Marketing Software

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 to do with technology at all. They have to do with the choices a company makes about how to treat …

Martech companies talk customer-centricity, but can they be customer-centric? Continue Reading »

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 surprised that it grew as much as it did as fast as it did. I was surprised that it became …

Martech Olympics: Even just the UK Marketing Technology Landscape has 417 companies Continue Reading »

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 Martech 5000. Now, 2.64% might not seem like a very large percentage, but when you consider that’s out of every …

1 in 40 of the Inc. 5000 are martech companies Continue Reading »

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 then followed up with a post — intentionally a little provocative — proposing that the myth of martech consolidation is …

The paradox of simultaneous martech consolidation and expansion, illustrated Continue Reading »

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 you’re new to this, a “marketing stack” is the collection of software that a marketing team uses to ply their …

54 marketing stacks from The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards Continue Reading »

UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available. 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 slides in marketing: Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2018) — 4.6MB Slide …

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2018): Martech 5000 (actually 6,829) Continue Reading »

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 not lived until you’ve tried to squeeze 5,000-some-odd logos on to a single PowerPoint slide. It’s an epic Zen exercise …

Announcing the build-your-own martech landscape kit, fun for the whole office Continue Reading »

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 this validates one of the 5 big disruptions to marketing that I’ve been clamoring about for the past two years: …

Salesforce to acquire Mulesoft because, hey, it’s a world of infinite cloud services Continue Reading »

I love The Stackies. Seriously, this “contest” that invites marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates how they conceptualize their marketing technology stack is fascinating. It’s one of my favorite projects with the martech community. Forget the over-simplified pictures that you see from vendors, showing idealized marketing stacks as they might exist in Nirvana. The entries into The Stackies are the real deal. They incorporate solutions from multiple vendors. They feature a wide …

Morningstar shares their marketing stack in The Stackies Continue Reading »

Blockchain and marketing isn’t just a punchline. Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing, a boutique marketing agency for blockchain startups, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the adoption of blockchain and decentralized technology in advertising and marketing — and speaker at the upcoming MarTech conference too — just released the second edition of his blockchain marketing technology landscape. Jeremy has mapped all the blockchain-powered and “decentralized” ventures in the adtech and martech …

Blockchain marketing technology landscape grows 400% Continue Reading »