Blog – Page 6 – Chief Marketing Technologist

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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Martech Differentiation is at the Decision Layer

Channel, partner, and ecosystem tech is one of the hottest categories in martech today

September 20, 2022 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Jay McBain, formerly of Forrester and now with tech analyst firm Canalys, is the world’s leading expert in partner, channel, and ecosystem technology. Where I’ve gone broad with the martech landscape, Jay has gone deep with his own ecosystem tech landscape. He recently released his 2022 Channels Ecosystem Landscape, shown in the image above but discussed in more detail in his accompanying release write-up. I first came across Jay’s work with his 2017 landscape, where …

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The 2nd Age of Martech has arrived, and it’s all about convergence in ecosystems

August 29, 2022 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

In 2019, I hypothesized that we were on the cusp of a Second Golden Age of Martech. The defining characteristic of this new era was a shift from dichotomies to convergences: From suite vs. best-of-breed to integrated platform ecosystems From software vs. services to blended delivery models with both From build vs. buy to customization on top of commercial platforms Instead of being forced to choose between X or Y — which was never fun …

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Are we “digital” yet? An algorithmic answer to a philosophical question

August 2, 2022 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

“We’re entering a post-digital-transformation era, where companies are no longer planning to become ‘digital.’ They are digital.” I didn’t think that was a particularly controversial statement, which I wrote back in April while working on this year’s martech landscape. It’s hard to inventory all of the ways in which technology is now embedded in marketing and not conclude that we’re past the “we should probably go digital someday” stage of things. But with a study …

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