2017

Is winter coming for martech? Or just for martech VCs?

For the past 7 years that I’ve been tracking the growth of the marketing technology landscape, I’ve been hearing prophecies of its consolidation. I’ve been quick to acknowledge that’s a possibility, probably an inevitable one. In fact, if you look at the distribution of revenue across martech companies today, you can argue it’s already happened. But I’ve found it ironically amusing that, at least in the short term, the more predictions of consolidation there have …

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Martech Funding Models

Check out the amazing speakers who will be at MarTech Boston

The agenda for MarTech Boston, October 2-4, has just been posted, and I am once again awed and humbled by the incredible cast of speakers who have agreed to participate. If you want to understand the real truth of how to lead at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management, this will be a two-day conference you won’t want to miss. Let’s start with the keynotes: David Edelman, CMO of Aetna, on B2C marketing and …

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MarTech Boston 2017 Featured Speakers

If a marketing tactic works, but people hate it, should you use it?

It’s a scenario straight out of Kiefer Sutherland’s TV series 24. There’s a ticking time bomb somewhere in the city. The only way to stop it is to torture a captured suspect into revealing its location. Yes, torture is wrong. But is it worth it to save the lives of hundreds of innocent people? What do you do? This hypothetical dilemma has come up so many times in both fiction and serious philosophical and ethical …

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Ads People Hate

Pop quiz: What do Amazon Alexa and Whole Foods have in common?

The easy answer, of course, is that they’ll both be controlled by Jeff Bezos and the rapidly evolving Amazon empire. That alone is a pretty remarkable for hybridizing the digital and the physical on such a massive scale. But in my worldview, Amazon’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods — insert requisite “Whole Paycheck” joke, such as it was cheaper than buying groceries there for the company cookout — gives Amazon a powerful new touchpoint …

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Vertical Competition in Martech with Amazon & Whole Foods

The average enterprise uses 91 marketing cloud services

This past weekend, I caught up on Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends report for 2017. As always, it was jam-packed with incredible data and insights, and this year it ballooned to 353 pages worth of them. There’s a ton of topics in the report that are important to marketing — voice-based platforms, convergence of advertising and commerce, gaming-inspired innovation, the reinvention of media, and the spectacular Internet explosions in China and India — but I …

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Average Number of Marketing Cloud Services Used by an Enterprise

What anchors your martech mall? A marketing metaphor

The following is a guest post by Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, a research and advisory firm that evaluates digital workplace and marketing technology vendors. The past several years have seen growing attention to martech “stacks,” the ever-expanding set of tools involved in enterprise customer engagement and marketing. As just one indicator, the latest MarTech Conference saw a record number of submissions to its famous Stackies contest. Stack diagrams are useful at showing …

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The Martech Mall Metaphor

Data industrialization on our way to marketing in a blockchain world

The following is a follow-up guest post by Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing, to his previous articles on blockchain marketing, blockchain brand promises, blockchain brand “logos,” and blockchains as brand equity. Jeremy currently works with several of the leading companies in the blockchain and decentralization space. DON’T MISS A CHANCE TO HEAR JEREMY SPEAK. He will be presenting at the MarTech Conference in Boston, October 2-4, with an in-depth talk on Blockchain and the …

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Data Industrialization & Blockchain Marketing

A proposed model for organizing the chaos of marketing technology

The marketing technology landscape is big, broad, and deep. (Feel free to mentally insert other, more colorful, adjectives.) So many different kinds of solutions fall under that umbrella, and they don’t always fit into nice, neat categories. This contributes to the confusion that many marketers feel around martech. It’s generally not clear what the taxonomy of the solution space is, which makes it difficult to break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks of capabilities. …

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6C's Model of Organizing Marketing Technology

600+ marketers report on the blend of art and science in marketing

At the MarTech conference last week, Mayur Gupta, global VP of marketing & growth at Spotify, and I revealed the results from a study we had conducted with the research team at Third Door Media on the intersection of art and science in marketing. We had 637 participants in the study — one of the largest groups surveyed on this topic in recent history — the vast majority of whom identified as marketers and marketing …

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Marketers as Scientists

Top 10 entries from the MarTech cartoon caption contest

Wow, I’ve got so much to share from last week’s MarTech conference in San Francisco. The speakers, sponsors, and moderators were all fantastic — as were the incredibly enthusiastic attendees. I’m so grateful to all of them. However, let me start with a little levity. Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist, gave a terrific keynote presentation to kick off our program on Thursday. As part of this, he shared his favorite entries from the “caption contest” we …

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MarTech Marketoonist Caption 10 (Winner!)

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