October 2019

There are notable inflection points in the history of martech where you simply have to pause and say, “Wow, the world sure has changed.” Crossing more than 1,000 solutions on the marketing technology landscape in 2014 was one. Digital ad spend surpassing traditional ad spend earlier this year was another. And now here’s a big one: “shadow IT” is going from bad to good — even in the eyes of IT. Shadow IT is coming …

A martech milestone: IT leaders embrace the upside of “shadow IT” Continue Reading »

I was reading Gartner’s latest CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020 — spoiler alert: average marketing budgets have fallen to 10.5% of company revenue and the percentage of the marketing budget dedicated to martech slipped from 29% to 26% — when something truly remarkable popped out at me. On page 20, Gartner included the chart at the top of this post, listing CMOs top supporters and top inhibitors. The IT Organization was the top of the top …

The 10-years war between marketing and IT is over Continue Reading »

In Gartner’s most recent Marketing Organizational Survey for 2019 — how marketing leaders structure their teams today and how they expect them to change over the next several years — a remarkable finding popped out to me: 20% of respondents reported that they run some form of decentralized marketing organization today. By the end of 2022, however, a majority — 51% — expect they will have a decentralized structure in place. A 31 point jump …

The (near) future of marketing is decentralized Continue Reading »