Got marketing technologists? 1,000-fold growth

This is both an anniversary post and a state-of-the-market update. Three years ago, I launched this blog to focus on marketing technology — and perhaps more importantly — the new professionals emerging at that intersection, marketing technologists.

At the time, I did a quick Google search for a couple of phrases: “chief marketing technologist” and “director of marketing technology” to see how popular those job titles were. Both terms predated my blog, although neither was particularly popular.

Yesterday, I ran those searches again — and this is how far they’ve come:

Granted, these counts are only estimates from Google, but the overall trend is clear: a 1,000-fold increase in the number of matching pages. Even if you generously assume that a couple thousand of those pages are directly related to my own writing, the broader proliferation of those terms dwarfs my humble contributions.

The marketing technologist meme is spreading!

Anecdotally, the number of times I’ve been seeing “marketing technologist” appearing on resumes, job posts, other blog articles, and social media discussions has been ramping up tremendously over the past 6 months.

For example, just over the past few weeks, here is some of the latest marketing technologist chatter I’ve seen:

The Marketing Technologist: Time has Come by Paul Dunay on his Buzz Marketing for Technology blog. This in turn was picked up by B2B Magazine and retweeted by many, including David Armano of Logic + Emotion and Edelman (“Got marketing technologist?”). Since Paul and David have inspired me for many years, I was particularly excited by this thread.

Cheryl Burgess of Blue Focus Marketing wrote a terrific piece on the “Quest for The Marketing Technologist” that garnered a large number of comments and tweets. And for good reason! She dives right into the untapped opportunity for marketing and IT collaboration, the intersection where marketing technologists thrive. Cheryl’s post was also reprinted by B2C Marketing Insider.

Chris Penn, one of the co-founders of PodCamp, VP of Strategy and Innovation at Blue Sky Factory, and a pioneering marketing technologist himself, was recently featured in a two-part profile by BostInnovation, Boston’s New Marketing Superstars: Chris Penn, The Marketing-Technologist Hybrid. To quote Chris from that article, “As a technologist, you know the capabilities of the tools you are using and the tools that are out there. You can then pick which tools fit the marketing goal.”

And just this morning, I came across the post Marketing 2.0 (long read!) by Guerson Meyer, an MBA student in Spain and co-founder of foodieSquare (yum). In discussing new marketing — and why he was chosen as a co-founder in this new venture — he says, “It is clear that the role of marketing can only be found with the new marketing principles. At foodieSquare, acting as a Chief Marketing Officer and Technologist, my tasks will be to understand the implication of current and future technologies in the community and interact with them in the most efficient way in order to deliver a consistent message that is credible that will enable to build trust and loyalty with an emotional engaged community.”

In addition, I’ve been hearing the term used by recruiters, seen job posts for marketing technologist positions on Monster.com, and talked with CMO’s who are establishing chief marketing technologist positions. Marketing technologist roles are quickly becoming recognized as part of the modern marketing team.

Marketing technologist highlights from last year

If you’re new to this blog — welcome! — and you’d like to learn more about marketing technologists, here are a few of the articles and presentations on the subject from last year:

• Rise of the Marketing Technologist presentation at Search Insider Summit
• The Case for the Chief Marketing Technologist presentation at Pivot
• Should Your Company Have a Chief Marketing Technologist? on Mashable.com
• The Time Is Ripe For a Chief Marketing Technologist on Six Pixels of Separation
• Why Marketing Should Run Its Own Technology in InformationWeek
• The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist in AdAge
• Chief Marketing Technologist: Finding the Right Person on MarketingSherpa.com
• The Role of the Marketing CTO or Chief Marketing Technologist at CloudTimes

For future reference…

I kind of wish that I had kept track of other terms back in 2008 to measure progress in this area. But it’s not too late to rectify that for future analyses. Let’s add a few more marketing technologist terms:

Other terms we should be tracking? Please add them in the comments!

P.S. When I launched this blog, I also mused about whether the term “martec” — short-hand for “marketing technology” — would catch on like “marcom” did for “marketing communications.”

In February 2008 there were 78 results for the term “martec and marketing technology”. In February 2011 it grew to 982 results. Well, as Meatloaf said, two out of three ain’t bad.