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Four months ago, I started a collaboration with Jason Baldwin, the global head of product management at WPP, to write a paper on the major trends in marketing technology that we believe will shape the decade ahead for agencies and brands. It wasn’t about guessing our own “hype cycle” of individual technologies. There are plenty of those predictions out there, and I’ve never found them particularly helpful for executives trying to shape their long-term strategies and capabilities development. Instead, we stepped back to consider the second-order effects that so many of these different technological innovations are feeding — broad patterns of how marketing organizations are changing in a digital world. Of the five trends we researched, all of them are already emerging in practice. You can and should harness them today. But we believe each of these patterns will grow exponentially over the next 10 years, redefining the very nature of marketing technology and operations: “No Code” Ci...

For the fifth episode of The Martech Show , we talked about five major trends of marketing technology. For this sixth episode , we discussed the six disciplines of agile marketing. For the seventh episode, we’ll clearly need to cover seven swans-a-swimming, which would make a great viral TikTok video. Coincidence or martech numerology? You decide. Seriously though, this episode was one of my favorite. Jim Ewel , one of the pioneers of agile marketing, just released a terrific book, The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing , and he gave us an excellent overview of those disciplines and four shifts in management and culture that make agile methods really deliver. We also took a brief trip down memory lane to a post I wrote over 10 years ago, sketching out early ideas for an agile manifesto . It’s pretty wild to think back to those younger days when the reconfigured blend of marketing, technology, and management was so nascent. This past decade has taught us so much. Jim’s distilled so...

Earlier this month, my opening keynote for the (virtual) MarTech Conference covered five major trends in marketing technology that are already present today but will grow dramatically over the next 10 years in The Age of the Augmented Marketer: “No Code” Citizen Creators Platforms, Networks & Marketplaces The Great App Explosion From Big Data to Big Ops Harmonizing Human + Machine The research for that keynote came out of a collaboration I did with Jason Baldwin, the head of product management at WPP. We’ve got a full report coming out soon, but in advance of that release, Jason joined me for The Martech Show Episode #5 to share his insights on several of those trends, particularly “Harmonizing Human + Machine” and the near future of AI in marketing. We were joined by Alex Pelletier, founder and CEO of martech consultancy Perkuto , who graciously sponsored this episode by making a donation on behalf of the show to One Laptop Per Child . Alex brought some great perspectiv...

Okay, the original title for this episode was, “Marketing Has a Data Farm: AI, AI, Oh!” — the kind of whimsical play on words that amuses me to no end. (I know, my bar for self-amusement is pretty low.) We intended to discuss how marketing is harnessing its troves of data through real-world examples of AI and machine learning models. However, with Christopher Penn , co-founder and chief data scientist of Trust Insights as our editorial guest — and a true expert on the subject of AI and machine learning in marketing — I let the conversation drift to topics that Christopher felt particularly passionate about: How to detect BS in AI sales pitches from martech vendors. The many ways in which bias can slip into machine learning — and the terrible consequences that can happen when it does. These are both important issues, and Christopher did an excellent job explaining different kinds of AI/ML bias and how they can creep in. One of the examples he shared was particularly eye-open...

The latest episode of The Martech Show is now available for your viewing pleasure. It was a terrific session, with special guest Erica Seidel , executive recruiter and founder of The Connective Good , along with our sponsoring guest Justin Sharaf , VP marketing at Jahia . Erica kicked off the show by walking us through the evolving trends she’s been seeing in hiring marketing executives — see the table at the top of this post — as well as some of the trade-offs that companies need to consider when hiring the right CMO. We then shifted into a discussion about how marketing ops and martech professionals can advance to leading the entire marketing organization. More CMOs are coming from these backgrounds. But while ops and tech pros have some advantages to press, they also face challenges — both real and perceived — in winning these top spots. Erica shared some terrific advice on overcoming these hurdles, and Justin shared his personal experience on the journey from leading marketi...

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 — with many products from many different vendors — but an integrated stack, so that these different apps were sharing data with a common system of record (a CDP, CRM, or marketing automation platform). For many of them, they had also connected an explicit orchestration engine or an implied one with a marketing automation platform. Now, you might expect members of the CDP Institute to be generally ahead of the curve on martech best practices for multi-system integrations. After all, why else would they be there? Don’t most members of golf clubs play golf? But there’s a difference between being interested in CDPs and actually having suc...

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 interesting findings related not only to CDPs but martech architecture and management in general. One slide that we spent a fair amount of time discussing was this analysis of the obstacles to CDP success — and how they shifted depending on the stage that a company was at in their adoption of a CDP: David also brought along puppets. And his own puppeteer. The busy bees. The lunatic cow who was udderly upset about the printer not working. A robot appearing over his shoulder that he never quite acknowledged. I know it’s only our second episode, but this was the most surreal one to date. Without further ado, here’s Episode #2: Attac...

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” has been a hot topic for at least a decade. For companies at any real scale though, their plans for transformation were frequently mapped out in years. And as they started that journey, those years typically stretched into even more years. This resistance to change was totally understandable, given human psychology, but also given the trade-off of short-term economic incentives for many businesses relative to longer-term strategic moves with outcomes clouded (get it?) in the misty future. In fact, this inertial force resisting change was so prevalent in dragging down digital initiatives that it inspired my Martec’s Law observ...

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 $#@! are there 8,000 martech solutions?” Jeff covered the latest updates to the still-growing Martech 5000 database — after deduping new submissions, updates, and removed solutions, the landscape expanded to 8,097 platforms and apps. (Are we missing yours? Register and add it here .) I walked through a model explaining the relationship between different kinds of platforms and apps in SaaS that enables the massive supply-side growth of this landscape. Anita added her perspective on expansion and consolidation in the martech landscape through the lens of the thousands of firms that use CabinetM to manage their martech stacks...

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 Cohesive Martech Roadmap .) “Genius” in this context is a Gartner-specific definition. They’ve developed the Gartner Digital IQ Index to benchmark the digital performance of brands relative to industry competitors. It supposedly measures “more than 1,250 data points across four dimensions of digital.” You can see the rankings of the top 10 brands in a number of different industries, mostly consumer, here . (Cleverly, to see the rankings of brands below the top 10 — potentially yours — you have to become a Gartner client.) For example, here’s the ranking for speciality brands: In Gartner’s ranking hierarchy, they label brands Genius, ...

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 moive “Speed” should have been “Speed and Scale.”) Why, like everybody else stuck in their basement, start a podcast! Well, kind of. I’m going to launch a “show.” The Martech Show , actually. It will consist of 10 episodes for the remainder of 2020. We’ll experiment with the format, but imagine a blend of webinar (with educational slides you can download), candid podcast-style interviews, interactive Q&A with the audience, some group research (answer one key question per episode), and even a little improv comedy. We’ll generally air one episode every two weeks. This will give us time to lovingly prepare each one and give us space to engage in follow-up conversations on other chann...

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 operations and martech pros — and the savvy CMOs who love them — the data is skewed through that lens. Out of 97 respondents, 40% identified as marketing ops/marketing tech and 25% as tech-savvy marketers (both flavors of marketing technologists ). As you can see from the chart at the top of this post, Zapier is by far the most popular tool used by this audience, followed by IFTTT and Airtable. From there, it stretches into a long tail of less commonly adopted no code products. Given the above, it’s not surprising that the primary no code use case reported in our survey was implementing workflows and processes (82%), often across ...

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 or HTML5 — there’s no denying that the capabilities that marketers have at their fingertips to build things today is extraordinary. If the 2010’s were about the emergence of marketing technologists as a bona fide discipline within the marketing profession, then the 2020’s seem poised to deliver us into the age of the “marketing maker.” In looking at a lot of different no code tools — and there are a lot of no code tools out there now — I noticed that many fell into one of three “patterns” of how they worked: Design & Content (UI) — web and mobile app builders, bot flows, interactive content Spreadsheets (Data) — if you ca...

I’ve called the past decade of the 2010’s The First Golden Age of Martech . It was an explosion of both a new industry ( martech ) and a new profession ( marketing technologists ). I’ve spilled a gigabyte of digital ink on why this next decade will be The Second Golden Age of Martech (including a recent update on how platform dynamics are driving this next wave ). But today, I want to share with you the nice quantified measure of The First Golden Age of Martech shown in the chart above. While working on my previous article — Why does the massive landscape of marketing services firms not bother people the way martech does? — based on research from BCG, I came across another article they published last month, Making the US Marketing Ecosystem Work for You . Sounds a little like a public service announcement. The article would be worth it just for the stacked area chart above, which elegantly illustrates several major changes in the marketing industry over the past 20 years: ...

The large size of the marketing technology landscape stirs many emotions in the marketing community. Excitement. Frustration. Awe. Anger. Yes, anger. Just last week, I was hotly accused by someone on LinkedIn of stoking FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — simply by publishing it. Those vehement reactions always surprise me. It’s just a count of martech companies, dude, arranged as clusters of logos on a slide. It’s not like Galileo telling the Church that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Although maybe in some distantly analogous way it is. Empirical evidence that runs contrary to people’s worldviews — or the way they wish the world was — isn’t always received kindly. Hey, I get it. I appreciate that complexity and uncertainty can be uncomfortable. We crave simplicity and certainty. And the martech landscape offers neither. But the Sun does not revolve around the Earth. And the only way we made it to Moon was by embracing the reality of what is, not what we wished to be. Physi...

The best part of being a dad? Well, okay, maybe not the best , but somewhere in the top five. A legitimate excuse for telling “dad jokes.” So to celebrate Father’s Day here at chiefmartec.com, I proudly offer up seven impromptu and —  oof — truly terrible martech dad jokes…   What’s the best place on earth for marketing technology? Mmm, Arctic Circle.   Why did the marketer close his eyes in the restroom? He didn’t want to CDP.   What did the marketer say when offered one more app at the dinner party? “I pass.”   Did you hear about that new iPaaS that’s even better than Zapier? Zapiest.   What did the overconfident marketer say when asked in a job interview if he understood software development? “Oh, sure, I no code.”   Why did the marketing operations director study philosophy? She wanted to learn how to rationalize a stack.   Who did the marketing technologist hire to see if her boyfriend was cheating on her? A PI. ...