50 fascinating marketing tech companies, all in one room

We’re 8 weeks away from this year’s MarTech Conference in San Francisco, and I’m very excited about how it’s shaping up. There are so many great speakers who have agreed to share their experience and perspective on marketing technology management and how to harness marketing technology to shape customer experience.

I’ll do a more detailed write-up of the presentations next week (there are a couple of early previews of what to expect here and here). But today, I want to highlight another feature of the conference: the exhibit hall.

You may have raised an eyebrow at that last remark, “The exhibit hall?”

I know, exhibits at conferences can easily suffer from the Goldilocks Dilemma — there are either too few or too many companies. Too few, and your odds of discovering something that you didn’t already know about can be slim. Too many, and well, it becomes more of a physical trek than an intellectual journey.

With 50 marketing technology companies exhibiting at MarTech, as mapped out above, I believe we’ve entered the “just right” zone. You can easily see them all over the two-day event — including during two cocktail receptions, if you find that a good beer or glass of wine facilitates an exploratory mindset — without collapsing from exhaustion. And there’s enough fascinating variety among them, that I guarantee you will make several cool, new discoveries — no matter how well you already know this space.

But it’s not just about the number of vendors, but their context. As the largest independent marketing technology event — i.e., one that isn’t owned and operated by a major marketing technology company itself — MarTech attracts an eclectic mix of marketing technology providers. You’ll get to meet multiple large “platform” companies, start-ups who are seeking to disrupt them, and a wide range of specialist innovators who cross multiple marketing platform ecosystems — all in one room. It is a live microcosm of the system dynamics of the marketing technology landscape that will include companies from categories across the entire landscape, such as:

• Asset & Resource Management
• Audience & Market Data
• BI, CI & Data Science
• Call Analytics/Management
• Content Marketing
• Customer Data Platforms
• Databases & Big Data
• E-commerce
• Email Marketing
• Interactive Content
• Marketing Automation
• Performance & Attribution
• Personalization & Chat
• Platform/Suite
• SEO
• Social Media Marketing
• Tag Management
• Team & Project Management
• Testing & Optimization
• Video Marketing
• Web Content/Experience Management
• Web & Mobile Analytics

And there are other fascinating kinds of marketing technology vendors that I don’t even have categories for on my landscape yet. I expect to learn quite a bit myself, the kind of learning that happens best face-to-face — and I’m humbled by all the great companies who have decided to participate.

Of course, in many ways, this exhibit hall is a bonus to attending MarTech. That arrow at the upper right of the exhibit hall map points to where the sessions will be held on one main stage.

Our speakers include renown marketing technologists, digital marketing leaders, and pioneering CMOs from companies such as Aetna, CA Technologies, Coca-Cola, Dell, Dun & Bradstreet, EMC, Grey, Kimberly-Clark, LinkedIn, Netflix, New Relic, and the University of Washington.

Leading analysts from CEB, Forrester, IDC, Raab Associates, and SiriusDecisions will share their latest research and cross-industry perspective. From the investment side of the sector, we’ll hear from the top marketing tech partners at Battery Ventures, Foundation Capital, and LUMA Partners. And a select set of hand-picked experts will help you connect marketing technology with conversion optimization, customer experience architecture, social selling, and lean UX design.

We’ll top it off with an inspiring keynote from John Maeda, arguably the prototypical hybrid leader for our boundary-crossing digital world.

But the best part of MarTech will be people like yourself — over 600 tech-savvy marketers and marketing-savvy technologists. The opportunity to connect with and learn from your peers sparks the kind of magic that only an in-person event can deliver.

The “beta rate” for attending the conference expires February 21, and tickets are selling fast. Register now to guarantee your spot.

We’re going to have an incredible two days together!