Every marketer has seen that crowded graphic of the marketing technology landscape, which gets set in smaller print every year as the number of vendor logos balloons, now, to over 8,000 and counting.

“This explosion of software is happening everywhere,” said Scott Brinker, creator of the graphic and also Editor of chiefmartec.com and VP Platform Ecosystem for HubSpot. 

Brinker closed day one of MarTech with a keynote addressing this growth in software applications and the transition to digital-first operations that affects how all of us do our jobs. He cited an IDC Technologies prediction that there could be over 500 million digital apps and services deployed using cloud-native approaches by 2023.

“Not all of these are going to be commercially packaged solutions you can buy off the shelf, although there will certainly be plenty — hundreds of thousands of SaaS applications,” Brinker said. “But there will be an even larger number of custom apps built within individual companies.”

As any marketer can tell on a daily basis, the amount of data out there is proliferating. Of course, as discussed in the other Day 1 keynote, the data isn’t always perfect.

But as data continues to grow, the applications to manage and activate it are growing even faster.

“The thing about Big Ops is that it’s not just the data that’s growing, it’s the interactions that every single one of us as an individual is having per day with data,” Brinker said. “That’s actually growing even faster than the data in the world.”

Read more here.

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“Marketing operations is one of the fastest growing marketing professions — and it shows no signs of slowing down.” That’s how Darrell Alfonso, who works in Global Marketing Operations for Amazon Web Services, kicked off day two of MarTech.There are currently no fewer than 61,000 job openings on LinkedIn which refer to “marketing operations” in the U.S. alone.

Alfonso drilled down into the marketing ops responsibilities which make it so critical to the modern marketing organization:

• Data. Data needs to flow seamlessly between systems and to be available to users;
• Revenue. It’s important to know how marketing activity impacts revenue;
• Efficiency. Successful marketing programs need to be iterable and scalable;
• Effectiveness. Marketing operations creates the analytics which provides insight into performance; and
• ROI. For every dollar that is spent, what’s the return?

It’s clear from the above that marketing ops, far from being back-room button-pressers, are on the front lines when it comes to identifying challenges faced by the marketing organization — as well as being tasked with finding solutions. CMOs should not just look to fill those vacancies with just anyone. They should seek out marketing ops professionals who are creators and builders. What does that mean?

“With marketing operations and martech,” said Alfonso, “you always want to keep the customer at the center and you want to create and invent on their behalf. When you do that wonderful things start to happen…and high-value business outcomes follow.”

Read more here.

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With its latest round of funding, Reddit promised to expand advertising options to help businesses drive more qualified leads. Well, it didn’t take long, from what we can see. The latest announcement indicates that ad features are where the platform’s headed. What’s new?

• Bid Recommendation: Leverage the bid recommendation tool in the ad group build page for guidance on what to bid to reach your target audience.
• Improved Bulk Edit Tool: Save time optimizing campaigns by updating bids and budgets across multiple ad groups simultaneously.
• Updated look w/ Better Performance: Loading times with the updated dashboard is also now 2x faster than before.

Why we care. One important thing about Reddit is that the communities (called subs) are so niche and specific to certain groups and interests. While they are generally wary of advertising, there’s an opportunity there to really hone in your targeting and find the exact people who would want your product or service. These upgraded advertising options will help marketers do that even more effectively now.

“I’m currently attending MarTech Conference. This is LIT.” Odd Morten Sørensen, Growth Hacker, NTE