Latest Brinker martech lumascape swells to over 7000 software apps

The latest Scott Brinker martech lumascape has hit the street, and shows the list of technology players vying for the marketing and customer budget has swelled to more than 7000 logos.

But according to the author himself, the list doesn’t adequate reflect the ongoing explosion and evolution of the martech environment.

The annual marketing technology landscape for 2019 has again been broken into six key categories of software in the marketing and customer experience management sphere: Advertising and promotion; content and experience; social and relationships; commerce and sales; data and management.

Within these, 49 categories of software are reflected, stretching from marketing automation and campaign management, email marketing, CRM, and CMS and Web experience management, through to complementary areas such as talent management, sales automation and enablement, analytics in its various forms, and search and social advertising.

While consolidation across the martech and adtech space has been rapid and aggressive, this year’s lumascape still shows a 3 per cent increase in the number of vendors seeking to win a slice of the marketer’s budget, from 6800 in 2018 to 7040 in 2019.

Commenting on his latest report, Brinker said the slower increase year-on-year may lead several to think there’s a plateau or flattening out of the list.

“At face value, it would seem that indeed, we have achieved ‘peak martech’,” he stated. “Yet 7000 marketing technology solutions isn’t exactly a consolidated market. We’d have to compress the industry by an order of magnitude or two – to 700 or even 70 – before that adjective would apply.”

In addition, Brinker admitted defeat to the amount of scope his own martech lumascape could deliver in the face of such a rapidly moving market. With nine people working on the report for up to four months, it’s clear the latest edition was only going to go so far, and Brinker noted a number of additional martech pockets not represented in the 2019 edition.

Among these are regional martech apps, vertical industry apps, martech apps built for specific platform ecosystems, those built by services or consulting groups, or open-source and citizen developed solutions.

What’s more, Brinker said innovation continues to be driven by three next-generation phases of martech – or what he’s labelled the ‘second golden age of martech’. These are platform ecosystems, blended models and software and services, and customer apps and ops on a common core.  

It’s a trend clearly reflected in the way enterprise-grade vendors have been building out their marketing stacks, such as Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle , HupSpot and G Suite.

Yet there’s plenty more room, and Brinker said marketing technology has a “long, long, loooooong tail”.

“The truth is that marketing and marketing technology are changing. The challenges of trying to chart all these different martech apps — and running into philosophical debates of what qualifies as an ‘app’ in a world of tens of thousands of pieces of software that could each claim to belong in that collection – is actually a pretty good reflection of the underlying evolution of software in general,” Brinker concluded.

“While individual categories on the marketing technology landscape — and the larger vendors operating within each of them — continue to jockey between expansion and consolidation, all of this is happen against a backdrop of ever more apps, components, services, and platforms steadily expanding for the foreseeable future.”

You can find the Brinker lumascape and report here.

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