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 experts from our five lovely sponsors on the disruptions reshaping marketing as they see it. You can be the first to get all of these assets — the landscape, the rep ..read more

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 built, including with low-code or no-code platforms. (2) Any apps that are personally used by employees without being expensed. Mobile apps are t ..read more

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 now. These are platforms that provide cohesion to a diverse set of apps or data sources in your stack. You get both a unified, integrated ..read more

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 year, the data consistently fails to show that outcome. According to the 2024 SaaS Management Index Report just released by Zylo, a leading SaaS manag ..read more

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 the 2024 Stackie Awards, all you need to do is create a single slide (16:9 ..read more

“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 that claim, you’re in good company with most of the people I shared that with on LinkedIn and the artist-formerly-known-as-Twitte ..read more

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. (Can I get a hallelujiah?) It’s a profound change. But there’s an even more profound change rolling in. Growing complexity as a con ..read more

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 of these findings. Missed it? Fear not. You can now catch the replay on YouTube — or watch it directly below if you’re reading this on my web ..read more

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 any 60-second interview clip. I feel for the speaker. It’s hard to explain why this is such an incredible time of technology-powered transformation in marketing ..read more

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 past 6 months, it will provide updated empirical data on the current state of the martech market and examine major tren ..read more