If you’re a marketer in today’s data-driven, technology-obsessed era, you undoubtedly took notice of the updated Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic published by Scott Brinker earlier this week. Just as we were all starting to make sense of the 2,000+ vendors included in last year’s graphic, this new one comes along – and it’s 87% bigger. Time to invest in a magnifying glass.
Aside from the number of vendors drastically increasing, an interesting shift in this year’s graphic is in the categories used. Scott has divided the martech landscape in what’s he calling six capability clusters: advertising and promotion, content and experience, social and relationships, commerce and sales, data, and management. This is a significant shift from how he was looking at the world in 2015, when the graphic took a more layered approach – consisting of infrastructure, backbone platforms, middleware, marketing operations, and marketing experiences.
As complex – and scary – as this landscape graphic is, it’s our new reality as marketers… and it’s likely only to get even more complex. This is all especially timely for me, as I hosted a discussion last week largely focused on how we here at Tealium are mapping out the marketing vendor landscape to help our customers make the most optimal, strategic technology investments.
As head of global sales solutions for Tealium, I have spent the last 18 months flying some 175k miles to collaborate with our customers, and prospective customers, on defining the right technology and organizational strategies for their business. It was in these discussions with a countless number of incredibly smart marketers, data scientists, and developers that I stumbled upon the notion of the Quadrants.
In short, the Quadrants represent the intersection of four strategic marketing pillars: acquisition, engagement, sharing, and nurturing. What I discovered is that just about every marketing technology in the universe can be placed in one of these quadrants, providing a more digestible way to look at core capabilities, overlaps in functionality, and functionality gaps.
Most importantly, as you can see, this encourages the approach of focusing on the data and building from the center out – which, the way I see it, is the only way to successfully navigate the ever-expanding super graphic of marketing technologies.
I’ll be exploring various aspects of the Quadrants concept in a series of blogs over the coming weeks, which we’re affectionately calling The ‘Quad Rants.’ We hope you’ll check back in to hear more, and more importantly, share your thoughts and questions.
PS. If you have a few minutes and want a bit more background on The Quadrants, you can check out the webinar I recently hosted here.
