5 years worth of marketing technology geekery

This month marks the 5th anniversary of the launch of this blog. The momentum that has grown around these topics of marketing technology management, marketing technologists, marketing software, marketing data, agile marketing, etc., has been incredibly exciting.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and contributing.

On the occasion of this 5th anniversary, I decided to invest in fixing up the place a little.

First, a fresh coat of paint. I commissioned a logo to give the blog a more definitive brand. I crowdsourced it through 99designs.com, running a contest that ended up with 109 designs from 26 different designers.

This was the winner:

I know, there are a lot of funnel-like logos out there. But the seed of this concept was actually Morse code.

The three layers of the funnel (red, orange, yellow) are the stylized codes for “C” (dash-dot-dash-dot), “M” (dash-dash), and “T” (dash). A marketing funnel made out of code — mmm, there’s something I can relate to. With some openness, asymmetry, and scaffolding in the design, representing interesting facets of marketing technology management. Those three layers also match to the three motifs of management, marketing, and technology that are intertwined here.

I also decided to use chiefmartec.com in the logo, rather than Chief Marketing Technologist, well, mostly because it’s shorter. It is the domain name of the site, after all. Oh, and it matches my Twitter account.

Yes, I’ve obviously had too much time alone with this logo.

Second, after years of faithfully using Typepad, I finally made the leap over to WordPress. Wow, no offense to Typepad, but what a difference. In classic marketing technologist fashion, I was soon geeking out on plug-ins and tweaking PHP code to get the exact features I wanted. I used the Genesis framework as the basis for the design, and I chose to host the blog at WP Engine, which has been terrific so far.

Hopefully in making this conversion I haven’t busted anything — legacy links, RSS feeds, email subscriptions, SEO juju, etc. If you do notice anything broken, I’d appreciate hearing about it!