I recently talked with Benjamin Bloom, senior director analyst for marketing technology and emerging trends at Gartner, around a report he recently published on Marketing Technology Drivers of Genius Brand Performance. (There’s a summary of the report in a blog post Ben wrote, Few “Genius” Brands Successfully Integrate Best-of-Breed Solutions Into a Cohesive Martech Roadmap.) “Genius” in this context is a Gartner-specific definition. They’ve developed the Gartner Digital IQ Index to benchmark the digital performance …

The larger your martech stack, the better your marketing performance? Maybe Continue Reading »

Pop quiz, hot shot. You find yourself with a ton of important martech topics to cover, an amazing roster of talented leaders eager to address those topics with their peers, and no venue to gather them together with the broader martech community. What do you do? (An aside: I thought the sequel to the movie “Speed” should have been “Speed and Scale.”) Answer: Why, like everybody else stuck in their basement, start a podcast! Well, …

Announcing The Martech Show: Pilot episode on August 21 at 11am ET — join the live studio audience Continue Reading »

I’ve called the past decade of the 2010’s The First Golden Age of Martech. It was an explosion of both a new industry (martech) and a new profession (marketing technologists). I’ve spilled a gigabyte of digital ink on why this next decade will be The Second Golden Age of Martech (including a recent update on how platform dynamics are driving this next wave). But today, I want to share with you the nice quantified measure …

In The First Golden Age of Martech, the US marketing ecosystem grew 50% faster than GDP Continue Reading »

The large size of the marketing technology landscape stirs many emotions in the marketing community. Excitement. Frustration. Awe. Anger. Yes, anger. Just last week, I was hotly accused by someone on LinkedIn of stoking FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — simply by publishing it. Those vehement reactions always surprise me. It’s just a count of martech companies, dude, arranged as clusters of logos on a slide. It’s not like Galileo telling the Church that …

Why does the massive landscape of marketing services firms not bother people the way martech does? Continue Reading »

I’ve had a hard time writing about martech these past couple of weeks. So I’m just going to write what I want to say, what I need to say. The terrible injustice of the killing of George Floyd was appalling and ugly. The fact that he was one of many victims of such violence and racism — even in just the past month — is all the more gut-wrenching. On top of that, watching the …

Martech is meaningless without our humanity Continue Reading »