TMW #206 | Martech is not a profession

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The Martech industry suffers for a lack of standards. We are not professionals.

Come join MTEC, TMW’s new research council, to develop standards for the Martech industry

TMW CEO Juan Mendoza sent me a video earlier this week of Australian Senator Deborah O’Neill blasting McKinsey executives for referring to themselves as “professionals” when they don’t have any obligation or responsibility to a professional standards body.

Give it a watch; it’s brutal.

McKinsey gets a lot of bad press, and plenty of it is deserved (see: opioid crisis), but my schadenfreude was short-lived when I realized that I am in the same boat on this occasion. The Martech industry doesn’t have a professional standards body, therefore I am not a professional.

Martech is a pretty new industry, so perhaps it can be forgiven for not having a standards body. But on the other hand, it doesn’t have much in the way of standards at all. The industry has grown fast and furious over the last three decades, but without a sense of structure.

It’s this lack of standards that’s visibly hurting the industry in so many ways… what will it take to overcome the resulting chaos that has visited upon it?

Settling down

I learned a new concept recently. It’s called the Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners (PST) framework.

It might sound like an expansion pack for an Age of Empires game, but it was actually created by Simon Wardley – a researcher and former startup CEO – to describe what innovation looks like at different stages of an organization’s evolution and maturity.

A basic summary of the framework is this: As an organization becomes more mature, it has different objectives and needs, which leads it to behave differently, hire different types of people, and focus on different metrics for success.

This concept can also be applied to entire industries. A completely greenfield industry encourages and demands experimentation, failing fast, and accepting uncertainty. A mature industry requires definition, a common language, standards, and focuses on efficiency.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

The Martech industry was completely greenfield and new in the 90s and noughties. It was a land of pioneers, with new companies starting to pop up to serve the needs of digital marketers: email marketing, CMSs, CRMs, and more. This was the era when Salesforce changed the game with the “the end of software” and the birth of software-as-a-service (SaaS).

As we rounded into the 2010s, we started to see a bit more structure. Luma Partners published the first Martech “LUMAscape” in 2011, tracking all the vendors in the space. The company’s founder, Terrence Khawaja, said that he “just wanted to organize this mess.” As time went on, Scott Brinker at Chiefmartec picked up the mantle to develop the one and only Martech Supergraphic that is so popular in the industry today. 

Around the same time, Gartner and Forrester started publishing Magic Quadrants and Waves for marketing technology categories, further categorizing and ranking players in the space. Since then, a coterie of media companies, consultancies, analysts, agencies, and tech vendors have created a cacophony of noise around the industry. It can be dizzying at times, and it’s the reason that The Martech Weekly exists – to try to cut through all the noise.

I see the 2010s as the time of settlement in the Martech industry. We started to get some semblance of structure, but there was – and still is – a lot of focus on the players in the game rather than the forces and rules that define the game.

The industry hasn’t developed standards as it grows. It has grown on top of itself in a messy, lawless, tangled web that resembles Kowloon, the Walled City in Hong Kong that fell between the cracks of British and Chinese rule for decades. Without formal governance, a city emerged where residents built houses on top of each other to form one of the most densely populated and lawless enclaves in the world.

Much like Kowloon, the Martech industry got stuck at settlement. For an industry where buyers are estimated to spend $148B in 2024 alone, the lack of accessible standards is shocking. 

It’s about time for us to do some town planning for the metropolis that is the Martech industry.

A lack of standards

What do teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, pharmacists, vets, dentists, pilots, nuclear technicians, air traffic controllers, judges, paramedics, and real estate appraisers have in common?

They all have standards! All these professions require folks to abide by a level of standards, striving for excellence. Yes, many of these are a matter of life or death or are at the very least mission critical, but they weren’t always regulated with standards. Doctors used to prescribe cocaine as a local anesthetic for children’s toothaches before standards were introduced into the medical practice.

But let’s be real. Martech folks aren’t saving lives. Are Martech standards really that urgent?

Well, we might not be saving lives, but we are wasting an unholy amount of money, as I explained in TMW #194 | How to make friends and influence Martech buyers:

Gartner says a whopping 80% of digital transformations fail. McKinsey takes a broader view across all types of transformations, estimating a 70% fail rate… And if you’re sitting there all cozy thinking that you are a marketer and this is not your problem, then think again. A lot of digital transformation involves marketing teams and Martech, and they’re not doing much better in terms of buying decisions. 90% of CDP owners don’t think their current CDP meets their needs. Average Martech utilization fell to 33% in 2023. 79% of marketing executives say that they are using less than half of their stack.

And yes, maybe you believe that if companies can afford to waste this money, then let them waste it. 

But at the end of the day, it has a human impact. Martech folks who oversee or operate at that level of inefficiency are not going to accelerate in their career, and will feel frustration in their roles. We’ve all been there, wondering why things all move so slow: It takes three weeks to pull a report that is not even fully accurate, four weeks set up a campaign… two years to migrate CRMs… the grey hairs are already sprouting.

Juan had a conversation with an enterprise B2B2C company a few months back, and they illustrated exactly how Martech can affect the people operating it: They estimated that every time they do a major platform change, they lose 20% of their staff on average over the following months. The tech matters to the people.

And it’s not just employees that feel the pain from wasteful Martech; consumers feel it too. According to a report by SAS and the Harvard Business Review, 81% of marketers believe that undisciplined Martech programs have a significant or moderate negative impact on consumer trust.

This has been evidenced from consumers as well. Forrester’s 2024 US Customer Experience Index hit its lowest point since Forrester started tracking the metric, although it did spike quickly during the early COVID years as brands invested heavily in going digital, before returning to the declining pattern.

Poor customer experience is a trust killer, especially considering the amount of data that consumers hand over to brands nowadays. Bad experiences generally just make consumers distrust marketers as a profession, which makes it a whole lot harder for everyone to gain satisfaction from the industry. In the US, advertising/PR folks – as a proxy for the marketing industry – are as hated as Big Pharma!

The other challenge with a lack of standards relates to the impact it has on education. TMW has been partnering up with RMIT University in Australia to develop the first marketing technology degree in the region and the third globally of its kind. That is a very narrow pathway into the industry, which puts more pressure on in-job learning to drive how the industry operates. Without standards, that in-job learning will vary wildly from company to company.

This is borne out in the skills gap in the Martech industry. Pick your stat: 65% of Martech folks rate their company or clients as subpar to standard in terms of people and teams in their ability to deliver Martech initiatives. Only 28% of marketers view their in-house talent as trained and working well. 48% of marketers cite a lack of skills to operate technology as a top two challenge. And a whopping 69% of UK leaders believe they currently have a digital skills gap.

So yes, marketers are not saving lives, but we still need standards. Otherwise, we will have an industry synonymous with waste, employee frustration, and customer dissatisfaction. Standards are crucial for the long-term viability of the industry.

Why excellence matters

North star visions, blue sky thinking, five-year roadmaps… these are the occasions in the life of an enterprise Martecher that they consciously think about and plot out what excellence looks like for their organization.

These occasions are too few and far between compared to the daily activity of a Martech leader. In a field as technical and complex as Martech, folks need to strive for excellence every day to ensure the satisfaction of all involved and reduce waste. If you’ve seen Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, then you’ll know the daily mentality needed to thrive in the Martech industry…

Source: Pinterest

But excellence is defined differently based on each person’s experience. Given the talent gap in brand-side Martech folks, not enough people have a level of experience that will consistently lead to excellence across the breadth of Martech.

And when you don’t have the experience, buying it in is expensive. A consultancy can come in to charge by the hour for their form of excellence, which is based on a wide range of experiences – and is not the same as standards. The analyst firms can help, but they can be even more expensive; Gartner subscriptions cost on average $184K per year according to Vendr.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of any person or company in the Martech ecosystem. There are brilliant, smart people everywhere in this industry, and equally impressive companies operating in the space. But they are all pulling in their own direction, looking after their own interests.

Defining excellence requires collaboration, and it’s not black and white, either. What is an excellent Martech operation for a retailer will look very different to that of a bank. But across industries, there are principles, values, strategies, and approaches that are universally applicable.

The Martech industry suffers for a lack of accessible standards for excellence… until now.

MTEC: Martech Excellence Center

Introducing TMW’s newest research project, MTEC.

The goal for MTEC is simple: To create standards in each domain of Martech to improve the satisfaction of those who work in the field, the customers they serve, and to reduce the waste and stasis that a lack of standards causes for businesses.

What we will do is organize cohorts of brand-side Martech leaders and practitioners to work together to create standards in the form of Excellence Definitions in each domain of Martech. The domains of Martech will be varied to cover the full experience of working in Martech; examples include customer data management, analytics and attribution, GenAI in the enterprise, the Martech buying process, Martech organizational design, Martech recruitment and talent management, and many more.

The scope of each cohort is not limited to tech. We want to consider the types of platforms, people, processes, data, regulation, and ethics required to achieve excellence in each domain of Martech.

Each cohort will span industries, ensuring no competitive companies are in the mix. It’s an opportunity for cohort members to get into deep discussions with peers in other industries, learn from their successes and failures, and bring that back to their own business.

For those that want to join the cohort, this isn’t an additional part-time job. Martech folks are too busy for that. We will use a mix of survey-based responses, short and sharp collaboration sessions, and asynchronous feedback to gain insights from each person’s experience and build out the Excellence Definition, which will be produced by TMW as a report.

I can hear you thinking it from here… what’s in it for me?

Apart from having access to other highly vetted brand-side leaders, you will also be cited publicly by TMW as an MTEC council member and have the opportunity to present findings via speaking opportunities at Martech World Forum events and through our editorial.

Speaking of editorial and events, you will also get a year’s subscription to TMW PRO Advantage (RRP $499) and access to an MWF event of your choosing (RRP $500).

Plus, you will be a key person in driving forward an industry that we all love. Yes, that’s a bit soft and mushy, but it’s a noble goal and much needed if we want this industry to be sustainable over the long run. We need standards, a common language, and a guiding light. It all helps to build the industry up for us all to thrive.

So, if you’re interested in getting involved, fill out this short form and we’ll be in contact in the new year.

Come shape the future of Martech.

Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.