Scott Brinker

Marketing technology — martech — as a whole is, more or less, about 20 years old now.

I think of the rise of Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot, etc., as the genesis of the martech industry.

But an industry is not made of products. It's made of people. And it was about 20 years ago that we saw the early emergence of "marketing technologists" — people who blended skills from across the domains of marketing and IT. They saw both sides and were able to build the bridges — rather tenous rope bridges at first — between these two worlds.

Those early marketing technologists were called "unicorns" 🦄 because the combination of those two skillsets was quite rare at first. They were on the fringe. Not well-understood. Rarely recognized at senior executive levels. Almost entirely self-taught in learning this new hybrid discipline.

But they forged the future that has become the marketing field of today.

Well, fast-forward two decades, and now marketing technologists are pretty mainstream. They're marketing ops and RevOps. Labels du jour include GTM engineers and marketing engineers. (A marketing technologist by any by other name would smell as sweet.) And it's widely acknowledged as a foundational pillar of marketing organizations now. Even more so with AI.

And, as I highlight in this week's chiefmartec newsletter, the discipline of marketing technology is now so mainstream that you can major in it at college! 😀

After meeting Dr Jason Pallant and Linda Robinson a couple of weeks ago at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and seeing their Marketing Technology Lab, meeting graduate and undergraduate students studying marketing technology, and learning more about their Bachelor of Commerce degree that offers a major in marketing technology... it struck me just how mainstream martech is.

And thank goodness it is. Because the work ahead in marketing as we reinvent and reimagine what's possible in an AI world is going to need a ton of bright, ambitious marketing technology talent.

But let's give a shout-out to the OG marketing technologists who pioneered this space. 🙌 Your vision and perseverance got us here.

newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p/marketing-te…

My martech career has been a happy accident. I was originally going into the music business.

I was a budding keyboardist, songwriter, and producer in my teens and early 20's. I loved creating music, mastering the technology of the studio, connecting with people through live performance, and collaborating with incredibly talented and good-natured souls.

But... it didn't pay the bills. My music career was more of a bill-generator. 😅 So I sun-lighted (the inverse of moon-lighted?) as an entrepreneurial software developer, ultimately focused on software for marketers.

You can guess where the story went from there. 😂

But I'm so happy and appreciative to have found that same kind of joy from music in martech. Both as an operator and now as an analyst, I've been able to create software, ecosystems, content. I'm constantly tinkering with what new technology can unlock. I'm deeply grateful and honored to connect with so many people through talks at live events.

And the collaborations? Man, so many special and talented people that I've had the privilege to work with in this field.

I was reflecting on that long and winding road this month as I had the incredible opportunity to "perform" — well, really just present a deck or join a panel 😂 — at martech events held at three iconic music venues:

▶️ Lincoln Center with Zeta Global's Zeta Live event
▶️ Sydney Opera House with a Hightouch private event
▶️ Abbey Road Studios (Studio 2!) with Progress Software's MartechNEXT

Thank you to those event organizers for inviting me to participate — and thank you to all of the people who attended. As always, it's a privilege for me to be able to engage with you in person. ❤️

With practice, I just might make it to Carnegie Hall. 😂

Hey, New York martech friends — last chance to join me and an incredible roster of speakers at Martech World Forum next week, Nov 4-5.

There are only a handful of seats left, so if you want to snag one, it's now or never!

You can use my code — ScottBSAVE — to get a 25% discount:

accelevents.com/e/u/checkout/m…

I'll be doing two sessions at the event:

The first on Wednesday with Steve Petersen from Wyndham on martech vibe coding in enterprise environments.

The second on Thursday, digging into martech's tectonic shift from apps to infrastructure.

If you're in the Tri-state area, don't miss this opportunity to connect with your peers in B2C enterprise marketing. Other speakers I'm excited to hear from include Keanu Taylor, John Hardy, Tony Byrne, Ana Mourao, and more.

Hope to see you there!

I keep saying, "context" is the word of the year in martech. 😀

Many facets to that, to be sure. But the most important context to understand is the context of our customers.

In B2B, acquiring accurate intent signals from your target accounts, understanding them, and being able to quickly take action on them is crucial to successfully running account-based marketing.

But it's become even more important as we lay the foundation for greater customer context to be captured and operationalized throughout our (increasingly agentic) martech stack.

The team at Influ2 is launching a new capability with their platform to expand the circle of that intent with individual people at accounts that *should* be on your list.

On November 5 at 12pm ET, I'll be joining Anna Tsymbalist and Caroline Hsu to talk through this new capability and what it makes possible.

Register here to join us for the disucssion:

pba.influ2.com/discovery-rele…

Want NEW data on which martech categories are "open" through APIs and MCPs?

Want revisualized data on which martech categories are becoming AI-native, AI-augmented, or AI-custom-built?

Good news! You can immediately download two mini-reports that cover both of those by signing up for our upcoming Martech for 2027 report and launch event.

Martech for 2027 will be launched on December 1, but you'll receive links to download these two mini-reports today when you register for the event.

Frans Riemersma and I have so much research data on the state of martech and where it's headed for 2027 that we can't fit it all in the main report we'll be launching.

So we're packaging up several of these extra views as bonus items for our friends and supporters.

There's a grid in the "How Open Is the Martech Stack?" mini-report in particular that I think you'll find especially interesting. 😀

chiefmartec.com/martech2027