I’m used to getting a lot ribbing pushback on the scale of the marketing technology landscape. “7,000 martech vendors is way too much!” My gut-level, defensive reaction is to reply, “Hey, it’s not my fault. I’m just counting them.” Of course, one could argue with the work I do with HubSpot’s platform ecosystem, we are […]

The good folks at Ascend2, a marketing industry research firm, recently released a study on Martech Stack Optimization. It’s the kind of report that I open with the enthusiasm of that kid from the movie A Christmas Story opening the present of his dreams. (I’ll try not to shoot my eye out.) Lots of good […]

As you know, we’re in the middle of awards season. Oscars. Grammys. Golden Globes. All fine trophies to be had. But my favorite kudos, of course, are The 2020 Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Marketers send in a single 16×9 slide that illustrates the way they think of their marketing stack. We share them all […]

Back in September 2017, Toronto-based ScribbleLive acquired ion interactive, the interactive content SaaS company I had co-founded and served as president and CTO. Scribble had raised $50 million (Canadian dollars?) from a bunch of VCs and had executed a string of acquisitions — including the content talent marketplace Visual.ly — to build out an enterprise […]

It’s a new decade — and time for a new approach to the marketing technology landscape. Contribute a new or updated martech vendor here. Report an acquired or defunct martech vendor here. Download the 2019 Excel spreadsheet here. Those are the TL;DR links above. Here’s the story of what we’re doing and where it’s headed… […]

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 […]