As the marketing tech landscape continues to take shape, it’s clear that a lot still needs to happen before digital marketers reach the holy grail of customer interaction. Picking winners and losers is a risky proposition, but CIO.com senior writer Tom Kaneshige takes a shot.
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.
At times, marketing tech is like the parable about the blind men and the elephant, whereby each man touches a part of the elephant, say, the trunk or ear or tusk, and attempts to define the entire animal. Marketing tech has many distinct parts that add up to an elusively shaped, incredibly disruptive ecosystem…
