Marketing Management

Twice a year, I face a dilemma. Presented with hundreds of nominated speakers and topics for an upcoming MarTech conference, I have to choose only a few dozen to fit into a two-day, three-track event. It’s a dilemma for a couple of reasons. First, the vast majority of pitches we get from martech practitioners and experts are really good. Having to turn down most of them, simply due to the limits of time and space, …

A preview of MarTech: over 50 in-depth sessions at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management Continue Reading »

At first, martech and mindfulness would seem to be on opposite ends of the great mandala of life. Let’s face it, the two words don’t often come up in the same sentence. Or really even the same conversation. Mindfulness is a path toward peace. Martech is a path toward pandemonium. At least that’s the way it feels a lot of the time. Marketing and martech are pretty chaotic fields. Disruptions. Distractions. Deafening noise. Martech has …

Martech and mindfulness Continue Reading »

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 will have the best of both: open platforms that serve as stable foundations, augmented by large ecosystems of specialized third-party …

3 trends driving the Second Golden Age of Martech: ecosystems, experts, and (citizen) engineers Continue Reading »

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 for free. Or download the most comprehensive global report of martech salaries and job responsibilities for free. That’s the 2018 …

Help us anonymously benchmark marketing operations and technology salaries Continue Reading »

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 change. MarTech will be the best vendor-agnostic conference to attend to master this discipline, to learn from and network with …

Highly accurate predictions about MarTech in 2019 (well, at least the conference) Continue Reading »

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 this morning and have geekily adapted it to a summary of this year’s “greatest hits” on this blog. Feel free …

The Twelve Days of MarTech Continue Reading »

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 share with you, compliments of Gartner. Bryan Yeager and Anna Maria Virzi, two leading analysts in the marketing technology industry, …

Martech is a mainstream marketing profession, latest Gartner data confirms Continue Reading »

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 actually thought that 22% was a pretty good level of investment in martech. The fact that some budget was redistributed …

Martech jumps to 29% of the CMO’s budget in Gartner’s 2018-2019 survey Continue Reading »

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, but he also helps you view marketing through a more pragmatic lens. The above cartoon on “digital transformation” this past …

The funny and frustrating truth: organizations change more slowly than technology Continue Reading »

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 take a ticket and wait (and wait and wait) for an expert in IT — or even in marketing ops …

Now every marketer is an app developer — even if they don’t know it Continue Reading »