Looking back over 2018, it’s been a heck of a year in the martech industry. Thank you for joining, sharing, and contributing — I’m looking gratefully at you, MarTech speakers (in the spring and fall), Stackies entrants, and martech salary survey participants — to this community. I found myself humming this tune in the car […]

As 2018 comes to a close, we can affirm that this was the year that the martech profession crossed into the mainstream. Marketing technologists are no longer unicorns. I was struck by this anecdotally with the speakers and attendees at the MarTech conference in October. But now I’ve also got some great quantitative data to […]

When Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey for 2017-2018 came out last year, many people seized on the fact that the money CMOs allocated for marketing technology had dropped to 22% of their budget, on average, down from 27% the year before. Some took it as an unmistakable sign of an impending martech apocalypse (“martech-alypse?”). I […]

I’m a huge fan of Tom Fishburne, a.k.a. Marketoonist. Every week, I look forward to his latest cartoon, pulling back the curtain on some absurdity of modern marketing that we all recognize but rarely call out. Tom artfully reveals the de-syncs between the dream and reality, in a way that’s funny and insightful. You laugh, […]

One of the ideas I’ve been focused on this year is the rise of “citizen technologists” in marketing — citizen developers, citizen data scientists, citizen integrators, etc. It’s about giving non-technical marketers the tools and empowerment to build apps, analyze data sets, and route data between different cloud services on their own, without having to […]

My opening keynote at the most recent MarTech conference was titled, “The New, New Rules of Marketing (Operations).” It was an iteration on ideas of the 4 forces of marketing operations & technology that I first wrote about a couple of months ago. In agile fashion, I’ve continued to revise this model and its presentation […]

Want to speak at MarTech in San Jose, April 3-5? We invite you to suggest a compelling presentation idea at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management that you’d be passionate about sharing with your peers. Sessions at MarTech are generally 45-minute, in-depth presentations with slides by a solo or duo. (A limited number of […]

The following interview was originally published by the CMO Council in the August 2018 edition of their Marketing Magnified e-journal. They asked me eight great questions about martech for marketing executives. These are my suggestions in reply. 1. How would you characterize the state of marketing technology discovery, qualification, implementation and use in global enterprises […]

As I’ve been preparing for the upcoming MarTech conference in Boston, I have been thinking about the fundamental forces that marketing technology and operation professionals wrangle in their work. I believe there are two overarching challenges in marketing operations today: Our environment is continuously changing, often quite rapidly. We have to gracefully balance opposing concepts […]

I’m going to declare that, as of August 2018, martech has crossed a threshold in maturity. And by martech, I mean the grand view of martech, the convergence of marketing, technology, and management practices across industries — and the hybrid marketing leaders who are driving the strategy and operations of that convergence. Sure, the marketing […]