tl;dr There are three trends that are changing the nature of martech. They will catalyze the end of the “first golden age of martech” and lay the foundation for a second golden age that will be much larger, but likely look quite different. Ecosystems — instead of marketing cloud suites vs. best-of-breed point solutions, we […]

If you have been following my work for a while, you know that I’m a big believer in sharing as much research as possible with the martech community at no cost. For instance, you can download the whole database of marketing technology vendors for free. Or download all of the marketing stacks from the Stackies […]

Ready for a great New Year? While I may be a curmudgeon skeptic when it comes to most marketing industry predictions, I’m quite certain of three things for the year ahead: Marketing technology & operations management will be integral to marketing in 2019. Martech tools, talents, tactics, and the overall marketing world will continue to […]

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 […]