Last week a meme went viral on social media of a marketing agency running a “thought leadership” interview on TikTok. I have no idea if it was a parody or real. Or more accurately, whether it was a deliberate or accidental parody. It was a jumbled jubilee of buzz bingo – personalization, data, brand, experience, customer centricity – that ended up saying absolutely nothing.
There but for the grace of God I go to any 60 second interview clip.
I feel for the speaker. It’s hard to explain why this is such an incredible time of technology-driven transformation in marketing with a few brief observations. And if you try to link it to the keywords that people are hyper-indexing with right now, it’s very easy to mix in the same radiation platitudes that we’ve been seeing for two decades of digital marketing. Now with ‘AI’ inserted into every other sentence.
What is my – ha — awkward to announce that Frans Riemersma and I have just published Martech for 2024an 89-page report on the state of marketing technology as we approach 2024;
You be the judge, but I hope you find it a different—and useful—read. Instead of short predictions of what we imagine will happen next year, we started with empirical data on what is it’s already happening today. We try to explain these phenomena in plain language and then figure out where these trends logically lead us.
We’re talking about AI, of course. But we spend more time describing important architectural changes underway in martech—aggregation and composability—that will enable much more advanced AI use cases. These are the giant shoulders on which Gen AI will stand.
As an “easter egg” of sorts, we’re also including a mid-year update on the marketing technology landscape. Thanks to a plethora of AI startups, the landscape grew 18.5% in the last six months alone. It took four years to grow the landscape from ~150 to ~2,000 solutions, from 2011 to 2015. Now we’ve added that many apps in a few months.
Now, I know this will be immediately countered by people who argue that the half-life of many of these apps is likely to be quite short. They might be right. Indeed, the forces of integration are hard at work across the entire SaaS universe.
But there is more to the story. We dive into an in-depth look at what’s happening in the long tail of martech applications. They are far from homogeneous, with great variation in both their longevity and potential for growth. It is an engine of continuous renewal, driving the evolution of our industry.
This hot mess of startups and even pre-launch hobby horses, rapidly iterating new ideas at the frontier, is the stellar melting pot from which the red giants—or blue giants, or orange giants, if you get the point—will be born and nurtured. , and inspired.
To appreciate this renewal cycle, consider the distribution of martech applications in more than 1,000 stacks that Frans and I have assembled over the past 7 years:
Despite the massive consolidation forces from major platforms in head — Adobe, HubSpot, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, etc. — we see a relatively stable balance with Torso apps (large niche apps, generally $100 million in revenue) and small apps at tail (anything else).
This is not cost allocation. Or even a usage distribution scale. But it’s a breakdown of the number of applications in marketers’ technology stacks that empirically shows that trunk and tail remain live parts of the equation.
It is important to recognize that the composition of our martech stacks is never static. We constantly see applications in the queue – and to a lesser extent in the trunk – being shuffled as either their relevance or uniqueness diminishes. But then new applications in the queue, pushing some new boundaries in martech innovation, appear to take their place.
It is this dynamic that brings us back to the issues of aggregation and composability.
But if you want the full explanation of this, you should download it Martech for 2024 report, where another 85 pages await you beyond the surface I’ve just scratched here.
One more thing. We are incredibly grateful to GrowthLoop, mParticle, OfferFit, SAS, and Snowplow, for supporting this report that we have been researching for the past five months.
They had no say in the body of our report. However, we included interviews with each of them to get their perspective on these trends. While they obviously have commercial interests in their views, they also have vast domain experience in the areas in which they compete. We moderated these interviews to leverage their information and experience in a non-promotional way:
- Aggregated audience and customer journeys (GrowthLoop)
- Customer Data Infrastructure in an AI Era (mParticle)
- Overcoming the three personalization bottlenecks (OfferFit)
- An important moment for a marketing manager (SAS)
- First-party data functionality in the customer experience (Snow blower)
I think you will find these interviews in themselves fascinating. I certainly did.
Again, you can download the full report here.
