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 […]

The alliterated alternate title for this post could be: Tickets, Tools, and Taylor Swift — One Father’s Afternoon in Automated Customer Experience Purgatory. Subtitle: a small case study of anti-patterns for customer experience bots and automation. My daughter turned 10 this year. As a present, my wife and I agreed to take her to her […]

Want to attend MarTech in Boston this fall, October 1-3? (If you’re a hybrid marketing technologist — or a marketing executive who depends on them — the answer should be, “Of course!”) Then this is the last week to get tickets at the lowest “alpha” rate — prices go up on Sunday, July 29. Since […]

(Note: the above infographic is just a sneak peak of the partial agenda for MarTech coming up — more sessions and keynotes will be announced soon.) Man, if you’re in marketing, the world is spinning fast. Technologies such as customer data platforms (CDPs), machine learning, chatbots, microservices, and more are quickly racing through the Gartner […]

I’ve grown to dislike the label “unicorn” in martech. In the early years of the marketing technology revolution, marketing technologists — hybrid professionals who applied technical skills in a marketing context — were sometimes called unicorns. Partly because they brought seemingly magical capabilities to marketing. But mostly because finding the perfect blend of marketing and […]