Marketing Management

The first Tuesday in May is #MartechDay — a day to celebrate all the wonderful people working in the martech industry and the amazing practitioners who bring these capabilities to life in marketing organizations around the world. On last year’s #MartechDay, Frans Riemersma and I released the updated 2022 marketing technology landscape and hosted the The Stackies 2022: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Over 1,200 marketing and marketing operations leaders joined us online for those sessions. …

Join us for the new Best of Breed Marketing Summit for this year’s #MartechDay (May 2) Continue Reading »

15 years ago, sitting at a wobbly kitchenette table in our cramped apartment, on a frigid February morning outside Boston, I started this blog for marketing technologists. Of course, at the time, almost nobody knew what a marketing technologist was. It sounded like an oxymoron. While there were certainly people already working at the intersection of IT and marketing, they were few and far between. Their roles were often ill-defined and underappreciated. But it was …

15 reflections on martech and more from 15 years of writing chiefmartec.com Continue Reading »

In my previous post, I boldly predicted that we’re on the verge of a whole series of martech innovations: AI, composability, AR/VR, even, yes, “Web3”. While I agree with the pessimists that 2023 will be a challenging year for a lot of martech vendors, I believe this is more of a business cycle bump in the road, rather than the end of an industry. We’re just getting started. But my real faith in martech’s growth …

Tech layoffs? Great companies are actively hiring marketing technology talent Continue Reading »

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 …

A whirlwind tour of the new martech map, major martech trends for 2023, and how to manage it all in the year ahead Continue Reading »

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 …

Tech stacks are still large, but orchestration can make all the difference Continue Reading »

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 …

What to expect in martech in 2023 and how to harness it to your advantage Continue Reading »

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 …

Partner Ops: The forgotten ops that’s suddenly thriving in the ecosystem era Continue Reading »

Apologies for the lull in posting. I took a long, much-needed family vacation — almost entirely digital-free. I’m now back in the saddle, recharged and reenergized about all that’s happening in martech. With a huge backlog of cool things to share with you. Here’s the first… Enterprise automation company Workato (disclosure: I’m an advisor to them) recently released their 2022 Work Automation Index. It’s not a survey, but rather the aggregated data from 900 of …

What are we automating in marketing and martech in 2022, and who is automating it? Continue Reading »

Half of martech and marketing ops professionals received a promotion in the past year. More accurately, half of the 426 respondents to our 2022 Martech Career Survey, run in collaboration with the team at MarTech.org, reported receiving a promotion within the past 12 months. But still, that’s impressive, and speaks to the incredible growth and demand for talent in this field. Overall, salaries grew 23% since the last time we surveyed them in 2019. These …

The latest data on martech and marketing ops careers, and an ode to spreadsheets Continue Reading »

“One of the things that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should in martech is the gap between the technology that is installed and the skills that exist in the organization.” In a recent interview I had with Anita Brearton, CEO of CabinetM, this was one of the points she was most animated about. “Stack utilization is a huge issue. You build these big, complex stacks — are you getting your money’s worth? …

The real build vs. buy question in martech is around talent, not technology Continue Reading »