Scott Brinker

Dear marketing readers: hang in with me here. I have a point. Promise. I started programming as a kid, writing multiplayer games for dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) — a precursor to the web and social media as we know it today. It was the late 80’s, early 90’s, and I mostly wrote in a language called C, with some occasional high-performance components written in 8086 Assembly language. For those of you who aren’t software …

Developer vs. non-developer is the wrong divide; what matters with no-code is knowing what you’re doing Continue Reading »

Welcome to 2024! I expect this will be a transformative year in martech. The Martech for 2024 report we published last month (video presentation) covered several of the major trends underway, such as aggregation and composability in stacks — especially in the data layer with cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, and lakes. The common theme of those trends is a breaking down of the boundaries between different martech apps and platforms. The silo’s days are numbered. …

The amazing turning point when martech systems complexity and martech UX complexity diverge Continue Reading »

Last week, Frans Riemersma and I published our Martech for 2024 report, an in-depth analysis of the evolving martech landscape in the gen AI era and the underlying forces of aggregation and composability that are shaping it. You can download a free copy here. We also hosted an hour-long presentation, discussing many of the themes of the report, with the added color commentary of two giant martech nerds armchair industry analysts weighing in on some …

Missed our Martech for 2024 jam session? Catch the replay and get the 89-page report for free Continue Reading »

There was a meme circulating around social media last week of an agency marketer rambling in a “thought leadership” interview on TikTok. I have no idea if it was parody or real. Or more accurately, if it was intentional or accidental parody. It was a jumbled jubilee of buzzword bingo – personalization, data, brand, experience, customer-centricity — that wound up saying absolutely nothing at all. There but for the grace of God go I in …

Major trends in martech for 2024: the real changes underway in a 99% platitude-free report Continue Reading »

Want to know what 2024 has in store for martech? I’m not talking about wild-eyed, hand-wavy, link-baity prognostications that proliferate in every year-end prediction season like that one Mariah Carey Christmas tune. I mean real-world, fact-based, happening-now trends that will inform your marketing operations and technology strategy for the next 12 months. On December 5, Frans Riemersma and I will release a 50+ page report on Martech for 2024. Based on our research over the …

What will happen in martech in 2024? A no-BS report and webinar by two giant martech nerds Continue Reading »

At last count, there are over 11,000 products on the martech landscape. And while it’s been a tough couple of years for many SaaS companies, forcing industry consolidation through acquisitions or shutdowns, the number of new martech startups that keep entering the field remains remarkably robust. Are these people nuts? Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it. However, while the martech landscape is massive by the total count of companies on it, the scale …

Products in the “long tail” of martech have a wide range of different strategies and aspirations Continue Reading »

Was it John Lennon who wrote, “Imagine there’s no martech, I wonder if you can?” I may be misremembering that lyric. But it’s what came to mind when I saw the above chart. It’s from a new Gartner report, 4 Actions to Improve Martech ROI, and it reveals a pretty dramatic shift in ownership of martech responsibilities from marketing to IT. “Configuration and deployment of new marketing technology” saw a 10-point shift from Marketing Leads …

Dissolving martech? Tech stack aggregation brings more power to marketing, more control to IT Continue Reading »

Martech utilization sucks. At least that’s the conclusion one draws from Gartner’s latest 2023 Marketing Technology Survey, which includes the above chart. “Thinking about the totality of the capabilities made available by marketing technology, what percentage of those capabilities are being utilized by your company today?” The average response to that question has dropped steadily for the past four years, from 58% in 2020, to 42% in 2022, to a dismal 33% here in 2023. …

Martech utilization problems: how to diagnose and remedy them Continue Reading »

One of the most interesting annual martech surveys out there is the Martech Replacement Survey produced by the team at MarTech.org. (Kudos to Chris Elwell, whose brainchild this was.) Every year they ask marketers: They also ask about commercial vs. homegrown martech, what the approval process was like, and how the replacement affected staff. Did existing employees get retrained or were new staff or service providers added? Having run the survey for the past four …

Martech stacks and staff are stabilizing, thanks to both better integration and budget pressure Continue Reading »