Marketing Software

“Bill Gates got it immediately. It took Andy Grove 10 years to figure it out, and 20 years for Steve Jobs.” That quote in The New York Times by David B. Yoffie, Harvard strategy professor and co-author of a new book, Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs, immediately caught my eye. (Hat tip to M.G. Siegler.) What was “it” that these three titans of technology ultimately all figured …

4 topologies of integrated marketing technology stacks Continue Reading »

I’m excited to announce The Stackies: Marketing Technology Stack Awards. The short version: share a high-level diagram of your own “marketing stack” — the collection of marketing software tools you use, large and small — by May 31, and if yours wins, I’ll donate up to $1,000 to the charity of your choice. All stacks will then be shared in a SlideShare deck, so everyone can have the benefit of learning from each other. Here …

Share your marketing stack and direct $1,876 for charity Continue Reading »

When it comes to valuations, the marketing technology landscape seems to follow, more or less, a power law distribution. A few companies are worth a tremendous amount of money, the so-called “fat head” of such a distribution. And then there’s a “long tail” of ever smaller niche companies that trail behind them as far as the eye can see. Most of the excitement in the market is naturally around the fat head — as Willie …

29 marketing tech “unicorns” worth $1 billion+ each Continue Reading »

“It’s okay to love your marketing stack. Just don’t love your marketing stack.” That’s what was running in the back of head last week, as I was moderating a “Show Us Your Marketing Stack” panel at the B2B Marketing Innovation Summit run by Demandbase in San Francisco. Three top marketing executives — Susan Ganeshan, CMO of Clarabridge; Kristin Hersant, VP marketing at Livefyre; and Franz Aman, SVP of brand and demand at Informatica — had …

Marketers are fiercely passionate about their marketing stacks Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post written by Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, with special advice from Julie Bernstein, COO for Stitch Fix and former CMO at Sephora. Ashu is the author of MarTech and the Decade of the CMO. I get pitched all the time — and I’ve heard it all. From the good to the bad, to the disastrous. As an early stage investor in martech companies, it’s part of my …

8 tips for marketing tech companies on pitching CMOs Continue Reading »

I’m sorry. I know a lot of people wish that the marketing technology merry-go-round would slow down and consolidate. And I fully appreciate why that’s desirable. Unfortunately, the evidence I keep encountering says we’re not there yet. Here are a few points on the curve that I’ve recently come across that suggest that marketing software remains a sector of frothy innovation: 1. Social Relationship Platforms (SRP). We’ve come a long way from simple social media …

I’m sorry, but marketing software is still a world in flux Continue Reading »

One of the most common questions I get asked about my marketing technology landscape graphic — other than the rhetorical exclamation, “Are you kidding me?” — is: Do you have an Excel spreadsheet of all these companies that you can share with me? My answers have been, no, I’m not kidding. And no, sorry, I don’t have a version in Excel. Well, Matt Heinz, Brian Hansford, Robert Pease, and the rest of the good team …

The Marketing Technology Landscape (2015) now in Excel Continue Reading »

I’d recommend that the next acquisition that some marketing cloud companies should make is a web design firm. Seriously, whatever the multiple — and I say this as a friend — it would be worth it. Acqui-hire, code red. I was struck by this last week when I was methodically checking each of their websites, trying to discern the state of their respective ISV communities. It ended up being really hard to answer that question, …

Should you judge a marketing cloud by its website? Continue Reading »

My doppelgänger (or am I his?) agrees: marketing technology isn’t consolidating yet. Digiday recently published a terrific podcast interview with Terry Kawaja, the CEO of LUMA Partners — an investment bank that specializes in adtech and martech companies. Of course, Terry and LUMA are probably most famously known for their amazing LUMAscapes that map out companies in marketing-related sectors such as display advertising, search, video, social, gaming, commerce, content, etc. Terry’s original display advertising LUMAscape …

For every marketing tech firm consolidated, 1.5 are born Continue Reading »

Ashu Garg is a general parter at the venture capital firm Foundation Capital, focusing on start-ups in the marketing technology sector. He is currently on the boards of TubeMogul, Localytics, and AdRise, and was formerly on the board of Aggregate Knowledge before it was acquired by Neustar. Before going VC in 2008, Ashu was the general manager for Microsoft’s online advertising business, worked at McKinsey in software and digital media, and set up Unilever’s operations …

VC predicts marketing tech will grow 10X in 10 years Continue Reading »