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Marketing Technology

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In August 2011, Scott Brinker created the first official “Marketing Technology Landscape.” It was a super-graphic with logos of the 150 different marketing solutions in the market at the time.

Scott continued mapping the landscape as the number of marketing technology solutions exploded — doubling to 350 in 2012 and blowing past 5,000 just five years later in 2017. I drew an “everything including the kitchen sink” cartoon in 2019 when the landscape reached 6,829 solutions.

The landscape has continue to expand further still. Scott’s latest 2025 Marketing Technology Landscape boasts a staggering 15,384 marketing technology solutions, organized in 49 categories. The logos are now so tiny, they look like pixels. The chart is completely unreadable. Of course AI is now part of many of these tools, and has accelerated the creation of new ones.

According to Zylo, a company that manages Saas licenses, the average business has a portfolio of 275 separate tools in their tech stack, many of those in marketing. Only 16% of the tools in a company’s tech stack were purchased by IT; 50% were purchased directly by the line of business and rest are shadow IT purchases.

The martech stack has become a Tower of Babel, with many of these tools not talking at all with the others.

Gartner reported in a recent CMO Spend Survey that marketing technology currently accounts for nearly a quarter (22.4%) of the total marketing budget.

With so much focus on new technology, we can lose sight of the strategy. Ultimately, the technology is a means to an end.

I love how Scott defined MarTech’s Law:

“Technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically.”

Speaking in NYC and London next month

I just confirmed I’m speaking in two cities next month for Opticon25: September 10 in NYC and September 30 in London. Hosted by Optimizely, Opticon25 is a free event for marketing and product teams. I hope to see some of you there.

And as always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit.

Cartoon From The Archives

And here’s that cartoon I referenced that I drew in 2019:

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Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.