Marketing Software

Hello, 2022! Or document.write(“Hello, 2022!”) to those still in codeland. Following my wrap-up of martech from 2021 — tl;dr a year in digital marketing that was experienced like a Twitch stream at 1.5X speed — let’s jump in to the martech topics I expect will shape 2022. Now, it’s true, I’m generally quite skeptical of […]

Congratulations on making it to the end of 2021. It’s been a long year for everyone as we navigated the ongoing pandemic saga. From the perspective of advancing digital business, these past 21 months have seen leaps and bounds forward. But the circumstances that catalyzed this punctuated equilibrium of marketing’s evolution have been hard for

There’s been some interesting debate lately about CDPs vs. CDWs — customer data platforms vs. cloud data warehouses. If CDWs such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Redshift, etc., are becoming a universal data layer in companies, is there still a role for domain-specific data platforms, such as marketing-controlled CDPs? The short answer, in my opinion, is

For the past year I’ve been talking about a shift from Big Data to Big Ops. In short, today’s challenges with business technology are less about managing a huge volume of data — Big Data — most of which wound up in a basement-level data lake, outside the reach of everyday business users. Instead, we’re

Traditional business thinking views change as risk, while composable thinking is the means to master the risk of accelerating change and to create new business value.” Monika Sinha, Research VP, Gartner That’s a quote from Monika Sinha, a research VP at Gartner, announcing the 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Agenda. The “composable enterprise” is

First, welcome to the freshly updated chiefmartec.com site — or, if you’re reading in this in your inbox, our freshly updated email subscription service, a big step up from RSS-to-email through Google Feedburner. What’s that thing they say about the shoemaker’s children? Well, now we finally have some groovy new footwear. Metaphorically speaking. Anyway, on with

Productiv, a SaaS management platform (SMP), published a report on The State of SaaS Sprawl in 2021. Since Productiv’s software manages the tech stacks — or “app portfolios”, as they like to call them — of hundreds of organizations, the data in their report is based on objective facts of app adoption, instead of merely

Every year, when the entries to the Stackie Awards flow in, I feel like the kid in A Christmas Story, excitedly opening up that present he’d be dreaming of. I am always delighted and inspired by the creative ways marketing teams visually represent their stacks — and so immensely grateful that they were willing to

Last week, Y Combinator held their Demo Day(s) for their Summer 2021 cohort. This was a massive graduating class: 377 startups from 47 countries. You can read a quick overview of all 377 (!) on TechCrunch, split across part one and part two. I read through all 377 and discovered 47 that I would put

My friends over at MarTech just released their 2021 Martech Replacement Survey, revealing insights into what and why companies switch from one martech application to another. The top-line finding: there’s a ton of martech swapping happening! 67% of the 374 marketers they surveyed, from SMBs to large enterprises, reported replacing a marketing technology application in