Marketing Management

I recently talked with Benjamin Bloom, senior director analyst for marketing technology and emerging trends at Gartner, around a report he recently published on Marketing Technology Drivers of Genius Brand Performance. (There’s a summary of the report in a blog post Ben wrote, Few “Genius” Brands Successfully Integrate Best-of-Breed Solutions Into a Cohesive Martech Roadmap.) “Genius” in this context is a Gartner-specific definition. They’ve developed the Gartner Digital IQ Index to benchmark the digital performance …

The larger your martech stack, the better your marketing performance? Maybe Continue Reading »

Pop quiz, hot shot. You find yourself with a ton of important martech topics to cover, an amazing roster of talented leaders eager to address those topics with their peers, and no venue to gather them together with the broader martech community. What do you do? (An aside: I thought the sequel to the movie “Speed” should have been “Speed and Scale.”) Answer: Why, like everybody else stuck in their basement, start a podcast! Well, …

Announcing The Martech Show: Pilot episode on August 21 at 11am ET — join the live studio audience Continue Reading »

I’ve called the past decade of the 2010’s The First Golden Age of Martech. It was an explosion of both a new industry (martech) and a new profession (marketing technologists). I’ve spilled a gigabyte of digital ink on why this next decade will be The Second Golden Age of Martech (including a recent update on how platform dynamics are driving this next wave). But today, I want to share with you the nice quantified measure …

In The First Golden Age of Martech, the US marketing ecosystem grew 50% faster than GDP Continue Reading »

The large size of the marketing technology landscape stirs many emotions in the marketing community. Excitement. Frustration. Awe. Anger. Yes, anger. Just last week, I was hotly accused by someone on LinkedIn of stoking FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — simply by publishing it. Those vehement reactions always surprise me. It’s just a count of martech companies, dude, arranged as clusters of logos on a slide. It’s not like Galileo telling the Church that …

Why does the massive landscape of marketing services firms not bother people the way martech does? Continue Reading »

I’ve had a hard time writing about martech these past couple of weeks. So I’m just going to write what I want to say, what I need to say. The terrible injustice of the killing of George Floyd was appalling and ugly. The fact that he was one of many victims of such violence and racism — even in just the past month — is all the more gut-wrenching. On top of that, watching the …

Martech is meaningless without our humanity Continue Reading »

At today’s virtual Discover MarTech event, I’ll be digging into the latest data from our 2020 Martech Career Survey run in collaboration with the team at MarTech Today. We’ll have an official report out later, but we wanted to get some of these key findings to you right away. In this year’s study, I added a couple of questions about the 4 kinds of marketing technologist roles that I had mapped out earlier this year, …

Job responsibilities of 4 marketing technologist roles: marketers, operations, analytics, and makers Continue Reading »

TEKsystems, who provides a lot of digital transformation services to Fortune 500 companies, recently released their 2020 State of Digital Transformation report. Since I’ve been cutting back on my all-night disco dancing at the clubs lately, I had some extra time to read through it last night. They revealed — or confirmed — some key notions of what transformation is all about. One set of findings was particularly interesting to me — shown in the …

Digital transformation helps those who help themselves: self-service processes and tools Continue Reading »

Hey, I hope you’re doing okay. A crazy and surreal time we’re in. The photo above is my new “office” in the basement of my house. Yeah, I’ve got a green screen set up. I’d like to claim it’s to support seamless virtual backgrounds in the continuous stream of video meetings that now occupy my day. But truthfully, it’s mostly just to hide the massive piles of clutter that our basement gravitationally accumulates. My wife …

Canceling the MarTech Conference scheduled for next month and sharing our updated plans ahead Continue Reading »

With a headline like that, who can doubt that I’ve got marketing in my DNA? Seriously though, as you can see from the at-a-glance editorial agenda above — which doesn’t even include the couple dozen additional vendor-led sessions we’ll also have in our Solutions Tracks and on our MarTech Theater stage — this next MarTech Conference, April 15-17 in San Jose, is going to be jam-packed with deep educational content on marketing technology and marketing …

Only 3 days left for the best price on awe-inspiring, mind-expanding, career-accelerating MarTech tickets Continue Reading »

I spend a lot of time debating dichotomies with myself: The classic: is martech consolidating or expanding? Should you centralize or decentralize marketing, automate or humanize it? Should you practice agile or waterfall approaches to martech product adoption? Should you buy more martech tools or better use the ones you have? The martech triumvirate: suite or best-of-breed, software or services, build or buy? What’s hype or actual technological advancement? So as I find myself contemplating …

Dr. Martech and Mr. Hype: A Transformational Webinar Continue Reading »