State of the Marketing Technologist 2012

It’s that time of year again. This blog’s anniversary — our fourth (!) — and time to look at the evolution of the “marketing technologist” meme over the past year.

First, let’s start with an update on Google searches:

Google Search February 2008 February 2011 February 2012  
chief marketing technologist 320 320,000 265,000 ↓ 17%
director of marketing technology 7,520 847,000 1,670,000 ↑ 97%
marketing technology   625,000 2,670,000 ↑ 327%
marketing technologist   109,000 203,000 ↑ 86%
marketing technology manager   340,000 748,000 ↑ 131%
VP marketing technology   194,000 684,000 ↑ 253%
vice president marketing technology   232,000 694,000 ↑ 199%
creative technologist   103,000 247,000 ↑ 140%
geek marketer   9,830 22,300 ↑ 127%

Although Google’s numerous algorithm changes make these year-over-year comparisons a little fuzzy, the overall trend seems clear. Marketing technology matches have grown 327% over the past year. And with the explosion of marketing technology, it follows that organizations are increasing establishing positions to manage it: matches for managers and VPs of marketing technology have more than doubled.

Interestingly, the term “marketing technologist” has only grown 86% — and the “chief marketing technologist” namesake of this blog actually decreased 17%. But a rose by any other name…

The label doesn’t matter. The role does.

In the past year: Forrester repeatedly advocated for an office of marketing technology and launched their first CIO-CMO summit to focus on this intersection. Gartner predicted that CMOs may have larger IT budgets than CIOs.

And the job boards reflect this. For instance, do a search for “marketing technology” on SimplyHired.com:

Marketing Technologist Jobs, February 2012

Marketing Technologist Content from Around the Web

In addition to the Forrester and Gartner research mentioned above, many others continued to spread the word about marketing technologists rising. Here are just a few:

…and I’m just scratching the surface (apologies to those posts I left out).

A Brief Chief Marketing Technologist Retrospective

A big thank you to everyone who read, shared, and inspired the ideas on this blog over the past year. Looking back, some of my favorite posts included:

We even had a couple of video presentations to boot, thanks to Adobe and Search Insider Summit:

I’m looking forward to what the next 12 months will bring us on this “marketing technologist” — or whichever name you prefer — journey together.

P.S. Any additional Google searches we should count this year to see how far they’ll grow by next February?

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