Stories by Tom Kaneshige

Most enterprise technology eventually converges into a suite, as it did with ERP. Integration hassles, management headaches and training challenges arising from a mishmash of best-of-breed solutions drive frustrated enterprise software buyers to the suite life -- but not in marketing tech, at least not yet.

If you've spent time Google searching and window shopping online, say, on an outdoor retailer's website, dreaming about a $400 graphite fly fishing rod, maybe even putting the fly rod in a shopping cart to keep the fantasy going only to click away when reality bites, you might see the fly rod following you around the Interwebs, your Facebook feed or a banner ad.

When Nima Asrar Haghighi, director of digital marketing and analytics at MuleSoft, looked around for a predictive lead scoring, he reached back to his technical roots.

Marketers and advertisers shudder when they think about the great consumer rush to mobile. With a smartphone's tiny screen and a mobile consumer's fleeting attention span, marketers face an enormous challenge capitalizing on mobility.

People not in the branding business don't see much difference between advertising and marketing. As new-age advertising technology, or adtech, and marketing technology, or martech, logically merge, what's the problem? For advertising agencies, which have been on the frontline of branding since the late 18th century, a lot is at stake.

Are you feeling overworked, overwhelmed, on the edge of a mental breakdown? You're probably a content marketer.

In rapid-fire speech and hands waving erratically, Rachel Weiss, vice president of digital innovation, content and new ventures at L'Oreal, says nothing is more personal than what you put on your body, such as makeup. She talked up awesome new digital services, such as a virtual beauty advisor, that really tap into human emotions.

In Las Vegas, if you're not new and fresh, you're old and boring. Casinos thrive on youthful energy and young executives flush with cash. Nightclubs buzz into the wee hours, chock full of hard-partying millennials, not stodgy Gen-Xers in desperate need of their beauty sleep.

Handing off customers, from marketing to sales to customer service, seems a bit jolting in today's digital world. These days, customers own the online social relationship, and they don't want to be passed around like a hot potato. They demand one group guide them through the customer journey.

Arms flailing in an ocean of customer data, panicky marketers need the CIO to throw them a life line. That is, they need to know what to do with the data.

As marketers ride the digital wave to higher salaries, greater roles and bigger budgets, will it all come crashing down? Do marketers really understand the technology that has upended their profession? If they don't improve their digital IQ in a hurry, they're risking a wipeout.

By now, it's pretty clear that marketing tech scares the bejesus out of modern marketers. Technology stacks, integration layers, APIs, oh my! Techies add to these fears by throwing tech jargon in a marketer's face, explaining technology to a marketer in a condescending way, and even snickering at the perceived simplicity of the marketer's craft.

The marketing tech landscape has been expanding at an impressive clip over the last three years. It now boasts more than 3,000 vendors, including giants such as Adobe and Oracle. It's an ecosystem buzzing with activity -- big fish gobbling up smaller ones, startups trying to survive -- and marketers can easily get disoriented.

Hold on to your hats, spending on marketing tech is about to take off -- $120 billion over the next decade, up from $1.2 billion today. At least that's what Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, sees when he gazes into his crystal ball.

Marketers are getting the message that serving the consumer at the mobile moment should be their top priority. So are they investing mightily in mobile marketing tech? Not as much as you might expect.