Last week, a meme went viral on social media of an agency marketer rambling during a “thought leadership” interview on TikTok. I don’t know if it’s a parody or real. More precisely, if it was a deliberate or accidental parody. It was a celebration of a mish-mash of buzzword bingo: personalization, data, brand, experience, customer centricity, but ultimately nothing at all.
Barring the grace of God, I will be appearing in a 60 second interview clip.
I feel sorry for the speaker. It’s hard to explain in a few simple words why this is such an exciting time for technological transformation in marketing. And when you try to tie that to the keywords that people are currently over-indexing, it’s very easy to blend into the same background radiation cliche that we’ve observed in his 20 years of digital marketing. is. This time, “AI” is inserted in every other sentence of his.
Which one is mine— Sigh — An awkward twist as Frans Riemersma and I announce that we have just published. Martech in 2024an 89-page report on the state of marketing technology to 2024.
Even though you will be the judge, I hope you find this a different and informative read. We started with empirical data about what will happen, rather than short, article-like predictions that imagine what will happen next year. already happening today. We try to explain these phenomena in plain language and guess where the trends are logically leading us.
Of course, we will also discuss AI. But we spend a lot of time talking about the key architectural changes underway in martech that are enabling more advanced AI use cases: aggregation and composability. These are huge shoulders on which the AI generation will stand.
As an “Easter egg” of sorts, we’ll also include a mid-year update on the state of marketing technology. Thanks to the rapid emergence of startups utilizing AI, Landscape has grown by 18.5% in the last 6 months. From 2011 to 2015, it took four years for the environment to grow from about 150 to about 2,000 solutions. Now, we’ve added this many apps in just a few short months.
Now, I know this will be quickly refuted by people who argue that the half-life of many of these apps is likely very short. they may be right. In fact, the forces of consolidation are at work intensely across the SaaS world.
But there’s more to the story. A deep dive into what’s happening in the long tail of martech apps. Far from being homogeneous, there is great variation in both lifespan and growth potential. It is an engine of continuous innovation, driving the evolution of the industry.
A star foundry of startups and even pre-start hobby horses that iterate rapidly on new ideas at the frontier, from which red giants, or if you get my senses, blue giants and orange giants are born. , nourished and inspired.
To understand this update cycle, consider the distribution of martech apps in a stack of over 1,000 that Fran and I have collected over the past seven years.
Despite the huge integration power of the world’s major platforms, Head — Adobe, HubSpot, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, etc. — we see a relatively constant balance. body Apps (typically large professional apps with over $100 million in revenue) and small apps tail (Everything else).
This is not cost allocation. Or even the size of the usage distribution. But this is the distribution of the number of apps in marketers’ tech stacks, and experience shows that the torso and tail are still active parts of the equation.
It’s important to realize that the configuration of our martech stack is never static. We constantly see apps in the tail, and to a lesser extent in the torso, shuffled away as they become less relevant and unique. But then subsequent new apps emerge to replace them, pushing new boundaries in martech innovation.
This dynamic brings us back to the themes of aggregation and composability.
However, if you want a full explanation of it, Martech in 2024 There are another 85 pages of the report waiting beyond the surface we’ve barely touched on here.
one more. We’re very grateful to GrowthLoop, mParticle, OfferFit, SAS, and Snowplow for sponsoring this report, which we’ve been researching for the past five months.
They had no say in the text of our report. However, we included interviews with each person to elicit their perspectives on these trends. They clearly have commercial interests in mind, but they also have vast expertise in the areas in which they compete. We guided these interviews to leverage their insights and experience in a non-promotional way.
- Aggregated audiences and customer journeys (growth loop)
- Customer data infrastructure in the AI era (mParticle)
- Overcoming the three personalization bottlenecks (offer fit)
- When responsible marketing matters (SAS)
- Manipulating first-party data in customer experience (snowblower)
We hope you will find these interviews fascinating in and of themselves. It certainly was.
You can also download the full report here.