3 Big Martech Innovation Themes in 2022

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 “predictions” and...

1w

2021: The Year Martech Shrank — Just Kidding (A Year in Review)

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...

3w

Data, Decisioning, Delivery & Design: A Framing for the CDP vs. CDW Debate

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,...

Dec 2021

Half $1 trillion software in the cloud: feeding The Great App Explosion and Big Ops

“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money,” the late US Senator Everett Dirkson apocryphally quipped. A few months ago, Gartner published the above chart with their latest estimates on cloud spending worldwide for 2021 and 2022. The lede here is that total spend on cloud-based services — SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc. —...

Nov 2021

Higher order effects of automation in Big Ops

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 now wrangling a Cambrian explosion...

Nov 2021

The Composable Enterprise brings us into The Great App Explosion & Big Ops

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...

Nov 2021

Commerce is the latest (renewed) frontier in martech, putting the revenue in RevOps

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,...

Oct 2021

Latest data on the size of tech stacks, er, app portfolios, and a philosophical question about shadow IT

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 surveyed opinions. This kind...

Sep 2021

29 visually striking martech stack illustrations from the 2021 Stackie Awards

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 share them with our community. This...

Sep 2021

Join us at MarTech next week, online and for free, and catch my keynote: From Big Data to Big Ops

Join us next Tuesday and Wednesday, September 14-15, for the latest MarTech Conference event — online and completely free to attend. With over 75 sessions, over 100 expert speakers, and more than 50 terrific solution providers, it’s going to be a jam-packed couple of days. Join us live for virtual ambiance — or, if you can’t squeeze it all into your...

Sep 2021