Marketing Software

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 of visibility across the industry. Yet like dark matter, there’s reason to believe that these custom-built apps make up a …

Why Lyft decided to build their own internal martech platform Continue Reading »

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 billion here in 2019. The $121.5 global estimate is an extrapolation given the spend in those two markets — which …

Martech is now a $121.5 billion market worldwide Continue Reading »

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 before competitors do, companies are increasingly bypassing the heavyweight “requirements gathering” processes of classic enterprise IT and, instead, more quickly …

Of dinosaurs and meteors: 2 different (and contentious) models of technology adoption Continue Reading »

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 to them and enthusiastically telling their peers about them. A massive landscape graphic that maps it out from a blogger …

If the martech landscape is driving you to drink, maybe this will help Continue Reading »

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 have a stake in how these dynamics play out in our industry. According to a recent study by the market …

Not all integrations are created equal: 4 layers of app integrations with SaaS platforms Continue Reading »

UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available. As Bill Murray would have said in Groundhog Day, “Well, it’s martech landscape day… again.” It has become an annual tradition at our spring MarTech conference to release an updated version of maybe the most infamous slide in marketing: the marketing technology landscape. We’re keeping that custom alive this year again. What a crazy graphic! We nicknamed it the “Martech 5000” a couple of years ago. …

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2019): Martech 5000 (actually 7,040) Continue Reading »

For the 5th year, we’ve run The Stackies Awards, where marketers send in a single slide that illustrates their “stack” — the collection of marketing technology tools they use and how they conceptualize them together. We received 48 entries this year, and some truly incredible ones. Airstack graciously sponsored the awards this time. And, as promised, we’ve gladly made a donation of $4,800 to Girls Who Code on behalf of the 48 entrants ABinBev, Airstream, …

48 marketing stacks beautifully illustrated for the 2019 MarTech Stackies: Marketing Stack Awards Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post by Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, an independent analyst firm that evaluates technology vendors and delivers hard-hitting research and advice. RSG only works on the “buy” side to advise enterprise tech decision-makers, and never works for vendors. Tony will be running a workshop and a series of presentations in the MarTech Theater at MarTech next week. From a technology perspective, many of us focus intently on martech …

The New Omnichannel Stack Reference Model from Real Story Group Continue Reading »

For the past couple of years, I’ve been nudging the producers of the MarTech Conference, the amazing team at Third Door Media, to share their own marketing tech stack in The Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Of course, they wouldn’t be eligible to win. Marc Sirkin, their SVP of marketing and experience, is also one of the judges of the contest. But it would be in the spirit of experience sharing that is one of …

Meta-martech: the producers of MarTech publish their own martech stack Continue Reading »

People often complain that my marketing technology landscape has too many apps. If only those crazy martech entrepreneurs would stop making more, all would be right in the jungle. Let’s set aside for a moment the supply-side economics that have fostered this app-a-palooza, e.g., cheap infrastructure in the cloud, a plethora of great open source foundations, worldwide developer talent on demand, etc. While those factors have created a world where there are now near zero …

4 remarkable facts from the latest hard data about the growth of (mar)tech stacks Continue Reading »