Frans Riemersma is the Founder of the marketing technology consultancy Martech Tribe, author of “A Small Book on Customer Technology”, and the co-producer of the “State of Martech Report”.
The story of marketing automation over the past three decades or so has largely been one of rapid adaptation to technological change.
With each defining era of technology – whether it was the launch of the Web and email in the early 1990s, the mass adoption of smartphones and social media platforms through the mid-2000s, or the transition to cloud computing and software-as-a service in the 2010s – new MarTech solutions always emerged to make it easier for brands to connect with people across channels. As channels multiplied, so did the need for more and more specialized apps.
Today the industry is facing a new era of technological change unlike anything that has come before it. Ever since ChatGPT was unveiled in 2022, the pace of innovation has been frantic. Almost overnight it seemed generative AI was being embedded into every software platform and tool. All of the established MarTech providers rushed to make AI a standard feature of their platforms. And lately a swarm of AI-native startups have jumped aboard, changing the contours of the MarTech landscape.
Today all parts of the marketing value chain – from ideation to design to content creation to channel activation to measurement – is being transformed. And no sooner have marketers begun to wrap their heads around this first ferocious wave of AI-led innovation when along comes an even more disruptive force: agentic AI which will upend how marketers actually go about their work.
We’ve certainly come a long way from just over a decade or so ago when email software applications (like ExactTarget or Eloqua) and programmatic ad platforms (like The Trade Desk) were the go-to MarTech tools of performance marketers. Back then marketers felt proud of themselves just for pulling off a multi-channel campaign, incorporating email, social media, and maybe mobile messaging.
With the shift in marketing strategy from flooding inboxes with promotional email to anywhere-anytime personalized engagement, the “marchitecture” has kept expanding to accommodate new forms of connectivity. MarTech stacks have grown to become a motley assortment of “best-of-breed” point solutions, all with their own databases, using APIs to shuttle data back and forth. Even the bundled marketing automation and CRM suites still struggle to fully integrate their closed systems with external apps, forcing marketers to use middleware (like Zapier) to automate their workflows. In fact, the number one problem facing the marketing operations group in charge of the infrastructure is integration. Too many data siloes, too many apps, too many interfaces, too many overlapping and conflicting workflow rules – too many chances for something to go wrong.
Today the entire constellation of MarTech solutions across all categories has swollen to more than 15 thousand vendors (up from a paltry 150 in 2011), according to the latest “State of MarTech” report, produced by industry thought leaders Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma. Much of the past year’s growth in this ever expanding universe is attributable to the AI-centric start-ups.
As Scott and Frans say, the market is “insanely crowded”. And it is likely to keep growing, maybe at an even faster pace, as businesses ramp up their spending on marketing automation from 20% of the marketing budget today to 31% over the next five years. But the MarTech stack of the past – a bunch of niche applications loosely bolted to a central marketing automation or CRM platform – will slowly give way to a more “composable” ecosystem of interoperable software components, orchestrated on the back end through AI agents. Hard to say what that marchitecture might look like exactly, other than a unified customer data layer at the center, but certainly it promises to be more streamlined, efficient and less siloed than now.
Frans Riemersma figures that ownership of this complex MarTech ecosystem might eventually be transferred from marketing ops to IT because the entire infrastructure will be deemed too important to be left in the hands of marketers due to security and compliance risks. Marketing’s job at that point? Spend more time thinking about the customer experience and less about getting the next campaign out the door.
I began by asking the Dutch native Frans the origin story behind his tech consultancy Martech Tribe.
Frans Riemersma (FR):: I have a background in marketing operations and related software like marketing resource management platforms, DONE Pin1, those kind of tools. Wrote a book about it 2009 and I thought I would like to broaden my horizon because I was VP R&D for a German MarTech vendor. They are now called Uptempo2 and they acquired Allocadia, Hive 93. And they basically looked into this marketing ops, resource management area. And I wanted to broaden my horizon and think, okay, what is MarTech? What is in there? Of course there’s CRM, there is upcoming back then, CDP, marketing automation, social media, data analytics, all that stuff.
So what I did, of course looking at the logo landscape4 of Scott Brinker and just started clicking logos because there was no formal education, nowhere to be found, still very hard to find, even at universities and stuff. So how to deal with technology, that was the big question. Not for me, I think, but for everyone. So I clicked some logos and soon enough I learned two things. One, by clicking logos, it’s a very good education. You get an expert pretty quickly. And an expert is not a know it all, an expert is somebody who has a clue like, okay, I know in which direction to search. The other thing is I learned there are not a lot of European vendors on the map.
So together with friends and family here in Europe, I started collecting stuff. I happen to speak Spanish. I’m from a region in the Netherlands that’s more related to Scandinavian languages, so I could find my way around. But although those websites were often in English as well. So before we knew, I think in 2, 3 years time we added like 2-3,000 tools to the landscape. Just from Europe. Yeah, there was a lot of enthusiasm from people over here, a lot of innovation.
So I shipped them over in an Excel sheet to Scott over a LinkedIn direct message and that was our contact we had so far, until this company from Germany said after I left the company, can you guys together do a podcast? And we did for a year long, every month, podcasts. And then at the end we said, hey, he asked me how do you do stuff? And I started to explain how I set up the structure and all my data warehouse and stuff. He said maybe we could do this together. So that’s how I ended up in MarTech more and more.
Stephen Shaw:: But the company itself, the idea of offering consulting services, did you see a gap in the market that suggested there was a need there?