A number of people have been asking me when the 2016 version of my marketing technology landscape will be released. The short answer is “soon.”
But I’ll share some more color if you’re interested…
For the past two years, I’ve gotten in the habit of working on that landscape over the Christmas and New Year holidays. Things quiet down for those couple of weeks, and I sit out on the deck of my brother-in-law’s house, in a typically warmer climate, and assemble the far majority of the landscape in that time. I actually enjoy working on it — like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, but one where you have to go hunting for the pieces out on the Internet.
This year, however, two things caused this to take much longer than I originally anticipated.
First, as you might surmise from the picture at the top of this post — the view from my chair as I sat down to work on this year’s version — I decided to reorganize the landscape. (Don’t read too much into the design shown in that photo, as that was very early in the process.) I’ll have more to say about the new design with the final release, but I believe the marketing technology space has shifted in interesting — and arguably counter-intuitive — ways that could be better represented by a different layout.
However, rethinking groupings and categories — and re-evaluating vendors through this new lens — has proven to be a fairly intense exercise, requiring more time to get it right.
Second — and the amusing irony of this is not lost on me — I underestimated the number of marketing technology companies out there today. I won’t make a prediction as to the number that will be on the final release of my landscape graphic, as space constraints will force me to make this “a very large representative sample” at best. But suffice to say, the industry has not shrunk.
The dynamics of this industry keep getting more fascinating every year. So I promise, I’ll have an updated landscape for you soon with some really interesting points for discussion.
In the meantime, as a brief diversion from the real work of categorizing the space, I’ll share with you a couple of amusing categories of marketing tech companies, such as the Marketing Blues:
And Buzz Marketing (or perhaps I should have called it “Marketing Cross-Pollination”):
Clearly, the killer martech company of 2016 will be named “BlueHive” — I joke, but of course, that’s already a real company.
Okay, okay, I’m going back to work on that gigantic jigsaw puzzle now. Stay tuned!
P.S. By the way, if you’re interested in the continuing evolution of marketing technology, be sure to check out the MarTech conference this March — two days of in-depth sessions by leading experts and practitioners in the field, dozens of innovative martech companies, and over 1,000 peers. Beta rates expire Feburary 13, so sign-up before then!
Anxiously looking forward to it and it’s printed version at MarTech. Thanks for all the hard work you put into this.
Thanks for all you do to help make sense of the marketing technology world Scott! I can’t wait to see the new version!
Looking forward to the 2016 version!
Looking forward to this one. Don’t forget http://www.adngin.com which can be placed in AdTech or in A/B tools. Where will it go? I can’t wait to find out.
Incredibly embarrasing. My ‘Blue’ company is in a co-working space with ‘Honey’.
Looking forward to it! Thanks for rocking this incredibly helpful diagram for the last few years.
Looking forward to it! I’d be curious to see if there are any (deep) machine learning and AI related companies that are crossing over into marketing technology… or if it’s still too early…
Waiting for this, especially the new classification.
I bet this is hard work.
Would you consider doing a non-static version anytime ?
– search field by name
– clickable logos to companies’ websites
That would be nice.
Thanks for doing this anyway, it’s great.
I can’t even imagine the amount of work that goes into this. But it does put Martech “on the map” for the people I show it to.
Oops Martec not Martech. Just realized I have been writing it wrong for a long time.
Hi Scott,
Thanks for your work, it’s really interesting. Do you publish your data anywhere by chance? Just a thought, but posting a link to a google form might be all that’s needed to get the data to come to you 🙂
Best,
Tony
Humor has to be essential to the process.
Thanks for another year. May it continue to feed your creativity and curiosity and not become a burden.
Anxiously looking forward for the 2016 landscapte. Appreciate your great work!
Hi, Scott,
Will you be releasing this only at MarTech?
Scott,
Every year I look forward to this. Can I make two humble suggestions with this?
Would you consider a searchable version of this? A plan text version so someone can search for company names rather than a logo based version?
Also maybe a version that implies market leader/size of the org based on the scale of the logo?