I was reading Gartner’s latest CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020 — spoiler alert: average marketing budgets have fallen to 10.5% of company revenue and the percentage of the marketing budget dedicated to martech slipped from 29% to 26% — when something truly remarkable popped out at me. On page 20, Gartner included the chart at the […]

In Gartner’s most recent Marketing Organizational Survey for 2019 — how marketing leaders structure their teams today and how they expect them to change over the next several years — a remarkable finding popped out to me: 20% of respondents reported that they run some form of decentralized marketing organization today. By the end of […]

The theme of my keynote talk at the MarTech conference earlier this month was “platforming marketing.” (Watch a reenacted video of the keynote here.) I’ve spent much of my career thinking about two broad topics: marketing and platforms. Yet it took me a while to recognize that the patterns I see in software platforms are […]

We had a fantastic MarTech event this week. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed and participated in it. My keynote was “Platforming Marketing” — how the next stage of martech maturity is about applying platform principles in marketing to empower your entire organization to leverage martech capabilities in their work. While we did not record […]

You’re familiar with Gartner’s iconic hype cycle, right? Pretty much every technology follows the same pattern of unrealistic hype in its early stages, followed by a crash of disappointment when those lofty aspirations fail to materialize. But then it steadily climbs up the “slope of enlightenment,” where reality and reasonable expectations eventually converge. I’ve heard […]

On the surface, this cartoon last week from Tom Fishburne, the talented Marketoonist, seems to be poking fun at the different “chief” titles that marketers and marketing-ish executives use. Ha ha, us mad marketing people and our zany titles du jour. But my reaction was: this is exactly why marketing is so challenging today. No, […]

Martech is marketing — at least an essential part of it. And MarTech is the place to master it. Next month in Boston, we’ll be hosting the latest and greatest MarTech conference, September 16-18 at the Hynes Convention Center. Come soak up three days worth of educational sessions covering key topics and practices across marketing […]

Sorry, but odds are you’re failing at SEO and probably don’t even realize it. That was the cold splash of water in the face that I got talking with Jessica Bowman, owner of enterprise SEO consultancy SEO Inhouse, author of The Executive SEO Playbook, and an editor-at-large for Search Engine Land. Jessica is pretty much […]

Normally, I don’t write about career moves on this blog. But an article that appeared in Ad Age this week about the upcoming departure of famed McDonald’s CMO Silvia Lagnado — and the company’s decision to not name a new CMO — caught my attention. Another CMO role disappearing is newsworthy — that’s been emerging […]

You can’t escape Amazon in the digital economy. Now a trillion-dollar company, they have disrupted diverse sectors from retail to software development with a deftness and drive that’s admirable and alarming. They actually seem to be speeding up their rate of innovation as they scale, defying the Law of Large Companies that causes giants to […]