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 »

First, one more reminder: please take our Martech Composability Survey this week. When you see the questions, I think you’ll agree that having a statistically significant dataset for a “no BS” view of this topic would be super valuable for the whole martech community. We’ll share the full results publicly. But we need your participation. Please and thank you! I’ve been adovcating the benefits of aggregation platforms in martech stacks for a couple of years …

Can martech data be unified, federated, and siloed all at the same time? Yes, and each serves a purpose Continue Reading »

First, a quick ask: please take this 5-minute survey on martech composability. We’ll share the full results back with everyone. I bet it will be very interesting. Thank you! Okay, back to today’s post… I prefer empircal data over gut-feel prognostications. For 12 years, I’ve been told that SaaS in general — and martech in particular — is going to dramatically consolidate. People can be quite vehement in such predictions. Yet year over year over …

Well, SaaS tech stacks shrank from 2023 to 2024… but only by 8%. You were expecting more? Continue Reading »

It’s that time of the year. The Northern hemisphere looks forward to spring. The Southern hemisphere looks forward to fall. And everybody in martech and marketing operations looks forward to the annual Stackie Awards. This will be our 10th edition of The Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Wow, a decade of hundreds of martech stack slides: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. We’d love for you to join this martech community tradition with us this year. To enter …

The 2024 Stackie Awards are now open for entries — share a slide of your martech stack, everybody wins Continue Reading »

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 »