For 13 years of the ever-expanding martech landscape, conventional wisdom has predicted that our industry would consolidate. That conventional wisdom has failed spectacularly. Or more accurately, the conventional wisdom of the software industry from 10, 20, 30 years ago has been disrupted by new dynamics, in a new environment. The barriers to creating software are a fraction of what they once were — and are rapidly shrinking further with AI. The barriers to distributing software …

Blueprint for a hypothetical martech “holding company” for a world where aggregation beats consolidation Continue Reading »

In our recent State of Martech 2024 report — which is free and now fully ungated — Frans Riemersma and I analyzed a ton of transformation happening across the martech industry, from the AI-powered explosion of the martech landscape to three counterintuitive truths of “composability” in martech stacks. Two of our most important findings, however, were the prioritization and adoption of foundational capabilities that are necessary for marketing to harness the full power of AI: …

The new data layer in martech has taken hold as the foundation upon which marketing AI will be built Continue Reading »

Take a guess at filling in the blank here: _______ is to AI Agents as Data is to AI Models The answer, as you likely surmised from my headline, is APIs. Let’s discuss why… Data is the differentiation in AI models For the past year and a half, the hyper hype cycle of AI madness has agreed on only one clear truth: data will be your most strategic asset in the Age of AI. LLM …

APIs are “very important” to martech buyers today, but they’ll be crucial for the coming wave of AI agents Continue Reading »

For years, the conventional wisdom in martech has been: the fewer apps in your stack, the better. It’s obvious, right? By reducing the number of apps, you will save money, have a better user experience, and improve your governance control. The CFO’s default answer to optimizing martech costs? Cut apps. The CIO’s default answer to optimizing martech governance? Cut apps. Seems rational. But what if it wasn’t necessarily true? Last week, on #MartechDay (May 7), …

3 counterintuitive surprises about composable martech stacks in The State of Martech 2024 report Continue Reading »

Yesterday we celebrated the 10th annual Stackie Awards as part of #MartechDay. Every year for the past decade, we’ve invited marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates their marketing tech stack and how they conceptualize it. From these entries, we select five “winners” whose visualizations we thought were particularly noteworthy in some way. I put “winners” in quotes because, as we always acknowledge, the real determination of a winning stack is if it …

26 magnificently illustrated martech stacks from the 2024 Stackie Awards, with the winners revealed Continue Reading »

Happy #MartechDay to you! On the first Tuesday of May, we celebrate the martech industry and all the talented marketing technologists and marketing ops professionals who work in it. Cheers to you for all you do in pioneering this wild and woolly field. It’s also the day when Frans Riemersma and I release our annual update to the marketing technology landscape. You can download a hi-res JPG image or a hi-res clickable PDF of it. …

2024 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic — 14,106 martech products (27.8% growth YoY) Continue Reading »

Tech stacks are large. The empirical stack data we recently shared from Zylo, a leading SaaS management platform, showed that even after a year of belt-tightening, the average SMB (500 employees or less) still has 162 SaaS apps. Mid-market companies (500 to 2,500 employees) have 245. And large enterprises have 650. This isn’t particularly surprising any more, is it? Oh, and by the way, those numbers don’t include: (1) Any custom apps the company has …

Visible and invisible tech stacks, and the upsides and downsides of “shadow IT” in martech and beyond Continue Reading »