Hello peak martech: 2019 Marketing Technology Landscape growth slows for first time

Marketing Technology Landscape 2019.

SAN JOSE, CA — The number of companies encompassed in the famous Marketing Technology Landscape did not grow by double digits for the first time in eight years, with the 2019 Marketing Technology Landscape including 7,040 companies, an increase of just three percent from 2018.

Lead author and MarTech Conference chair Scott Brinker, unveiled the 2019 Martech Landscape during a keynote address at the conference in San Jose Thursday.

“The immediate reaction would be, This is it, we’ve reached peak martech,” said Brinker in an interview earlier this week. “But what it comes down to isn’t so much peak martech. It’s peak martech landscape.”

Brinker came to that conclusion after he began looking for martech in international markets and other sectors and found that the landscape misses a lot that’s happening in regional martech and the thousands of smaller solutions and apps available in various ecosystems of martech giants such as Salesforce, Oracle and HubSpot. “WordPress has an ecosystem of 54,000 plugins!” noted Brinker.

“We’ve hit the limits of what can be tracked down and included in one graphic,” he said, noting that the in proliferation of small point solutions and ecosystems is part of where he sees marketing technology heading.

Chiefly, in the new age of martech, Brinker sees the big ecosystems evolving into open platforms that are complemented by integrated, third-party apps; services firms offering more in the way of automated solutions; and the ability to create no- or low code solutions means marketers can create and customize point solutions to meet their specific needs. And all of these factors are propelled by the cloud.

Why you should care. “In some ways, forget about martech 5,000. Welcome to martech 50,000,” said Brinker, pointing to the hundreds of plug-and-play apps that are essentially mini martech products. “There are regional, vertical, ecosystems, services and citizen martech segments.”

The handful of behemoths — Adobe, Salesforce, etc. — that have made big acquisitions in recent years are also contributing to the explosion of what could be called micro-martech within their ecosystems. Not to mention the proliferation of services integrating with one another — consider Adobe’s recent partnerships with LinkedIn, Drift, Roku and ServiceNow.