Marketing Technology Ecosystems, Part 1 of 6: Introduction

Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape is appropriately bewildering, with 3,500+ vendors in the marketing technology space:

It can be difficult to decide which vendors to do business with; all their sales claims sound identical. They all say they’ll add multiples to our ROI, save us valuable time, and make us wheelbarrows full of cash.

How do we know which companies are the real deal?

Will any of them truly benefit our business?

The dirty secret of many of these vendors is that they are all based on a handful of technology ecosystems. They share, for lack of a better analogy, similar or identical technology DNA. If we understand the DNA of marketing technology, if we learn the technologies vendors build their systems upon, we can better evaluate their claims.

For example, a marketing technology vendor can claim they have predictive analytics. Which prediction technology is it based on? If we know that two vendors both use Google’s Predictive API, then we know much more about their service offering – and its limitations.

In this series, we’ll examine the marketing technology ecosystem. We’ll look under the hood at the platforms marketing technology is built upon, and examine whether you could build instead of buy, since many marketing technology vendors charge significant premiums beyond what their costs are.