13 cringe-worthy martech dad jokes that are even worse than last year’s

Last year, we celebrated Father’s Day here at chiefmartec.com by subjecting you, dear reader, whose esteem we otherwise value, to 7 really bad martech “dad jokes”. It was… well, possibly one of the least popular posts in the history of this blog. But as any seasoned dad-joker will attest, the lack of a positive response to a dad joke is an implicit...

2d

Metcalfe’s Mirror: Complexity in networks (P.S. your martech stack is a network)

Fair warning: this post is pretty wonkish, even relative to my usual style. (Yikes.) Robert Metcalfe, the godfather of computer networks, famously stated that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected. This became known as Metcalfe’s Law: The classic example is the telephone. When only two people had telephones,...

2w

A 2×2 view of systems of record in martech

The phrase “system of record” has been bandied about in martech for years. In the absence of any other context, it’s usually assumed to mean the software that holds the authoritative (or “golden”) customer record. Most often in practice, this is a CRM. This is why illustrations of martech stacks often have a CRM product such as Salesforce, HubSpot,...

3w

Aggregation Theory applied to martech stacks

I recently wrote how martech stacks have arguably become virtual platforms. Even if you have a completely heterogeneous, “best-of-breed” stack, you likely have a set of products that work across your stack to provide cohesion, albeit each at a different layer of integration: Data: everything ultimately ends up in a “data lake” platform such as Snowflake...

4w

Summer of Stacks: Opening the 2021 MarTech Stackie Awards

Summer approaches! (Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.) Fresh air, sunshine, and frolicking outdoors have never felt so viscerally appealing, after a seemingly infinite year indoors. I hope you get time to walk in the woods, roll in the grass, or dip your feet in the ocean. But there’s still work to be done! Marketing and martech continue to...

5w

Is your entire martech stack becoming one big virtual “platform”?

The Great App Explosion can’t be stopped. But it can be harnessed. A couple of years ago, I proposed a model of 4 layers of app integrations with SaaS platforms. Advocating for better integration, for marketing apps in particular, I pointed out that not all integrations are equal. They vary significantly in how deeply they’re integrated. The 4 layers...

May 2021

Wait, more martech tools create more manual tasks?!

The good team at Airtable, whom I featured in my MarTech keynote, Marketing Superpowers: How AI & No Code Transform Every Marketer into a Maker, recently published the Airtable Marketing Trends Report based on a survey of 300 marketing leaders. This was their overview summary: Despite investment in tooling and processes, marketers aren’t operationally...

Apr 2021

Majority of marketing departments now use agile (and they’re more strategically aligned as a result)

Okay, I was just kidding on April Fools’ Day with hyperagile marketing. Apologies to any of you who spent the past week planking through your team updates. But I am excited to share with you some exciting news about real agile marketing adoption. AgileSherpas and Forrester just released their new State of Agile Marketing 2021 report, and it reveals...

Apr 2021

Introducing Scram: Hyperagile Marketing Practices for a Hyperautomation, Hypergrowth World

Agile management was born 20 years ago, to help teams operate better in a fast-moving, ever-changing, digital world. Agile originated in software development circles, with a bunch of programmers high in the mountains, and spread to other disciplines, eventually marketing. (“Hey, what are you all doing, standing around, chatting in a circle? With a...

Apr 2021

There are as many European-based martech products today (3,647) as there were globally in 2016

I remember the mad rush to finish the 2016 marketing technology landscape five years ago, just in time to present it for my opening keynote at that spring’s MarTech conference in San Francisco. In the previous years — 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015 — the landscape had grown exponentially, from 150 solutions to just under 2,000. Many pundits (*cough* here’s...

Mar 2021