The only plausible explanation for the 2018 Martech “5000” is that Marketers have got some serious karma going on.

Okay, maybe not serious karma — used in a colloquial sense, though, this annual Martech graphic reads like the answer to the marketing industry’s pre-digital era prayers.

Do any marketers remember the “good old days” when you pined for more data?

Any of you recall, perhaps, *wishing* you had more data? More applications to help you with data? More platforms to reach your audience from?

Be careful what you wish for. 

Martech “5000” Nears 7000

This year’s Martech “5000” graphic contains 6,289 marketing technology solutions, took the collaboration of several companies to create, and required the services of an outside (and highly talented) team for data visualization (Blue Green Brands if you’re curious).

In 2011, there were around 150 marketing technology solutions to choose from. The landscape grew tenfold from 2011 to 2014...and at just shy of 7,000 this year, growing at a rate of 27% over last year, we’re two years away from another ten-fold increase.

That’s 10,000 marketing technology solutions. And since the demand definitely is there, that’s one big marketing technology problem they’re solving.

In 2014, Scott Brinker wrote about the first ten-fold explosion: “Imagination, talent, passion, daring, perseverance — these are the most valuable assets in modern marketing, and they’re not a function of size.”

In 2016, Ajay Agarwal wrote of his confidence that “technology can transform sales and marketing — and empower teams with better insight, more precision and, ultimately, more predictability.” At conDati, we agree, and we look forward to empowering marketers with the technology they need to transform data overwhelm into data mastery.

What Next? Start with Integration...

Where do we go from here, then? With this data overwhelm, no consolidation of solutions, the need for better data (due in part to GDPR), and the need to not only wrangle your data but also tame your data solutions, the partial solution of marketing integration has arrived.

iPaaS (integration-Platform-as-a-Service) “solutions on the martech landscape are a testament to the immense demand for orchestrating all of these different components,” Scott notes in his Martech “5000” blog post. This is true, and a needed stop gap measure to help make sense of the sheer number of cloud based services enterprises use every day. The average enterprise used 91 cloud based marketing services in 2017.

Once that data is integrated, though, what’s next?

...Banish Spreadsheets & Get Ready for Real Martech Innovation

Well, as it stands now, marketers gather a team to make sense of the multi-channel data, enter all that disparate data into spreadsheets, and, once a month (or so, whenever they can take some time away from their job of actually marketing) gather around to make sense of the visuals presented. In fact, there are enterprises spending the equivalent of $20,000 per month or more in employee and executive time to solve this problem - to say nothing of the opportunity costs.

What if, however, there were another option? At conDati, we applaud what Scott Brinker described as “a vision of many open platform-like tools being woven together in a more dynamic fashion…(that) give more power to marketers to shape their craft in a digital everything world.”

Our solution empowers that vision and carries it forward by offering not only integration, but carefully chosen algorithms that use machine learning in the most efficient, effective way possible to bring your data together across all channels and then deliver useful information instantaneously, with no latency. We are your data science team in the cloud - which means a fraction of the cost, and machines don’t take vacations.

Welcome to 2018 where marketing professionals now have the imagination, talent, passion, daring and perseverance they’ve always had. And now, that’s coupled with the technology that can transform and empower their space with better insight, more precision, and, yes, more predictability.

Sound like an implausible wish? Book a demo and see for yourself.