look books), as well as powers Mobile Image Search for brands like Nordstrom, Citi and Mary Kay — and we’d be honored to join your growing list of the “mar-tech stack.”

    Kind regards,
    Zach

    Reply
  46. Vincent Foucault

    Hi,

    Great article and work on the ‘supergraphic’!

    One question: are ad verification vendors somewhere? I can’t seem to find them.

    If not, I will just mention that they are an increasing part of our decision making in media.

    Best regards,
    Vincent

    Reply
  47. Sunil

    Hi Scott,

    Thanks for this wonderful piece of information.

    Impressed with the choice of tools available. Would you be coming out with recommendations on and USPs of the best of these tools to help someone like me to make an informed choice to use them?

    Thanks
    Sunil

    Reply
  48. Brigitte Bertling

    Hi Scott,
    thank you for this great overview. I was wondering why you did not show “Ligatus” in the Box “Native/Content Advertising” as Ligatus is europeans biggest native and performance network? Also our brand veeseo is missing in the Content Marketing box and adyard in Affiliate Marketing & Management. Please tell me, if you need the three logos. Best,
    Brigitte Bertling, Consultant Marketing/PR Ligatus

    Reply
  49. Florian

    Hi Scott, great thing… Apteco is now on the list 🙂
    We should also be in Marketing Automation… Thanks and have a great day.
    Cheers
    Florian

    Reply
  50. Josh Kiem

    Fabulous job, Scott. Big fan with walls covered with your graphic for years! Two quick notes:

    1. I’m also a +1 for the database, or at least a listing.
    2. Please consider adding Bell Litho Internet Solutions to the Marketing Automation space.

    Thanks again!!!!

    Reply
  53. Local Direct Media (@LocalDirect)

    This is awesome Scott, thanks for all your hard work! I do see that Automotive Digital Marketing for car dealers is missing altogether- did you know that the automotive industry is #2 in digial spend? Also, our automotive division http://www.AutoClimber.com represents AutoSaver.com (new MarTech Platform for auto dealers and car shoppers) please consider for future updates! Thanks again Scott!

    Reply
  54. Jens Thieme

    Hi Scott, unless I am holding the wrong end of the stick, which is entirely possible, I am missing a whole segment which becomes increasingly important: Competitive Intelligence with some crucial players like CID, Comintelli, M-Brain, Digimind, ClearCI, CI Radar, Management Monitor, Wide Narrow, Shift Central, News Edge, Mira … just to name a few. Did I miss them?

    Reply
  55. Anke Reuter-Zehelein

    It would be great, if you could add Ingenious Technologies (www.IngeniousTechnologies.com), specialist for business analytics and marketing automation and winner of the category ” Best Performance Marketing Technology” 2016 to your overview Martech landscape.

    Reply
  59. Louisa Bainbridge

    Can’t believe I’m just coming across this now! Excellent resource and a great way to identify new vendors. I would love to add another for consideration in 2017 in the Optimization, Personalization and Testing category. TravelTime – an API that searches and maps location data by time rather than distance to increase web conversions up to 300% http://www.traveltimeplatform.com/ .

    Reply
  61. Erin Stripe

    Hi Scott, Really enjoy watching the evolution of your martech supergraphic. Would appreciate the inclusion of Consumer Intelligence Group (CiG) in the Audience/Market Data and Data Enrichment category. We’re a mighty Canadian bunch in the business of data insights technology. http://www.consumerig.com

    Reply
  63. Doug Schumacher (@MemeRunner)

    Hi Scott,

    Per your suggestion, I’m posting a note to include our social media analytics and reporting tool Zuum in the 2017 edition. Our URL is ZuumSocial.com, and we’d go in the Social Media Marketing & Monitoring section.

    Thanks
    doug

    Reply
  66. Puneet Kataria

    Awesome work Scott. You choose to add 101 of your own competitors. Bow to you.

    I am the founder of Promoto (http://www.promoto.co). We are a B2B Advocate Marketing company.

    We apply A.I. (Predictive Analytics) to identify potentials Advocate upfront.

    We are cross between A.I. X Advocate Marketing X B2B.

    Please do consider us for 2017 landscape. Thanks in advance.

    Reply
  68. Shawn Contreras

    Excellent job and not an easy task to organize & categorize such an extensive list. I like that you also took the approach of solutions vs. vendors. I, too, like many others would love to see your database and criteria for categorization. Thank you for the efforts and making this public!

    Reply
  70. Nikola Leger (@nikleger)

    Hi Scott! We can’t thank you enough for the tremendous work that goes into these charts. As we take on the incredibly ambitious moonshot to deliver a universal martech platform for SMBs, this type of robust research and enlightened insights are incredibly valuable on our journey. Thank you!

    Reply
  71. Anati Zubia

    Hello Scott! What a wonderful view into the world of MarTech – love everything about this and look forward to seeing future versions. For the next round, you might want to add AppointmentPlus to the Marketing Automation and Campaign/Lead Management category. Thank you! AZ

    Reply
  72. Mark

    CRM/ERP? and I would take a look at ERPNext which is probably the biggest Odoo competitor at the moment. I don’t work for them.

    Great work, it’s going to take me ages to highlight all the open source ones.

    Reply
  75. Ganesh Kumaran

    Hi Scott,
    Congratulations on your great work. Kindly request you to take a look at ‘Fiind’. Fiind is a data science company that helps B2B companies find their customers efficiently through predictive analytics and machine learning. http://www.fiind.com
    We will be happy to join your much-sought Marketing Technology landscape 2017 under ‘Predictive Analytics’ category.

    Reply
  79. Felix Krueger

    I’m looking forward to the 2017 version. Do you have any indication on when it’ll become available? I don’t blame you for the irregular release pattern. Lots of logos to go through!

    Reply
  80. PushpaIthal

    Advo.Ninja is an innovative employee advocacy platform with advanced personalization and deep text technology. Please consider us for 2017’s landscape.

    Reply
  81. shay smith

    Can’t believe I’m just coming across this now! Excellent resource and a great way to identify new vendors. I would love to add another for consideration in 2017 in the Optimization, Personalization and Testing category. Thanks for this.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *