Actually, I’m asking you. What is the current state of marketing technology and operations careers? This is my one-time-a-year pleading on my knees request to the martech community to participate in our survey of professionals in the field. In exchange for 5 minutes of your time, you’ll help all of us better understand the work […]

At the beginning of the 2010’s, I wrote a post about the rise of the marketing technologist. It was the early days of a new, hybrid professional emerging: rare “unicorns” who combined IT skills with marketing domain expertise and a genuine passion for harnessing the blossoming marketing technology landscape. Fast-forward to the start of 2020’s. […]

Happy New Year! To kick off 2020, I’m excited to share one of the first entries into The Stackies 2020: Marketing Stack Awards from Nexthink, an enterprise platform that help IT departments deliver great digital employee experiences. Jon Blumenfeld, Nexthink’s director of digital marketing, created their entry around the concept of a “Periodic Table of […]

I love TED Talks. They have such a great format for packing a really interesting phenomenon, observation, or story into ~15 minutes of focused narrative. Giving one myself — even an independent TEDx Talk — has long been something I’ve aspired to. And so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to do so at […]

Last month, I declared that the 10-years war between marketing and IT was over. This was in response to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020 that showed a remarkable reversal in the relationship: IT went from being one of the “top inhibitors” to marketing’s vision and strategy to being a “top supporter.” Actually, IT vaulted into […]

About a month ago, I received an odd comment on my blog, “Martec’s Law was quoted by the Portuguese navy with respect to asymmetrical warfare. It is definitely a law now.” Huh? That mandated an immediate Google search. Sure enough, Martec’s Law had just appeared in Jane’s Defense Weekly — what AdAge is to marketers, […]

There are notable inflection points in the history of martech where you simply have to pause and say, “Wow, the world sure has changed.” Crossing more than 1,000 solutions on the marketing technology landscape in 2014 was one. Digital ad spend surpassing traditional ad spend earlier this year was another. And now here’s a big […]

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 […]