Marketing Software

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 »

Marketing technology, great visualizations, disruptive innovation — these are a few of my favorite things. So I was delighted when Jeremy Posvar and Todd Wells — the two fellows who shared Microsoft’s marketing tech stack in last year’s Stackies awards — reached out to share a paper they had created to help explain blockchain in marketing with their visual explanation skills. You can download a copy of their paper right here — no “fill out …

Team behind Microsoft’s marketing stack visualization tackle blockchain martech Continue Reading »

We just opened up The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards, and I’m delighted to share with you our very first entry. The above graphic represents the evolving marketing tech stack of a small-to-midsize financial services firm over a period of five years. It was created by John Schott, who is now a technical solutions professional for Microsoft Dynamics 365. This is why I love The Stackies: every year, participants share new ways of looking …

How does a marketing tech stack evolve over time? Continue Reading »

The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards are now open for entries, and we’d love to have you participate. If you haven’t heard of The Stackies before, this is — in my, um, humble opinion — the coolest awards program in marketing. (The Clios are so-last-century.) What makes it so cool is that this isn’t a vanity award, but an educational program: everyone in the marketing community gets to benefit from all of the entries. …

Share your marketing tech stack, and we’ll donate up to $10,000 to Girls in Tech Continue Reading »

A couple of weeks ago, I met with Stuart Williams and Seth Ulinski, analysts at TBR, who shared some of their latest digital marketing technology research with me. Many fascinating findings — including the stat that I shared at MarTech in Boston, that over 75% of enterprises now have an executive explicitly responsible for leading adoption of marketing technology. But as they walked me through their deck, there was another finding of theirs that made …

Amazon and Google now lead two key martech categories as vertical competition heats up Continue Reading »

I love the channel software landscape graphic below produced by Jay McBain of Forrester. It’s accompanied by a fantastic article, The Channel Software Stack – A Comprehensive (And Critical) Look At The Future Of The Industry that I highly recommend reading. There’s a whole cottage industry of technology landscapes with little logos out there. (And who am I to throw stones?) Heck, there’s even a software solution for making logo landscapes of other software solutions …

1 million software companies by 2027? We’re gonna need a bigger chart Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post contributed by Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing, a growth marketing advisory firm focused 100% on blockchain and decentralized technologies. He presented at the MarTech conference in Boston earlier this month on Blockchain and the CMO: The Next Era of Marketing. David Johnston of Factom  likes to say that “everything that can be decentralized will be decentralized.” He calls this Johnston’s Law. If I may, I will offer “Epstein’s …

Crypto-marketing: how marketers create crypto-token value Continue Reading »

Officially, my first published marketing technology landscape graphic was in 2011. That was the one where I categorized around 150 marketing technology companies. My most recent one, produced in collaboration with Anand Thaker, was released in May 2017 with nearly 5,000 marketing technology companies on it. By sheer quantity of logos, it got 32 times bigger in just 7 years. Just based on the gross number of companies in the field, that would seem to …

The 2010 marketing technology proto-landscape did consolidate by 61% Continue Reading »