Marketing Software

The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI), a leading investment bank in the marketing space, issued a report yesterday of 2011 M&A activity across media, information, marketing services and technology sectors. JEGI reports that those sectors “saw nearly 900 transactions in 2011 totaling $47 billion, a 9% rise over 2010.” From a marketing technology perspective, the marketing and interactive services sector is the most interesting, which had “291 transactions announced at a total value of $15.1 …

2011 was a big year for marketing technology Continue Reading »

“You are what you don’t automate,” one of ion’s engineers commented in a meeting the other day. It was in the context of a series of time consuming, manual steps that had to be done for a particular task. He attributed the adage to super-programmer Jeff Atwood, although I’ve not been able to find the reference. It struck me as a brilliant way to frame the challenge of marketing automation. See, in software engineering, most …

You are what you don’t automate Continue Reading »

If you work in marketing, you might want to learn a little computer programming. Buy a book. Watch a screencast. Check out Codeacademy. No, really. Suspend your incredulity for a minute. I’ll explain… It’s not because you should have to roll up your sleeves and start writing your own marketing software. I’m the first to acknowledge that not every marketer needs to become a technologist. However, I do believe that every marketer should develop a …

Why marketers should learn how to program Continue Reading »

Marketers are paying tribute to Steve Jobs. But marketing technologists should pay tribute to Dennis Ritchie (standing in above photo, next to Ken Thompson), who sadly passed away this past weekend. As a great article in Wired points out, Jobs stood on the shoulders of Ritchie. See, Ritchie invented the C programming language, which he and Ken Thompson then used to build the UNIX operating system — which is the foundation of Apple’s OS, and …

Marketing technologists mourn Dennis Ritchie Continue Reading »

This morning I was reading a transcript of a talk the late Jim Gray gave a few years back on eScience: A Transformed Scientific Method, and I was struck by the parallels in our current transformation of marketing. This terrific slide from Jim’s talk sums up the evolution of the paradigms of science: Although the purpose of science has remained constant — just as the purpose of marketing is indifferent to the digital revolution that …

Computational science/computational marketing Continue Reading »

While much of the marketing world was caught up in the announcement of Steve Jobs’ resignation as the CEO of Apple, e.g., The Meaning of Steve, a much happier piece of marketing news slipped through the commotion: the marketing technology company Eloqua filed to go public with a $100 million IPO. As disclosure, my company, ion interactive, is an Eloqua customer, and many of our customers are also Eloqua customers — we’ve found great synergy …

Eloqua files for IPO, new bellwether for marketing tech Continue Reading »

Marc Andreessen had a great essay in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Why Software Is Eating the World. Remarking on the news from last week that Hewlett-Packard is looking to jettison its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, he makes the case this isn’t a tech bubble — this is the new normal: My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and …

Why Software Is Eating Marketing Continue Reading »

I’m detecting an exciting shift in the marketing technology landscape — less of an emphasis on back-office analytics, and more of a focus on delivering compelling customer experiences in the front-office. To be sure, analytics support that mission; but they don’t dominate it. I think this is a really important step forward. Earlier this month, Brian Walker of Forrester released a report on The Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions that discusses some of the …

Amazing graphic of customer experience touchpoints Continue Reading »

UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available. When I first presented the Rise of the Marketing Technologist, my key exhibit was a kaleidoscope of over 100 logos of marketing technology companies — what better way to viscerally express the awe-inspiring explosion of software in marketing. Ever since then, I’ve itched to take that hot mess of a graphic and organize it, group the products into categories, and reveal some of the underlying structure …

Marketing Technology Landscape Infographic Continue Reading »

Popped into a session hosted by MITX yesterday morning, What Can Marketing Automation Do for You? The panelists were Jim Williams of Eloqua, Christopher O’Donnell of Hubspot, and Bill Stone of RenaissanceOPTI. Given my interview with Steven Woods last week on marketing automation as a solution to the explosion of marketing touchpoints — as well as Eric Wittlake’s thoughtful commentary, When Did Automated Dialogue Trump Real Conversation? — I was eager to hear other perspectives. …

What can marketing automation do for you? #MITX Continue Reading »