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 […]

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,

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,

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

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 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

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

I’ve floated the idea of an Inverse Conway’s Law in previous posts before, but only in passing. So today I want to fully describe the concept, because I believe it is a useful way to understand some of the current challenges in martech — and why it may drive a major shift in marketing software

For years, people have been prognosticating the collapse of the martech landscape. That all these thousands of different martech apps are going to be winnowed down to a handful of winners. For the past 12 years, those predictions have been consistently proven wrong, year after year after year. (The myths of martech are nothing if

Why let data get in the way of a good narrative? Tech stacks are going to shrink dramatically. Marketing’s tech stack is bloated compared to every other department. Shadow IT is a scourge across major martech systems. And most SaaS products — especially martech apps — are highly underutilized, a wanton waste of resources. It’s