Marketing Software

The following is a guest post by Gerry Murray, research manager for IDC’s CMO Advisory service and a popular speaker at the MarTech conference. All images in this post are courtesy of IDC. In the early days of the martech industry, every application had to be a standalone solution. In addition to the execution environment (email, web, social), they had to have all the underlying services for data, workflows, analytics, reporting, etc. Thus each was …

The Customer Experience Operating System (CX-OS) Continue Reading »

One of the more amusing moments at MarTech Europe in London was when Jeremy Waite — currently a strategic marketing evangelist at IBM, but previously with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and, before that, Adobe Marketing Cloud — presented the results of an experiment he conducted with IBM Watson. To answer the question, “Why Are All Marketing Clouds the Same?”, he loaded the websites, social media accounts, and other online marketing content from 6 marketing cloud vendors …

6 marketing clouds walk into Dr. Watson’s psychology lab at MarTech Continue Reading »

As a rule of thumb, people wildly underestimate the number of marketing technologies they have deployed in their organization — sometimes by a factor of 2X, sometimes by a factor of 10X or more. “We use 2-3 marketing technologies,” they might answer in a survey, when in truth, they use more like 20-30 products from the marketing technology landscape. It’s completely understandable, of course, as marketing technologies are not weighted equally. Executives naturally remember the …

Odds are your marketing stack is way bigger than you think it is Continue Reading »

I do. As do the researchers at the CEB Marketing Leadership Council, who have put together the most comprehensive marketing technology survey I’ve ever seen. It asks participants about every category on the marketing technology landscape: Have you adopted or plan to adopt a solution? When? Is it a point solution or part of a larger technology solution or platform? How much business value are you getting — or expecting — from it? How difficult …

Want to learn the truth about marketing technology stacks? Continue Reading »

The following is a guest opinion piece by Josh Dreller, VP of product marketing at 4C. Note that 4C could be characterized as a provider of “point solutions” themselves, so this opinion is aligned with their business. But as I aruged in defense of marketing technology point solutions a few years ago, consider the inverse justification too: executives align their businesses with their opinions of where the market is going. Most marketing technology platforms fall …

Consolidating point solutions with a hub in your marketing stack? Continue Reading »

One of the hottest topics in marketing technology today is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and cognitive computing in marketing. If you’re wondering about the difference between those three terms, well, my feeble attempt at delineating them is this: machine learning is a subset of AI (which broadly applies to computers doing “smart” things), and machine learning is used in cognitive computing to enable a software program to “reason” like a human, …

2 terrific #MarTech talks on the rise of AI in marketing Continue Reading »

Whenever I disclaim that my gigantor marketing technology landscape graphic is only a “representative sample” — that there are actually many more martech companies out there than I’ve been able to discover and include — I get the sense that most people consider it simply fine print. “Sure, Scott, you’re disclaiming that so as to not offend a handful of a companies that you might have inadvertently left out,” I imagine them thinking. “But you’ve …

Think my marketing tech landscape is too big? It’s missing 1,900 firms Continue Reading »

Last week, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring LinkedIn for a whopping $26.2 billion. This is the largest acqusition in Microsoft’s history — over three times the size of its acqusition of Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011 — and one of the largest in the history of the digital age (we’ll graciously look past that whole AOL acquiring TimeWarner fiasco). I’d also claim that it’s the largest marketing technology acqusition ever. If you skeptically …

Microsoft buys LinkedIn: the largest martech acquisition in history? Continue Reading »

REMINDER: don’t miss the upcoming INAUGURAL EPISODE of chiefmartecTV live with David Raab this Friday, June 10 at 2pm EDT. Last week was a big week for marketing technology M&A news. Two billion-dollar M&A deals: Marketo was acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for $1.79 billion and Demandware was acquired by Salesforce for $2.8 billion. (Granted, these deals aren’t closed yet, but for now, let’s take them at face value.) What does this …

Big deals for Marketo and Demandware, but what do they mean? Continue Reading »

STAY TUNED at the end of this post to learn about the upcoming INAUGURAL EPISODE of chiefmartecTV, which will be covering this topic with David Raab on June 10. I recently participated in a book discussion at the Atlanta Tech Village with Sangram Vajre, the energetic CMO of Terminus, talking about waves of innovation in marketing technology. His company is one of the emerging stars of the current account-based marketing (ABM) wave. We were remarking …

The disruptive effects of accelerating waves of marketing technology Continue Reading »