Scott Brinker

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 …

Products in the “long tail” of martech have a wide range of different strategies and aspirations Continue Reading »

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 …

Dissolving martech? Tech stack aggregation brings more power to marketing, more control to IT Continue Reading »

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 utilization problems: how to diagnose and remedy them Continue Reading »

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: They also ask about commercial vs. homegrown martech, what the approval process was like, and how the replacement affected staff. Did existing employees get retrained or were new staff or service providers added? Having run the survey for the past four …

Martech stacks and staff are stabilizing, thanks to both better integration and budget pressure Continue Reading »

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. …

Conway’s Law vs. Inverse Conway’s Law and the future of build vs. buy in martech Continue Reading »

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 …

3 possible scenarios for the future of martech in the Age of AI Continue Reading »

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 …

Countering 4 “myths” of tech stack dysfunction: shrinkage, martech, shadow IT, and utilization Continue Reading »

Lately, I’ve been excitedly talking about “composability” as a major new trend in martech (and business technology in general). But in the absence of defining it more precisely, the term has triggered some confusion and debate about what is or isn’t technically feasible today. So let’s rectify that. In the most broad sense, composability is simply the ability to combine things together. This might be data, for instance, if you want to analyze products (one …

Composability is already everywhere in martech today, you just may not realize it (which is a good thing) Continue Reading »

A few weeks ago, an internal memo from Google (or so it was claimed) was leaked that warned, “We have no moat.” Allegedly, it was written by an AI researcher at the company who was explaining how the real competitive threat to Google’s generative AI initiatives wasn’t OpenAI. It was open source communities. If you want to understand the enormous power of ecosystems — and if you’re in martech, this may be the most important topic …

The key point of Google’s “we have no moat” memo on generative AI is that ecosystems are the moat Continue Reading »