Marketing Management

Ops is sexy these days. In martech land, it’s been a growing story around RevOps — revenue operations — that connects together marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops under one umbrella, often reporting up to a chief revenue officer (CRO) or chief customer officer. The coalescence of these functions has been driven partly by shared DNA — there’s some similarity in the kinds of work each of these ops teams performs (e.g., automation, …

Big Ops: Converging Digital Ops Domains and Toolsets Continue Reading »

Four months ago, I started a collaboration with Jason Baldwin, the global head of product management at WPP, to write a paper on the major trends in marketing technology that we believe will shape the decade ahead for agencies and brands. It wasn’t about guessing our own “hype cycle” of individual technologies. There are plenty of those predictions out there, and I’ve never found them particularly helpful for executives trying to shape their long-term strategies …

Martech 2030: Five Trends in Marketing Technology for the Decade of the Augmented Marketer Continue Reading »

Holy cats, 2020 has been a crazy year. And it’s not over yet. (cringe) But for all the terrible things this year has besieged us with, it’s also revealed something encouraging. We — as individuals, but perhaps more remarkable as organizations — are capable of adapting to change on a much faster time scale than we previously expected. “Digital transformation” has been a hot topic for at least a decade. For companies at any real …

Bending Martec’s Law: 2020 has taught us we’re more agile than we thought Continue Reading »

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 »