State of the Marketing Technologist 2012

It’s that time of year again. This blog’s anniversary — our fourth (!) — and time to look at the evolution of the “marketing technologist” meme over the past year.

First, let’s start with an update on Google searches:

Although Google’s numerous algorithm changes make these year-over-year comparisons a little fuzzy, the overall trend seems clear. Marketing technology matches have grown 327% over the past year. And with the explosion of marketing technology, it follows that organizations are increasing establishing positions to manage it: matches for managers and VPs of marketing technology have more than doubled.

Interestingly, the term “marketing technologist” has only grown 86% — and the “chief marketing technologist” namesake of this blog actually decreased 17%. But a rose by any other name…

The label doesn’t matter. The role does.

In the past year: Forrester repeatedly advocated for an office of marketing technology and launched their first CIO-CMO summit to focus on this intersection. Gartner predicted that CMOs may have larger IT budgets than CIOs.

And the job boards reflect this. For instance, do a search for “marketing technology” on SimplyHired.com:

Marketing Technologist Content from Around the Web

In addition to the Forrester and Gartner research mentioned above, many others continued to spread the word about marketing technologists rising. Here are just a few:

• David Nickelson started the Marketing Technologist group on LinkedIn
• John Refford published a terrific amount of marketing technologist focused content on his marketing technology blog (“use technology to make marketing more awesome”)
• Eric Brown, my favorite voice for the new IT, wrote a number of great IT-meets-marketing posts on his blog, such as this one of a story of a CIO, IT and marketing
• Matthew Grant of MarketingProfs did a podcast with me on Why you need a marketing technologist
• ITSMA ran a research interview with me on the question of Do you need a Chief Marketing Technologist?
• Alterian published a guest post of mine answering this question as well, Do you need a chief marketing technology officer (CMTO)? to promote a webinar on 10 reasons why you need a chief marketing technology officer with Marcus Tewksbury
• Chief Content Officer magazine ran a feature story I wrote on the Rise of the Marketing Technologist
• The Australian Direct Marketing Association published their own opinion of The Rise of the Marketing Technologist
• Many great posts by Elmer Boutin on his blog on the crossing of marketing and IT
• Jim Suchara presented the idea of the marketing technologist to a group of IT executives and managers in Detroit, inspiring this piece on finding marketing technologists
• Ray van Hilst organized a great session on untangling and understanding the marketing department’s technology at the ASAE Technology Conference
• Michael Brenner pulled together a panel-like article on marketing tools and technology — how does a marketer decide
• Widen published a post on digital asset management and the marketing technologist
• Code Worldwide, an innovative firm coming out of Omnicom, published their presentation on the marketing technologist: why clients need new vendors

…and I’m just scratching the surface (apologies to those posts I left out).

A Brief Chief Marketing Technologist Retrospective

A big thank you to everyone who read, shared, and inspired the ideas on this blog over the past year. Looking back, some of my favorite posts included:

• Marketing Technology Landscape Infographic
• Why marketers should learn how to program
• 7 Laws of Technology for Marketers
• 14 marketing technology organizational models
• Agencies and the marketing technologist revolution
• You might be a marketing technologist if…
• 5 strategies for business, life, and really hard math problems

We even had a couple of video presentations to boot, thanks to Adobe and Search Insider Summit:

• 3-minute interview: why marketing technologists now
• The Book of Marketing Technology on Broadway
• A brief, hand-wavy history of marketing fragmentation

I’m looking forward to what the next 12 months will bring us on this “marketing technologist” — or whichever name you prefer — journey together.

P.S. Any additional Google searches we should count this year to see how far they’ll grow by next February?