Relative to six years ago, most categories of software are still at least 50% higher in round counts, even if they are coming of their highs. This is an interesting trend because venture capitalists raised roughly equivalent amounts of money in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Despite this increasing amount of capital on investor’s balance sheet, 2016 was a slower year by round count. And this data implies that fewer earlier stage companies raised, which means there will be fewer Series Bs in 2017 and fewer Series Cs in 2018.

Across a survey of more than 200 US marketers, Gartner found basic capabilities are now in widespread use, such as Web analytics, Web content management and email marketing platforms. Just 20 per cent of marketers surveyed aren’t currently using these solutions, and about 60 per cent are fully deployed. Interestingly, email marketing platforms had the highest penetration rate in retail (83 per cent).

Intermediate capabilities reflected more specific variations around the marketing approach. As an example, Gartner highlighted digital marketing analytics, lead management and multi-channel campaign management platforms. Less than half of marketers are currently using this trio of solutions, but more than 70 per cent are committed to deployments.


Less prevalent are advanced capabilities, but they’re rapidly being adopted. This list includes multi-touch attribution (fully deployed by 21 per cent of respondents), dynamic creative optimisation (31 per cent), A/B testing (33 per cent), and tag management systems (33 per cent). In addition, nearly one-fifth of marketers have plans to roll out personalisation, customer data or mobile marketing analytics platforms in the next two years.

In line with its infamous proclamation that marketing will be spending more on technology than the CIO by 2017, recent figures from Gartner suggest CMOs will indeed to rivalling IT departments when it comes to technology expenditure this year. According to the analyst firm, the average CMO spending on technology during 2016 was 3.24 per cent of revenue, against 3.4 per cent of revenue for the CIO.

In addition, a new research report from The CMO Club found CMOs increasingly owning the digital strategy – more so than the CIO or technology chief – highlighting marketing’s growing technology role. That survey reported 60 per cent of marketers were defining the need and identifies a digital marketing or technology solution before turning to the IT function to act as implementer, and 13 per cent are also doing the implementations themselves.

Steve Lucas, who joined Marketo Inc. as chief executive in October, thinks one new macro-event that could help kick the martech roll-up into high gear: a new U.S. president Jan. 21. Donald Trump has vowed to change tax laws to make tens of billions of dollars held overseas by U.S. tech companies more attractive to bring back home. “When you see this repatriation of cash coming in under the Trump presidency, you’re going to see significant growth in M&A,” Lucas said.

But that’s not the main reason he predicts rampant consolidation, which could come across information technology. Mainly, marketers are looking to reach consumers in a more personalized way, but do it at massive scale in real time. Of course, since Marketo’s key selling point is that it can offer a single view of customers at a scale of millions of consumers, and Lucas is looking to make Marketo one of the key consolidators, his comments can be seen as self-serving.

Nonetheless, he also may be right. It’s clear that marketers are looking for more intimate engagements with consumers. “Marketers need to engage with millions of people in a personalized manner at scale,” Lucas said. “It’s go digital or die.”

Focusing on customers = more profitable marketing outcomes.

By embracing new technologies, creating each go-to-market strategy with a fresh approach, taking advantage of the insights that customer data and feedback offers, and connecting with the wider organization in order to direct better business strategies, CMOs are more than capable of driving revenue growth.

The expectations are more dynamic today and yes, the pressure is on to produce results. For marketers who can apply their creativity to coming up with the most impactful ways to utilize all the new and evolving tools at their fingertips through innovative strategies, and who can accept both the power and responsibility of the reborn CMO, driving growth should be a piece of cake.

• Fragmented landscape ripe for consolidation. Adobe, Google, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce have the highest number of installations in place across nearly a quarter of the categories of martech in the survey. However, some categories — mobile marketing analytics, data visualization, SEM/SEO tools, ad verification services, and retargeting — have no reported deployments completed or underway from the big five. 
• Marketers are moving quickly from the basics to sophisticated tools. More than half of the respondents have deployed the martech staples — web analytics, web content management and email marketing top the list followed by survey/customer insight tools, data management platforms and content marketing platforms not far behind. 
• Adtech and martech converge in the most advanced organisations. Advanced marketers use more specialised technologies that deliver improved insights and business results through increased data use.

These five disruptions are:

• Digital transformation redefines “marketing” beyond the marketing department.
• Microservices & APIs (and open source) form the fabric of marketing infrastructure.
• Vertical competition presents a greater strategic threat than horizontal competition.
• AR, MR, VR, IoT, wearables, conversational interfaces, etc. give us digital everything.
• Artificial intelligence multiplies the operational complexity of marketing & business.

I’ll describe each one of these in more detail in their own post, starting here with Part 1: Digital Transformation.

The presentation covers an update on the ad tech and mar tech sectors, the growth in M&A activity, and the top five digital advertising and marketing trends.

The majority of marketers (72%) feel that the marketing technology landscape is changing either “rapidly” or at “light speed” — which is evident from the explosive growth we’ve seen in that landscape graphic over the past 5 years.

In contrast, the majority of marketers (67%) say that their company’s own use of marketing technology is evolving only “slightly” or “steadily” — or “not at all.”

This is Martec’s Law: technology is changing faster than organizations.

And while you might predict that the marketing technology landscape is bound to settle down soon, keep in mind that we’re now on the cusp on an explosion of new innovations in virtual reality, augmented reality, the Internet of Things, conversational interfaces, robotics, artificial intelligence, and so on. The next three years are likely to see more technological change than the last three. (Sorry.)

• Gartner sees an upsurge in inquiries in the areas of Ad Blocking, B2B Marketing Analytics, and Mobile Wallets, driving their inclusion in the Hype Cycle for the first time this year. 
• Predictive B2B Marketing Analytics has the potential to increase win rates, improve average deal size, and accelerate sales cycles. 
• Personalization continues to be a challenge for the majority of marketers. 
• Nine technologies have been removed from the Hype Cycle this year. 

Marketer's have allocated 12% of company revenue to the marketing expense budget to last year’s 11%.

CMOs have taken on responsibility for aspects of sales, IT and customer experience functions in 30% or more organizations.

27% of the marketing expense budget is now allocated to technology, or 3.24% of revenue in 2016 vs. CIO’s tech budget of 3.4% of revenue.

We’re also seeing a strong correlation between a CMO’s willingness to share in the risk and the size of the budget they’re able to command. 

While the majority of marketing leaders expect budget increases again next year, the percentage of marketers bracing for a cut has grown nearly 5X from this time two years ago.

"Wow! It may have taken place seven days ago, but I am still exhausted — and exhilarated — from our inaugural B2B Marketing Forumin Miami last week. Here is a short recap of what we covered during the two days..."