Tom Wentworth, a pioneering engineer-turned-CMO in the marketing technology space whom I’ve long admired, recently commented on a LinkedIn thread, “Martech is about to face its ‘dot-com’ moment. How many pet stores did we really need in 2000?” I think he’s right — but possibly not in the way he (or you) might think. The […]

I’ve said many times that change is at the heart of modern marketing operations. It is at the very center of the “4 forces” diagram of The New Rules of Marketing Technology & Operations because it’s the dominant variable of our profession. And what’s the most common and concrete change in martech? Why changing martech […]

If there’s one marketing awards program where the entire industry wins, it’s The Stackies. Each year, dozens of organizations enter a 16×9 slide that visualizes their “marketing stack” — the collection of martech software they use — and how they think about its structure. We then publish them all, ungated, for everyone in marketing to […]

The following is a guest post by Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group and popular speaker and workshop leader at the MarTech conference series. The above graphic is Real Story Group’s Omnichannel Stack Reference Model. Earlier this autumn, Real Story Group convened two-dozen martech/CX stack owners from among our larger subscribers for two days […]

The editorial staff here at chiefmartec.com (looking in the mirror) are rather obsessed with martech stacks. What’s in them? How much is controlled by IT or marketing operations? How do marketers think of them? How many apps in them support self-service users? How big are they? Blissfully recently published their SaaS Trends: IT & Compliance […]

A few months ago, I read a fascinating article published by the Lyft Engineering team on Medium, Building Lyft’s Marketing Automation Platform. While we know there are a lot of homegrown martech systems in the wild, it’s rare for them to be described publicly. I’ve referred to them as “dark martech” because of that lack […]

Martech: 2020 and Beyond, a new report collaboratively produced by BDO, WARC, and the University of Bristol, estimates that the worldwide spend on marketing technology is $121.5 billion. Their report focuses on martech spending in North America and the UK, where they’ve sized the market as growing from $34.3 billion in 2017 up to $65.9 […]

Boy, did I kick a hornet’s nest. A couple of weeks ago, I shared an article from MIT Sloan Management Review, Implement First, Ask Questions Later (or Not at All) by Stephen J. Andriole. A quick summary: As a result of easy-to-acquire SaaS tools and pressure to harness the relatively unknown possibilities of emerging technologies […]

Thousands and thousands of entrepreneurial vendors. A few giants that have consolidated portfolios of dozens of their own “best-of-breed” options, so a buyer could theoretically get everything they need from one source. A dizzying array of choices for buyers. Yet choices that many become quite passionate about. They enjoy discovering new ones that are special […]

Disclosure: This is one of those rare articles on this blog that’s entangled with my work as VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. While it’s not specific to HubSpot — this is an issue and a framework that I believe are broadly applicable across all SaaS platforms — I want to be transparent that I do […]