Spring is one of my favorite times of year in the martech industry. We release the latest marketing technology landscape. We share the latest data on martech careers and job responsibilities. We — in normal times — run the MarTech Conference in the Bay Area. And at that conference, we announce the winners of The […]

Welcome to the 2020 edition of the marketing technology landscape. Yes, it grew once again, by 13.6%, up to a total of 8,000 martech solutions. That’s after 615 from the 2019 landscape went away, either consolidated with another martech company or simply gone defunct. If you were predicting consolidation, an 8.7% churn rate from one […]

Early in March, Blissfully released their 2020 SaaS Trends Report. As with previous data they’ve shared, the report is full of highly interesting findings based on actual SaaS usage — not just what people claim they’re using when asked (which is usually underreported by half). I was just getting ready to excitedly write a story […]

TL;DR If you think the world of martech software has shrunk, take a tour of Europe. Everybody needs a hobby. Golf. Fishing. Home brewing. For some of us, it’s collecting logos of martech companies and carefully categorizing them into little boxes on slides, to the delight or dismay of marketers at conferences worldwide. I say […]

I’m used to getting a lot ribbing pushback on the scale of the marketing technology landscape. “7,000 martech vendors is way too much!” My gut-level, defensive reaction is to reply, “Hey, it’s not my fault. I’m just counting them.” Of course, one could argue with the work I do with HubSpot’s platform ecosystem, we are […]

The good folks at Ascend2, a marketing industry research firm, recently released a study on Martech Stack Optimization. It’s the kind of report that I open with the enthusiasm of that kid from the movie A Christmas Story opening the present of his dreams. (I’ll try not to shoot my eye out.) Lots of good […]

As you know, we’re in the middle of awards season. Oscars. Grammys. Golden Globes. All fine trophies to be had. But my favorite kudos, of course, are The 2020 Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Marketers send in a single 16×9 slide that illustrates the way they think of their marketing stack. We share them all […]

Back in September 2017, Toronto-based ScribbleLive acquired ion interactive, the interactive content SaaS company I had co-founded and served as president and CTO. Scribble had raised $50 million (Canadian dollars?) from a bunch of VCs and had executed a string of acquisitions — including the content talent marketplace Visual.ly — to build out an enterprise […]

It’s a new decade — and time for a new approach to the marketing technology landscape. Contribute a new or updated martech vendor here. Report an acquired or defunct martech vendor here. Download the 2019 Excel spreadsheet here. Those are the TL;DR links above. Here’s the story of what we’re doing and where it’s headed… […]

Tom Wentworth, a pioneering engineer-turned-CMO in the marketing technology space whom I’ve long admired, recently commented on a LinkedIn thread, “Martech is about to face its ‘dot-com’ moment. How many pet stores did we really need in 2000?” I think he’s right — but possibly not in the way he (or you) might think. The […]