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1967 was the Summer of Love; we will remember 2025 as the Summer of Vibes – Chief Marketing Technologist
Are you feeling the vibes yet? 'Vibe' has become the latest AI buzzword. Even more than 'agentic,' which is saying a lot. While both terms are widely open to interpretation — and therefore ripe to be appropriated by anyone selling anything — vibe stands out for sheer weirdness. The term originated with a post by Andrej Karpathy, one of the original co-founders of OpenAI, who described vibe coding as a new way of rapidly building
2025 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: 100X growth since 2011, but now with AI… – Chief Marketing Technologist
tl;dr The martech landscape grew again since last year, up 9% to 15,384 solutions. While new AI natives continue to blossom, the previous generation is consolidating more. There's also an exploding 'hypertail' of custom software. We cover all of this and more in our new State of Martech 2025 report (free and ungated). Over 15 years ago, I tossed a bunch of martech logos on a slide to present the Rise of the Marketing Technologist
Beyond AI assistants: how AI is being more deeply embedded in marketing and martech stacks – Chief Marketing Technologist
This is a short excerpt of data from The State of Martech 2025 report that will be released on May 6, 2025. You can get the complete 100+ page report and access to an extended keynote presentation of our research by registering for free for #MartechDay. It's no surprise that stand-alone AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have become ubiquitous. In our study of 96 martech and marketing operations leaders, 87.5% reported these
Complicated to Complex: AI Agents and Managing a Dynamic Martech Stack – Chief Marketing Technologist
The following is a short excerpt from The State of Martech 2025 report that will be published on May 6, 2025 — #MartechDay. Sign up for free to attend our keynote presentation, which you can watch live or on-demand. You'll also get first access to our 100+ page report, the new 2025 marketing technology landscape, and full deck of all the 2025 Stackie Award entries. Don't miss the martech bundle of the year — register
Everything you could want to know about AI, martech stacks, and the 2025 marketing technology landscape – Chief Marketing Technologist
Sorry I've been a bit quiet this past month. I've been heads down on research for our State of Martech 2025 report that we'll be releasing on #MartechDay — May 6 — along with the 2025 marketing technology landscape. And the 2025 Stackie Awards. And a series of zero-fluff interviews with six industry leaders who are sponsoring our event this year. We'll unveil it all in a big, free virtual event that you're invited to. Trust
What’s in your stack? The 2025 Stackie Awards are open for entries, and we’re donating $100 for each one – Chief Marketing Technologist
It's 2025, and martech stacks are going through all kinds of changes. From unified data to agentic workflows, from consolidating vendors to proliferating gen AI, and from commercially-packaged platforms to custom-developed apps, martech stacks — and the marketing ops heroes who manage them — are experiencing a Renaissance of new ideas and new technologies. The 2025 Stackie Awards are your opportunity to contribute to that Renaissance. 'What are the Stackie Awards?' you say. They're a fun
Meet the new martech stack: systems of context and systems of truth – Chief Marketing Technologist
For years, martech was divided into systems of record and systems of engagement. Systems of record stored the 'master' versions of data. CRMs and CDPs for customer data. PIM for product data. DAM for brand assets. ERP for inventory data. (I know, there's a ton of acronyms in this piece, almost to the point of parody. Click on the image above for a larger-scale version to read the Acronymn Decode Ring on the right.) Systems
Despite financial pressure — or because of it? — tech stacks are actually expanding again – Chief Marketing Technologist
If you predicted that tech stacks would shrink in 2024, it was probably a good bet. After all, the trend line had been headed in that direction. The average number of apps in companies' stacks shrank in both 2022 and 2023, albeit by only a modest amount, less than 10% on average. But economic times were tight last year, and CFOs were on the warpath to cut SaaS waste. And, of course, there's the ongoing
AI agents are the new iPaaS and the next frontier of intense competition in digital ops orchestration – Chief Marketing Technologist
Welcome to 2025! It'll be the Year of AI Agents in martech, in word and deed. Here's what I think that means... From the moment there was more than one software product in a company's tech stack, there's been jockeying to determine who was boss. If the tech stack were an orchestra, which product would be the conductor? Whichever one directed the flow of data among apps and determined which function in which app was
Martech for 2025: A brand-new, 108-page report on AI use cases, stack foundations, and market structure – Chief Marketing Technologist
Happy holiday season, ye merry marketing maestros! Here's a marvelous way to get prepped and psyched for the New Year that's right around the corner. Frans Riemersma and I just released our latest report, Martech for 2025. It's 108 pages of our latest research and analysis of what's actually happening with marketing technology in the maelstrom of AI madness. No heaps of hype. Just hard data and a hopefully helpful framing of the facts. You
The state of marketing operations professionals is OK, but it’s going to get much, much better – Chief Marketing Technologist
Last week, Mike Rizzo and team at MarketingOps.com hosted their annual MOps-Apalooza event with 400+ marketing ops people. I was honored to be one of their keynote speakers, and I'll share the core theme of my talk with you in a moment. But first... They also released their annual State of the Marketing Operations Professionals, an epic 87-page report that surveyed more than 600 marketing ops pros on almost every facet of their careers. It's
The one presentation about martech for 2025 — and the AI madness around it — you won’t want to miss – Chief Marketing Technologist
Sorry that it's been a while since I last posted. But I have a good excuse. Frans Riemersma and I have been deep in research on what's happening in martech for the year ahead — a big part of which has been sorting through much fact vs. fiction with generative AI. What's the deal with existing martech platforms vs. new, AI-native products popping up like wildflowers? Will AI agents actually impact marketing in 2025? How?
Companies are replacing more martech, focused on integrations and APIs, and still expanding their stacks - Chief Marketing Technologist
I have two surveys for you that I think you'll love. The first is one that I'm asking you to take: a cut-through-the-BS survey on the real ways in which you're seeing gen AI used in your organization — or not. This data will contribute to the 'Martech for 2025' report and virtual event Frans Riemersma and I will be sharing on December 3. More details to follow. Both of us and thousands of your
Buying martech: what you love, what you hate, and who you trust (or not) - Chief Marketing Technologist
If you're reading this blog, it's a safe bet that you've been involved in buying — or selling — martech software. Probably quite a bit of martech software. So I greatly appreciate that a number of you responded to my survey over LinkedIn asking what you loved and hated about that experience and which resources you found helpful and trustworthy (or not!) in that process. Here's what you, at least the collective 'you,' had to
Will AI in martech make buyer experiences better or worse? It depends... - Chief Marketing Technologist
How do you know you're at the peak of a Hype Cycle? When means outweigh ends. Martech professionals and marketing ops leaders are being driven to apply AI in marketing — use it for something, anything! — with the belief that automating and accelerating things with AI, especially with generative AI, must produce beneficial outcomes. It reminds me of the old joke about the overly-optimistic kid excitedly digging through a giant pile of horse manure,
Blueprint for a hypothetical martech "holding company" for a world where aggregation beats consolidation - Chief Marketing Technologist
For 13 years of the ever-expanding martech landscape, conventional wisdom has predicted that our industry would consolidate. That conventional wisdom has failed spectacularly. Or more accurately, the conventional wisdom of the software industry from 10, 20, 30 years ago has been disrupted by new dynamics, in a new environment. The barriers to creating software are a fraction of what they once were — and are rapidly shrinking further with AI. The barriers to distributing software
The new data layer in martech has taken hold as the foundation upon which marketing AI will be built - Chief Marketing Technologist
In our recent State of Martech 2024 report — which is free and now fully ungated — Frans Riemersma and I analyzed a ton of transformation happening across the martech industry, from the AI-powered explosion of the martech landscape to three counterintuitive truths of 'composability' in martech stacks. Two of our most important findings, however, were the prioritization and adoption of foundational capabilities that are necessary for marketing to harness the full power of AI:
APIs are "very important" to martech buyers today, but they'll be crucial for the coming wave of AI agents - Chief Marketing Technologist
Take a guess at filling in the blank here: _______ is to AI Agents as Data is to AI Models The answer, as you likely surmised from my headline, is APIs. Let's discuss why... Data is the differentiation in AI models For the past year and a half, the hyper hype cycle of AI madness has agreed on only one clear truth: data will be your most strategic asset in the Age of AI. LLM
3 counterintuitive surprises about composable martech stacks in The State of Martech 2024 report - Chief Marketing Technologist
For years, the conventional wisdom in martech has been: the fewer apps in your stack, the better. It's obvious, right? By reducing the number of apps, you will save money, have a better user experience, and improve your governance control. The CFO's default answer to optimizing martech costs? Cut apps. The CIO's default answer to optimizing martech governance? Cut apps. Seems rational. But what if it wasn't necessarily true? Last week, on #MartechDay (May 7),
26 magnificently illustrated martech stacks from the 2024 Stackie Awards, with the winners revealed - Chief Marketing Technologist
Yesterday we celebrated the 10th annual Stackie Awards as part of #MartechDay. Every year for the past decade, we've invited marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates their marketing tech stack and how they conceptualize it. From these entries, we select five 'winners' whose visualizations we thought were particularly noteworthy in some way. I put 'winners' in quotes because, as we always acknowledge, the real determination of a winning stack is if it
2024 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic - 14,106 martech products (27.8% growth YoY) - Chief Marketing Technologist
Happy #MartechDay to you! On the first Tuesday of May, we celebrate the martech industry and all the talented marketing technologists and marketing ops professionals who work in it. Cheers to you for all you do in pioneering this wild and woolly field. It's also the day when Frans Riemersma and I release our annual update to the marketing technology landscape. You can download a hi-res JPG image or a hi-res clickable PDF of it.
16 years later, the present — not future — of martech is here, but unevenly distributed - Chief Marketing Technologist
The CMO Survey, a bi-yearly study of trends and perspectives from CMOs run by Duke University, Deloitte, and the AMA, has been one of the keystone research projects in the marketing industry for over a decade. It's very well run, and I eagerly look forward to reading it every time it's published. I was particularly excited to read the Spring 2024 edition just released, because they'd added a detailed section on marketing technology. What were
This isn't hyperbole: we have some big counterintuitive revelations coming on #MartechDay 2024 - Chief Marketing Technologist
If you only attend one online event this year... well, then it's clearly not 2021 anymore! 😀 But this one is worth it. I guarantee you will be surprised, if not shocked, by what we share. On Tuesday, May 7, Frans Riemersma and I will host our annual #MartechDay celebration. We'll release the epic 2024 martech landscape. We'll publish a deeply researched State of Martech report. We'll host the 2024 Stackie Awards. And we'll interview
Visible and invisible tech stacks, and the upsides and downsides of "shadow IT" in martech and beyond - Chief Marketing Technologist
Tech stacks are large. The empirical stack data we recently shared from Zylo, a leading SaaS management platform, showed that even after a year of belt-tightening, the average SMB (500 employees or less) still has 162 SaaS apps. Mid-market companies (500 to 2,500 employees) have 245. And large enterprises have 650. This isn't particularly surprising any more, is it? Oh, and by the way, those numbers don't include: (1) Any custom apps the company has
Can martech data be unified, federated, and siloed all at the same time? Yes, and each serves a purpose - Chief Marketing Technologist
First, one more reminder: please take our Martech Composability Survey this week. When you see the questions, I think you'll agree that having a statistically significant dataset for a 'no BS' view of this topic would be super valuable for the whole martech community. We'll share the full results publicly. But we need your participation. Please and thank you! I've been adovcating the benefits of aggregation platforms in martech stacks for a couple of years
Well, SaaS tech stacks shrank from 2023 to 2024... but only by 8%. You were expecting more? - Chief Marketing Technologist
First, a quick ask: please take this 5-minute survey on martech composability. We'll share the full results back with everyone. I bet it will be very interesting. Thank you! Okay, back to today's post... I prefer empircal data over gut-feel prognostications. For 12 years, I've been told that SaaS in general — and martech in particular — is going to dramatically consolidate. People can be quite vehement in such predictions. Yet year over year over
The 2024 Stackie Awards are now open for entries - share a slide of your martech stack, everybody wins - Chief Marketing Technologist
It's that time of the year. The Northern hemisphere looks forward to spring. The Southern hemisphere looks forward to fall. And everybody in martech and marketing operations looks forward to the annual Stackie Awards. This will be our 10th edition of The Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Wow, a decade of hundreds of martech stack slides: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. We'd love for you to join this martech community tradition with us this year. To enter
Developer vs. non-developer is the wrong divide; what matters with no-code is knowing what you're doing - Chief Marketing Technologist
Dear marketing readers: hang in with me here. I have a point. Promise. I started programming as a kid, writing multiplayer games for dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) — a precursor to the web and social media as we know it today. It was the late 80's, early 90's, and I mostly wrote in a language called C, with some occasional high-performance components written in 8086 Assembly language. For those of you who aren't software
Every marketer a data analyst and an engineer... delusion or destiny? - Chief Marketing Technologist
'Everyone within Publicis will become a data analyst, an engineer, an intelligence partner, with all the information they need at their fingertips to supercharge client growth.' Publicis Groupe made that bold statement last week in a press release and presentation celebrating their performance from last year 'after shifting from a holding company to a platform' and charting their course for their future in the age of AI. Now, if you've raised a skeptical eyebrow to
The amazing turning point when martech systems complexity and martech UX complexity diverge - Chief Marketing Technologist
Welcome to 2024! I expect this will be a transformative year in martech. The Martech for 2024 report we published last month (video presentation) covered several of the major trends underway, such as aggregation and composability in stacks — especially in the data layer with cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, and lakes. The common theme of those trends is a breaking down of the boundaries between different martech apps and platforms. The silo's days are numbered.
Missed our Martech for 2024 jam session? Catch the replay and get the 89-page report for free - Chief Marketing Technologist
Last week, Frans Riemersma and I published our Martech for 2024 report, an in-depth analysis of the evolving martech landscape in the gen AI era and the underlying forces of aggregation and composability that are shaping it. You can download a free copy here. We also hosted an hour-long presentation, discussing many of the themes of the report, with the added color commentary of two giant martech nerds armchair industry analysts weighing in on some
Major trends in martech for 2024: the real changes underway in a 99% platitude-free report - Chief Marketing Technologist
There was a meme circulating around social media last week of an agency marketer rambling in a 'thought leadership' interview on TikTok. I have no idea if it was parody or real. Or more accurately, if it was intentional or accidental parody. It was a jumbled jubilee of buzzword bingo – personalization, data, brand, experience, customer-centricity — that wound up saying absolutely nothing at all. There but for the grace of God go I in
What will happen in martech in 2024? A no-BS report and webinar by two giant martech nerds - Chief Marketing Technologist
Want to know what 2024 has in store for martech? I'm not talking about wild-eyed, hand-wavy, link-baity prognostications that proliferate in every year-end prediction season like that one Mariah Carey Christmas tune. I mean real-world, fact-based, happening-now trends that will inform your marketing operations and technology strategy for the next 12 months. On December 5, Frans Riemersma and I will release a 50+ page report on Martech for 2024. Based on our research over the
Products in the "long tail" of martech have a wide range of different strategies and aspirations - Chief Marketing Technologist
At last count, there are over 11,000 products on the martech landscape. And while it's been a tough couple of years for many SaaS companies, forcing industry consolidation through acquisitions or shutdowns, the number of new martech startups that keep entering the field remains remarkably robust. Are these people nuts? Hold that thought. We'll come back to it. However, while the martech landscape is massive by the total count of companies on it, the scale
Dissolving martech? Tech stack aggregation brings more power to marketing, more control to IT - Chief Marketing Technologist
Was it John Lennon who wrote, 'Imagine there's no martech, I wonder if you can?' I may be misremembering that lyric. But it's what came to mind when I saw the above chart. It's from a new Gartner report, 4 Actions to Improve Martech ROI, and it reveals a pretty dramatic shift in ownership of martech responsibilities from marketing to IT. 'Configuration and deployment of new marketing technology' saw a 10-point shift from Marketing Leads
Martech utilization problems: how to diagnose and remedy them - Chief Marketing Technologist
Martech utilization sucks. At least that's the conclusion one draws from Gartner's latest 2023 Marketing Technology Survey, which includes the above chart. 'Thinking about the totality of the capabilities made available by marketing technology, what percentage of those capabilities are being utilized by your company today?' The average response to that question has dropped steadily for the past four years, from 58% in 2020, to 42% in 2022, to a dismal 33% here in 2023.
Martech stacks and staff are stabilizing, thanks to both better integration and budget pressure - Chief Marketing Technologist
One of the most interesting annual martech surveys out there is the Martech Replacement Survey produced by the team at MarTech.org. (Kudos to Chris Elwell, whose brainchild this was.) Every year they ask marketers: Did you replace any martech applications in your stack? Why did you replace them? What did you look for in the apps you replaced them with? They also ask about commercial vs. homegrown martech, what the approval process was like, and
Conway's Law vs. Inverse Conway's Law and the future of build vs. buy in martech - Chief Marketing Technologist
I've floated the idea of an Inverse Conway's Law in previous posts before, but only in passing. So today I want to fully describe the concept, because I believe it is a useful way to understand some of the current challenges in martech — and why it may drive a major shift in marketing software in the AI Era. Conway's Law (broad interpretation) To understand Inverse Conway's Law, you first need to understand Conway's Law.
3 possible scenarios for the future of martech in the Age of AI - Chief Marketing Technologist
For years, people have been prognosticating the collapse of the martech landscape. That all these thousands of different martech apps are going to be winnowed down to a handful of winners. For the past 12 years, those predictions have been consistently proven wrong, year after year after year. (The myths of martech are nothing if not resilient.) But maybe, just maybe, the Age of AI will be the inflection point that will bring those failed
Countering 4 "myths" of tech stack dysfunction: shrinkage, martech, shadow IT, and utilization - Chief Marketing Technologist
Why let data get in the way of a good narrative? Tech stacks are going to shrink dramatically. Marketing's tech stack is bloated compared to every other department. Shadow IT is a scourge across major martech systems. And most SaaS products — especially martech apps — are highly underutilized, a wanton waste of resources. It's enough to make you shake your fist in the air. 'Down with martech! Down with SaaS!' The only problem with