We, the editorial staff at chiefmartec.com, near sightless from logo-blindness while working on the 2017 marketing technology landscape (no, that link is the old one), have nonetheless seen the light.
In studying thousands of marketing technology companies, until the buzzing of buzzwords now echoes endlessly in our brains, we have triangulated a grand vision for the ultimate martech platform:
An ABM-focused CDP for millennial influencers, powered by AI, with a chatbot interface, VR data visualization, and a blockchain database that handles big data in real-time, all run in the cloud.
Such an epic concept deserves a face-melting product name, so we will call it: STACK OF ROCK. (Hear the arm-swinging power chords ringing out in celebration.)
But, wait, isn’t a marketing stack something that involves multiple components?
Ah, we have an ingenious plan for how to build this product in the most open fashion ever. No, not microservices. We’re going to architect STACK OF ROCK as a deeply entangled ecosystem of nanoservices. Each nanonservice will consist of no more than a single line of code (minification is permitted) contributed by a different vendor from the martech landscape.
As Shakespeare once said, back when he worked at McKinsey, “All the world is a marketing stack, and you can contribute a nanoservice.” This jumble carefully-curated collection of nanoservices isn’t a marketing suite. It’s a marketing sweet.
It will be rapturously disruptive unconsolidated consolidation.
Since the pace by which breakaway ventures like this achieve billion-dollar “unicorn” status continues to accelerate exponentially, we believe the inevitable extrapolation of this trend is obvious: STACK OF ROCK will be valued at $1 billion here at inception.
Yes, the world’s fastest unicorn company ever is a marketing technology vendor.
(Eat our dust, Uber.)
We asked a number of the VCs that we know — they’re always asking us for tips on the hottest up-and-coming martech ventures, which we usually offer up by throwing darts at a wall-sized version of our landscape — what they thought of our glorious new venture. Their reactions surely confirm our high estimation of this industry monster that we are prepared to unleash upon the world:
“Are you high?”
“We’re not saying ‘no’…”
“Actually, somebody else just pitched us on this last week.”
Anyway, we may skip the whole funding process — that’s so 2016 — and move straight to entertaining bids from the world’s two largest martech Goliaths, Facebook and Google. Has Facebook ever tried to acquire a company for less than $1 billion?
Mark, Larry — we’ll be waiting by the phone: 867-5309. (We’re trying some old-school out-of-home advertising with our M&A hotline. Our AI suggested it. Because certainly there was no human intelligence involved in this.)
P.S. In other news on this April 1, today is really the last day you can purchase tickets to the upcoming MarTech conference in San Francisco, May 9-11. Really, we’re not kidding about that. It’s going to be an awesome event. Maybe even more epic than STACK OF ROCK.
P.P.S. Admittedly, early analyst reviews of STACK OF ROCK are dubious. Arch analyst David Raab was reported to have said, “Scott is not nearly as funny as I am. And I’ll prove it in my MarTech session, Singing the Customer Data Platform Blues.”
I never said any such thing, archly or otherwise. You might the bar is pretty low to be the world’s funniest martech analyst, but with people like Travis Wright in the mix, I am not even a contender. Plus, I’m still sulking because they didn’t laugh at at the cave man joke.
Wait, that was a joke?