Most people suck at accurately predicting the future. I’m one of them. I took my shot at the prediction hall-of-fame last year, predicting that Microsoft would spend more than $1 billion on acqusition(s) in the marketing technology space in 2015. I thought it was a reasonably solid bet. And when they tried to buy Salesforce for $55 billion in the spring, I was feeling pretty cocky for about a week — that would have been …

7 not-quite-predictions for marketing technology in 2016 Continue Reading »

Al Ries and Jack Trout, who essentially invented the concept of “positioning” in marketing, wrote a terrific book in 1993 called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It’s a fantastic read, and even though it’s more than two decades old, I believe it’s as relevant today as ever. To discuss marketing technology consolidation, I’d like to call out six of their “immutable” laws related to positioning: #1 The Law of Leadership: It is better to …

The race for the #1 and #2 marketing technology brands Continue Reading »

This is the first of several articles leading up to my predictions for marketing technology in 2016. Because martech is a relatively complex space, I thought it would be helpful — at least for my own thinking — to break out a couple of foundational ideas, which we can then build upon. Let’s start with the illustration above, the 5 stages of maturity in marketing technology categories. While this certainly echoes Everett Roger’s famous diffusion …

5 stages of maturity in marketing technology categories Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post by the CEO of Sweetspot Intelligence, Sergio Maldonado. I had the pleasure of meeting Sergio at MarTech Europe last month where he shared a sketch of the above “marketing data technology” landscape with me. I found it very interesting and invited him to share his perspective with readers here. Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic has become a global reference for marketing executives, marketing technologists, digital strategists, IT executives, …

Marketing data technology: making sense of the puzzle Continue Reading »

As an enthusiastic proponent of interactive content — and, admittedly, I am biased — I was fascinated to see Twitter release an interactive content feature into its service last month. You can now add a 2-answer poll to any tweet of yours, and for the next 24 hours, people can place their votes. Okay, given its tiny footprint, perhaps we should call this interactive micro-content? This is a terrific example of what I would call …

Twitter jumps into interactive micro-content with new poll mechanism Continue Reading »