Grant,

This article does an excellent job explaining the proliferation of marketing technologies from an IT perspective—particularly the benefits of SaaS platforms for both creators/entrepreneurs and buyers of software. But you ask a very important question; Why Marketing?– which Scott answers briefly…and I would like to expand on just a bit.

Advertising, and more generally Marketing, has been in the throes of transformation for decades, or what the Economist Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’. To understand it, think of marketing way back…before Social Media, before Google, even before email and the Internet. Content was created by a few large ad agencies (think Don Draper) and pushed to consumers. Of course we still have ad agencies doing big TV campaigns but that’s far from the full story today. Google (and others, of course) have transformed marketing from what was largely a top down, indiscriminate, push of content from a few companies…to a much more efficient, bottom up, pull from 100s of millions of consumers via Internet search. That’s how Google has gone from Start-up in 1998 to a $400 billion (last I checked) company 16 years later. But it’s more than just Google and the search engine.

Today, that vast bulk of content is created, bottom-up, through websites, blogs, and social platforms. Today (again, last I checked) there were over 640 million websites, 40 million WordPress blogs (just 1 of many blogging platforms), 150 billion emails sent per day, 500 million daily Tweets, and 4.5 BILLION Facebook Likes—the ‘Like’ is the ultimate in abbreviated content.

Add to the proliferation of content, the exponential growth in digital interactions, and now marketing has become more data intensive than Wall Street—hence the acquisition of marketing tech firms by tech giants like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Adobe.

The transformation of marketing is represented both by meteoric rise in content and the ability of marketers to interact with that content. The primary challenge of marketing today—and the focus of many of today’s marketing technology firms—is managing the proliferation of content and interactions, and harnessing this data to put relevant content in the hands of customers and prospects so that products can sell themselves, or, in the case of B2B, at least do the bulk of the selling work before a hand-off to sales people is made.

Hope this give some additional insight into the ‘why marketing’ question.

Hi Scott, thanks for the reply. Yes–definitely agree that asymptotically approaching perfection is what we strive for. In the end there is no such thing as perfection. We can help buyers use technology to sift through the rapidly growing set of data out there, and focus their time on evaluating that short list and what the real trade offs are vs trying to figure out what each vendor really means with their marketing speak. I say that kindly as a former CMO myself. 🙂

As an aside, vendors will see less churn when buyers are more closely matched the first time. It’s sort of like getting married to someone you only went on one date with–when things get hard, you’re more likely to wonder what your other options might be.

Thought provoking post as always!

Taking it from a different angle: Whether the number is 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 marketing sw vendors isn’t it just as important to hone into those vendors that are working towards the critical mass where we can confidently say their business is sustainable for the foreseeable future? Would be interesting to see which of the marketing vendors have revenues of $10M, $50M, $100M, $500M, $1B (very few I imagine directly from their marketing tech businesses.) Certainly _one_ data point that would help understand where the momentum is within the industry.

Thanks, JP — glad to hear that this was helpful for you!

Yes! Yes! And yes!

The biggest technical pain at this point is interoperability. The good news is that there’s tremendous development resources going into addressing that pain. As a set of dominant platforms and middleware products emerge from the primordial soup, this pain will be significantly reduced and the power of choice will be a lot more enjoyable.

Segment.io is a great example of marketing middleware.

I really like what Segment.io is doing to bring order to some of this via a middleware tool that makes it easy to add new services. I would like to see the AppStore equivalent for marketing tools. This may need to come from one of the major vendors, such as Salesforce, which has done just that for CRM via their AppExchange.