Entries now being accepted for The 2023 Stackies Awards — what’s in your stack?

Grab your favorite slide maker, martech pros. It’s time to show your stack. The 2023 Stackies: Martech Stack Awards are now accepting entries for the next 11 weeks — until midnight Pacific on Friday, April 21. There is no fee to enter. In fact, for each qualified entry, we — the awards hosts are myself from chiefmartec.com and Frans Riemersma...

1d

Tech layoffs? Great companies are actively hiring marketing technology talent

In my previous post, I boldly predicted that we’re on the verge of a whole series of martech innovations: AI, composability, AR/VR, even, yes, “Web3”. While I agree with the pessimists that 2023 will be a challenging year for a lot of martech vendors, I believe this is more of a business cycle bump in the road, rather than the end of an industry. We’re...

2w

2023 will be a chaotic year for martech, yet the start of a massive wave of growth

I’m going to start the year with a controversial prediction: we are at the beginning of a massive wave of growth in martech. The next 7 years of expansion in our industry and profession will dwarf the past 7 years. I assume that’s a controversial claim because most people think this is going to be a rough year for the martech industry. Partly...

4w

A whirlwind tour of the new martech map, major martech trends for 2023, and how to manage it all in the year ahead

Yesterday, my brother-in-martech Frans Riemersma and I gave a tour de force presentation of the current martech landscape as it stands at the end of 2022 (now officially over 10,000 solutions!), five major trends that we expect will shape martech and marketing in 2023, and a framework for managing it all in what is sure to be a highly “fluid” year ahead....

Dec 2022

You can now filter the 10,000+ martech landscape by revenue, size, age and G2 ratings

In today’s virtual event Martech for 2023: The (Really) Big Picture — full video will be shared tomorrow — Frans Riemersma and I released a major update to the interactive martech landscape on martechmap.com. We know: the martech landscape is overwhelming. In our latest update to the database, even after removing a number of solutions that were...

Dec 2022

Tech stacks are still large, but orchestration can make all the difference

Ever see the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon? Great story about the Apollo moon missions. I’m pretty sure it was in one of those episodes that I most remember the impactful difference between “unit tests” and “system tests.” Getting people on the moon required a huge number of different component technologies, many each breakthrough innovations...

Nov 2022

What to expect in martech in 2023 and how to harness it to your advantage

2023 will be a fascinating but challenging year for marketing. Macroeconomic headwinds are colliding with rising customer expectations for better digital experiences. Martech stacks are consolidating under economic pressure. Yet at the same time, major innovations with generative AI, first-party/second-party data, ecosystem strategies, and fragmenting...

Nov 2022

Partner Ops: The forgotten ops that’s suddenly thriving in the ecosystem era

tl;dr — The State of Partner Ops and Programs is a “must read” report for martech. A month ago, I wrote about how channel, partner, and ecosystem tech is one of the hottest categories in martech today. As businesses become increasingly interwoven with each other in serving customers in a digital world — where nearly everything can be adjacent...

Nov 2022

When is a martech stack too complex?

At many companies — but not all — their martech stack has become too complex. Aside from the anecdotal evidence that I frequently hear on LinkedIn and Twitter threads, Gartner’s most recent Marketing Technology Survey frames the problem quantitatively: on average, the 324 enterprise marketing technology leaders they surveyed reported that only...

Nov 2022

Why there are 10,000 martech products that “kinda all do the same thing” (but not really)

One of the perennial criticisms of the martech landscape is that “most of these products all do the same thing.” Send an email. Render a web page. Analyze some data. This criticism has grown louder in proportion to the growth of the landscape. With an increasingly exasperated tone, people ask, for example, “What’s the point of hundreds of CRMs...

Oct 2022