The deal was announced yesterday afternoon: Adobe is acquiring Marketo for $4.75 billion. (As fate would have it, it was just a few hours before I was speaking at a MOCCA marketing operations event in New York on the topic of martech industry trends — to be followed by a Q&A with Sarah Kennedy Ellis, […]

The following is a guest article by Donny Dvorin, general manager of Never Stop Marketing Research, a leading analysis and consulting group focused on blockchain martech providers. Jeremy Epstein, the CEO of Never Stop Marketing, will be keynoting the MarTech conference this October 1-3 in Boston. It was clear to anyone who attended one of […]

A ton of marketing technology is sold today as the solution to delivering better customer experiences. Of course, martech doesn’t automagically create great customer experiences any more than a food processor automagically makes you a great chef. It depends on how you wield it. And, frankly, the most important elements of customer experience have nothing […]

In the beginning, there was the first marketing technology landscape. And then it grew. And grew. And grew. And grew. And grew. And, yes, this year it grew again. To be honest, there were a number of things about this slightly obsessive exercise of mine that surprised me over the years. For instance: I was […]

This article was co-written with Anand Thaker, my collaborator on the marketing technology landscape. Inc. Magazine’s annual list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies in the U.S., the Inc. 5000, was just released for 2018. Out of those 5,000, 2.64% of them are martech companies that appeared on this year’s marketing technology landscape, e.g., the […]

Man, people sure do find anecdotes more persuasive than data. (As an aside, this is why machine learning can be so helpful in applying true data-driven marketing — our human biases really skew our perception of reality.) We most recently released the 2018 marketing technology landscape with the data showing nearly 7,000 martech-related vendors. I […]

Wow, I am just in awe of the 54 entries we received into The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. The quality of the illustrations this year were particularly remarkable. These are marketers who clearly have a lot of passion for their infrastructure. (How’s that for something you wouldn’t have heard 5 years ago?) If […]

Like the running of the bulls in Pamplona — an apt simile? — it’s become a yearly tradition for me to release the marketing technology landscape at the MarTech conference in the spring. So here at our event in San Jose today, I’m pleased to unveil the 2018 edition of one of the most loved-and-hated […]

As we’ve been slaving working away on the new 2018 edition of the Marketing Technology Landscape (“Martech 5000”) graphic — and that’s not the editorial “we,” but indeed a whole team of obsessively-compulsive martech lunatics dedicated industry advocates — it suddenly occurred to me this morning that we’ve been selfishly hoarding the fun. Seriously, you’ve […]

Yesterday, Mulesoft announced it was being acquired by Salesforce for $6.5 billion. That’s a pretty hefty premium — a 21.6X multiple — given that the company had less than $300 million in revenue for 2017. That’s a strategic bet. So what’s the strategy? Although I’ve sworn off the game of making predictions, I do feel […]