Martech 2018: We Have Nearly 7,000 Solutions and More Challenges Than Ever

In April, Sarah Hale, my fellow martech account director, and I attended the annual Martech Conference in San Jose. While the warm weather was a welcome break from Chicago’s long winter, the conference itself was the real highlight. Not to mention seeing Walker Sands’ name in lights during the keynote. Check out the 2018 State of Martech for additional relevant findings on how marketers view martech these days.

Here’s a recap of our biggest takeaways from the conference:

There are more martech solutions than ever before

Host Scott Brinker unveiled his latest martech landscape on Day 1, and we discovered that there are now nearly 7,000 martech solutions – 6,829 to be precise. This is 28 percent more than last year, and only 4.5 percent of the companies from the 2017 landscape were removed.

Blockchain is going to be like the Internet but bigger

Speaker Jeremy Epstein predicts that the impact blockchain will have on business will be as big as the Internet was in the 90s. To really dumb it down, blockchain allows you to know who owns what at a specific moment in time, which enables commerce to happen a lot faster. Check out this podcast to hear him explain how this works to his nine-year-old.

CDP is the next frontier

If we were playing martech bingo, blockchain, AI and CDPs would definitely have been on our cards. Presentation after presentation mentioned CDPs as the next major technology that savvy organizations should integrate if they haven’t already. Unlike a cookie-based DMP, CDPs are geared toward first-party data and reliant on persistent profiles. The result? A normalized database at a time when data is at a crossroads.

The best product doesn’t always prevail

The businesses that succeed are the ones that find the overlap between great technology and a great go-to-market strategy. There are countless start-ups out there, but the ones that find a way to resonate with customers are the ones that grow – even if they don’t necessarily have the best products, according to venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz.

These were just a few of the takeaways we gathered at Martech this year. If you’d like to hear more, either of us would love to chat. Send us a note!

Post contributor: Sarah Hale, Account Director at Walker Sands