Integration is by far the most important criteria when selecting martech — and it’s changing the industry

The CDP Institute released their latest State of Customer Data report last week, and it revealed an important milestone in the martech industry: For the first time ever, the majority of participants (52%) described their martech stack as an integrated, multi-system architecture. In others words, most marketers reported having a best-of-breed stack...

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The Martech Show Episode #2: Insights from the CDP Whisperer — and his magical mystery puppet show

The second episode of The Martech Show is now posted for your viewing pleasure. It was a great honor to have David Raab, founder of The CDP Institute — indeed, the person who defined the customer data platform category — as my guest. David had just completed the analysis of the latest CDP Institute Member Survey, and he brought along a collection of...

2w

Bending Martec’s Law: 2020 has taught us we’re more agile than we thought

Holy cats, 2020 has been a crazy year. And it’s not over yet. (cringe) But for all the terrible things this year has besieged us with, it’s also revealed something encouraging. We — as individuals, but perhaps more remarkable as organizations — are capable of adapting to change on a much faster time scale than we previously expected. “Digital transformation”...

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Watch the first episode of The Martech Show now: Why so many martech solutions?!

We’ve shipped our first episode of The Martech Show — our new hybrid webinar-podcast series “where marketing and technology collide.” A big thank you to my two guests: Jeff Eckman of Blue Green, our collaborators on the ever-expanding martech landscape, and to Anita Brearton of CabinetM, our sponsor for this episode. Our ovearching topic was “Why the...

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The larger your martech stack, the better your marketing performance? Maybe

I recently talked with Benjamin Bloom, senior director analyst for marketing technology and emerging trends at Gartner, around a report he recently published on Marketing Technology Drivers of Genius Brand Performance. (There’s a summary of the report in a blog post Ben wrote, Few “Genius” Brands Successfully Integrate Best-of-Breed Solutions Into a...

Aug 2020

Announcing The Martech Show: Pilot episode on August 21 at 11am ET — join the live studio audience

Pop quiz, hot shot. You find yourself with a ton of important martech topics to cover, an amazing roster of talented leaders eager to address those topics with their peers, and no venue to gather them together with the broader martech community. What do you do? (An aside: I thought the sequel to the movie “Speed” should have been “Speed and Scale.”)...

Aug 2020

How marketing operations and martech professionals use “no code” tools

I’ve been on the trail of “no code” martech these past couple of weeks, covering event-triggered marketing automation as a no code programming paradigm and mapping a partial taxonomy of over 75 no code tools. I also ran an impromptu survey of no code usage with readers, the results of which I’m sharing here. Given that my audience is mostly marketing...

Aug 2020

3 overlapping patterns of “no code” martech and the rise of marketing makers

I’ve been fascinated with the rise of citizen developers in marketing empowered by a rapidly expanding landscape of “no code” tools for several years now. Momentum is growing, and while there’s some philosophical debate to be had around what is or isn’t a “no code” tool — versus any app that lets you create things without breaking into raw JavaScript...

Aug 2020

Trigger-based marketing = event-driven programming with “no code” martech in every stack

Last week, I shared some interesting stats on trigger-based marketing from a benchmark report by Blueshift. A couple of eye-popping, high-level findings: Email triggers are 497% more effective than batch emails Mobile push triggers are 1,490% more effective than batch push notifications Directionally, this isn’t surprising, although the magnitude...

Jul 2020

What the coastline paradox reveals about infinite software specialization (in martech and other fields)

After three and a half months of working out of my basement, I was in desperate need of a change of scenery. Preferably somewhere with a lot of outdoor space for hiking and frisbee throwing (a lost art!). No crowds. Lots of nature. Fresh air. The answer? Renting a small cottage on the sparsely populated mid-coast of Maine. I took the photo above from...

Jul 2020