May 2021

I recently wrote how martech stacks have arguably become virtual platforms. Even if you have a completely heterogeneous, “best-of-breed” stack, you likely have a set of products that work across your stack to provide cohesion, albeit each at a different layer of integration: Data: everything ultimately ends up in a “data lake” platform such as Snowflake Workflow: tools such as Workato and Zapier orchestrate processes across apps UI/UX: tools such as Slack provide a common …

Aggregation Theory applied to martech stacks Continue Reading »

Summer approaches! (Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.) Fresh air, sunshine, and frolicking outdoors have never felt so viscerally appealing, after a seemingly infinite year indoors. I hope you get time to walk in the woods, roll in the grass, or dip your feet in the ocean. But there’s still work to be done! Marketing and martech continue to advance, adapting to the “new normal” of innovative digital customer experiences and digital business operations. …

Summer of Stacks: Opening the 2021 MarTech Stackie Awards Continue Reading »

The Great App Explosion can’t be stopped. But it can be harnessed. A couple of years ago, I proposed a model of 4 layers of app integrations with SaaS platforms. Advocating for better integration, for marketing apps in particular, I pointed out that not all integrations are equal. They vary significantly in how deeply they’re integrated. The 4 layers of integration that I described: Data — sharing data between apps, which is the most common …

Is your entire martech stack becoming one big virtual “platform”? Continue Reading »