Scott Brinker

Entries now being accepted for The 2023 Stackies Awards — what’s in your stack?

February 7, 2023 / Other / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Grab your favorite slide maker, martech pros. It’s time to show your stack. The 2023 Stackies: Martech Stack Awards are now accepting entries for the next 11 weeks — until midnight Pacific on Friday, April 21. There is no fee to enter. In fact, for each qualified entry, we — the awards hosts are myself from chiefmartec.com and Frans Riemersma from MartechTribe — will donate $100 to Justdiggit, a non-profit helping to regreen Africa and cool the planet in the process. So …

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Tech layoffs? Great companies are actively hiring marketing technology talent

January 25, 2023 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In my previous post, I boldly predicted that we’re on the verge of a whole series of martech innovations: AI, composability, AR/VR, even, yes, “Web3”. While I agree with the pessimists that 2023 will be a challenging year for a lot of martech vendors, I believe this is more of a business cycle bump in the road, rather than the end of an industry. We’re just getting started. But my real faith in martech’s growth …

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Martech and Marketing Operations Adoption Lifecycle

2023 will be a chaotic year for martech, yet the start of a massive wave of growth

January 14, 2023 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

I’m going to start the year with a controversial prediction: we are at the beginning of a massive wave of growth in martech. The next 7 years of expansion in our industry and profession will dwarf the past 7 years. I assume that’s a controversial claim because most people think this is going to be a rough year for the martech industry. Partly due to macroeconomic factors — small recession? big recession? And partly due …

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A whirlwind tour of the new martech map, major martech trends for 2023, and how to manage it all in the year ahead

December 7, 2022 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Yesterday, my brother-in-martech Frans Riemersma and I gave a tour de force presentation of the current martech landscape as it stands at the end of 2022 (now officially over 10,000 solutions!), five major trends that we expect will shape martech and marketing in 2023, and a framework for managing it all in what is sure to be a highly “fluid” year ahead. You can watch the complete 60-minute session on YouTube and also download the …

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You can now filter the 10,000+ martech landscape by revenue, size, age and G2 ratings

December 6, 2022 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In today’s virtual event Martech for 2023: The (Really) Big Picture — full video will be shared tomorrow — Frans Riemersma and I released a major update to the interactive martech landscape on martechmap.com. We know: the martech landscape is overwhelming. In our latest update to the database, even after removing a number of solutions that were either acquired or shut down over the past six months, we ended up with more than 10,000 products …

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Tech stacks are still large, but orchestration can make all the difference

November 21, 2022 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Ever see the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon? Great story about the Apollo moon missions. I’m pretty sure it was in one of those episodes that I most remember the impactful difference between “unit tests” and “system tests.” Getting people on the moon required a huge number of different component technologies, many each breakthrough innovations on their own. But success depended on how well the entire system worked. All those components needed to …

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What to expect in martech in 2023 and how to harness it to your advantage

November 10, 2022 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

2023 will be a fascinating but challenging year for marketing. Macroeconomic headwinds are colliding with rising customer expectations for better digital experiences. Martech stacks are consolidating under economic pressure. Yet at the same time, major innovations with generative AI, first-party/second-party data, ecosystem strategies, and fragmenting media channels are driving important changes to marketing’s digital capabilities. On December 6 at 11am EST — 5pm CET and 8am PT — Frans Riemersma and I will give the …

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Partner Ops: The forgotten ops that’s suddenly thriving in the ecosystem era

November 8, 2022 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

tl;dr — The State of Partner Ops and Programs is a “must read” report for martech. A month ago, I wrote about how channel, partner, and ecosystem tech is one of the hottest categories in martech today. As businesses become increasingly interwoven with each other in serving customers in a digital world — where nearly everything can be adjacent to everything else — a whole wave of new opportunities for innovation are opening up. The …

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When is a martech stack too complex?

October 31, 2022 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

At many companies — but not all — their martech stack has become too complex. Aside from the anecdotal evidence that I frequently hear on LinkedIn and Twitter threads, Gartner’s most recent Marketing Technology Survey frames the problem quantitatively: on average, the 324 enterprise marketing technology leaders they surveyed reported that only 42% of their martech capabilities are being used. That’s down from 58% utilization in 2020. You only need two points to draw a …

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Why there are 10,000 martech products that “kinda all do the same thing” (but not really)

October 23, 2022 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

One of the perennial criticisms of the martech landscape is that “most of these products all do the same thing.” Send an email. Render a web page. Analyze some data. This criticism has grown louder in proportion to the growth of the landscape. With an increasingly exasperated tone, people ask, for example, “What’s the point of hundreds of CRMs or marketing automation tools? They’re all just storing the same customer fields and mail merging them …

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