Marketing Management

The theme of my keynote talk at the MarTech conference earlier this month was “platforming marketing.” (Watch a reenacted video of the keynote here.) I’ve spent much of my career thinking about two broad topics: marketing and platforms. Yet it took me a while to recognize that the patterns I see in software platforms are the same thing I now see happening with the democratization of martech within marketing organizations today. They’re both striving to …

Platforming Marketing: 8 P’s of Self-Service Martech Continue Reading »

We had a fantastic MarTech event this week. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed and participated in it. My keynote was “Platforming Marketing” — how the next stage of martech maturity is about applying platform principles in marketing to empower your entire organization to leverage martech capabilities in their work. While we did not record the keynote live, I decided to recreate a version of it with Loom: I hope to see you at a …

Video recreation of my MarTech opening keynote: Platform Marketing Continue Reading »

You’re familiar with Gartner’s iconic hype cycle, right? Pretty much every technology follows the same pattern of unrealistic hype in its early stages, followed by a crash of disappointment when those lofty aspirations fail to materialize. But then it steadily climbs up the “slope of enlightenment,” where reality and reasonable expectations eventually converge. I’ve heard many people say that martech has entered the “trough of disillusionment” stage of the hype cycle this year. After buying …

Is martech in the trough of disillusionment? I hope so Continue Reading »

On the surface, this cartoon last week from Tom Fishburne, the talented Marketoonist, seems to be poking fun at the different “chief” titles that marketers and marketing-ish executives use. Ha ha, us mad marketing people and our zany titles du jour. But my reaction was: this is exactly why marketing is so challenging today. No, the challenge isn’t sorting out which title to use. (Although what we call something does impact the way it’s framed …

This perfectly captures the Herculean challenge of modern marketing Continue Reading »

Martech is marketing — at least an essential part of it. And MarTech is the place to master it. Next month in Boston, we’ll be hosting the latest and greatest MarTech conference, September 16-18 at the Hynes Convention Center. Come soak up three days worth of educational sessions covering key topics and practices across marketing technology and operations, featuring: 6 keynotes from superstars such as Charlene Li and Mitch Joel 24 breakout educational sessions across …

Want to thrive with martech and marketing operations? Check out these 75 amazing MarTech sessions Continue Reading »

Sorry, but odds are you’re failing at SEO and probably don’t even realize it. That was the cold splash of water in the face that I got talking with Jessica Bowman, owner of enterprise SEO consultancy SEO Inhouse, author of The Executive SEO Playbook, and an editor-at-large for Search Engine Land. Jessica is pretty much the world’s leading expert when it comes to running successful SEO at large enterprise companies. Frankly, SEO is not a …

Is your martech leadership failing on SEO? Probably Continue Reading »

Normally, I don’t write about career moves on this blog. But an article that appeared in Ad Age this week about the upcoming departure of famed McDonald’s CMO Silvia Lagnado — and the company’s decision to not name a new CMO — caught my attention. Another CMO role disappearing is newsworthy — that’s been emerging as a trend lately. But what really caught my attention was how they’re filling the gap: they’re promoting two VPs …

McDonald’s drops CMO role and creates a new SVP marketing technology role (under the CIO) Continue Reading »

You can’t escape Amazon in the digital economy. Now a trillion-dollar company, they have disrupted diverse sectors from retail to software development with a deftness and drive that’s admirable and alarming. They actually seem to be speeding up their rate of innovation as they scale, defying the Law of Large Companies that causes giants to get dragged down by their own girth. How do they manage that? A week ago at the MIT Platform Strategy …

Want to innovate like Amazon? Here’s their formula Continue Reading »

Last week, I staked the claim that “martech is marketing.” Whatever you think of martech and its relationship to marketing at large — or what you believe its relationship should be — it’s hard to deny that it’s not a part of marketing’s domain. Love it or hate it, marketing technology is entangled in the practice of modern marketing. The question is simply to what degree. There’s actually quite a range of possibilities for what …

Martech is marketing, kind of like fixing things is home ownership Continue Reading »

“Martech is marketing.” The MarTech conference recently updated its tagline to that phrase, evolving beyond our original motto, “Marketing. Technology. Management.” It’s not that the conference itself changed. But since we launched the event five years ago, the context in which it operates — the profession of marketing — sure has. Over that time, the landscape of marketing technology has grown from around 1,000 vendors to over 7,000. But that’s more of an expression of …

Martech is marketing: a wide spectrum of possibilities Continue Reading »