Marketing Software

Pop quiz! Write down the names of three multi-billion companies who either provide a “marketing cloud” today — or are potential contenders in that space over the next few years. Done? I’ll bet you a beer at MarTech that there was one company who wasn’t on your list: Google. (Okay, be honest: they wouldn’t have […]

Tag management, at its core, is a relatively straightforward marketing technology — but one that has taken on new life with the rise of the home-grown, heterogeneous marketing cloud. First, a brief orientation on tag management: Many marketing software applications require marketers to insert little snippets of code — “tags” — into their web pages

A couple of months ago, I was honored to be invited to present at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. I gave a 19-minute, TED-style talk on “The Golden Age of Marketing Software” — a whirlwind overview of the marketing technology landscape, the dynamics of marketing as a technology-powered discipline, and the rise of the

On the topic of “open marketing platforms” — foundational marketing software systems that make it easy to plug in or connect with other marketing applications built by third-parties — I admit that I’m thoroughly biased. As an industry observer, I’ve staked my prognostication badge on the case for consolidated platforms and diversified ecosystems (2012), the

The battle of the marketing clouds is heating up. Last month Oracle announced its unified Oracle Marketing Cloud, and yesterday IBM introduced ExperienceOne — both massive visions of how all the different acquisitions they’ve made in the marketing space will be stitched together into more cohesive offerings. But with all these proclamations of marketing technology

My fellow marketing technology enthusiasts, mark this week in your journals. Here at their Marketing Nation Summit in San Francisco, Marketo just triggered a major inflection point in our industry. First, let me set the stage for the significance of what they’ve done. For a number of large companies assembling marketing “suites,” the narrative they’ve

Overcrowded. That was probably the most common remark to my latest marketing technology landscape. Well, aside from more colorful exclamations that decorum prevents me from repeating. And the truth is that this graphic, even with nearly 1,000 companies represented, was far from complete. There are hundreds of great companies that weren’t included: AppNexus, AdColony, Addroid,

UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available. The short version: the above graphic is the latest incarnation of my marketing technology landscape supergraphic (click for a high-resolution 2600×1950 version, 4.7MB). It represents a whopping 947 different companies that provide software for marketers, organized into 43 categories across 6 major classes. A high-resolution PDF

I started working on a new version of a marketing landscape that will be released early next month. The last one I did was back in 2012, and a lot has happened since then. One thing in particular that has surprised me in my research is how much the marketing automation category has expanded. While

Will marketing technology consolidate into a handful of behemoth super-platforms? Or will it continue to diversify with more innovative new software? My theory on marketing technology consolidation vs. diversification has been both. I believe that a set of “backbone” platforms will serve as the foundation of marketing’s technology infrastructure, but they will promote open APIs