Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma published the State of Martech 2026 last week. If you work in this space, read it. If you don’t, here’s what it says and why I think most CMOs are about to misread it. By Jason Simon The headline number is 0.79%. That’s how much the martech landscape grew in…
In October 2025, McKinsey published Rewiring martech: From cost center to growth engine, drawn from a survey of more than 200 senior marketing and technology leaders at Fortune 500 companies and in-depth interviews with over 50 CMOs. The headline finding, reported widely in Fortune and elsewhere, asked a question that should have been routine: what is the ROI of…
A monthly synthesis of signals across the watchlist. Vendors named where the record is public. Customer lists are not. 1: Category Movement April was the month the agentic positioning shift moved from vendor-by-vendor messaging to a category-wide strategic posture. The dominant move came from Adobe, which used Summit 2026 in Las Vegas (April 20–22) to rebrand Adobe Experience Cloud…
HR has more data than ever before. But for many organizations, that has not translated into better decisions. Across conversations with HR leaders, the same themes keep surfacing: fragmented people data, low trust in the numbers, difficulty connecting systems, too much descriptive reporting, and not enough insight that leads to action. There is also growing…
Retail leaders wrestle with a deceptively simple question:“Is this store or market performing as well as it should be?” The problem is that most organizations still answer that question by looking at performance in isolation. Rankings, averages, and year-over-year growth get used as proxies for success. That works until it does not. A top performing store may simply…
Something fundamental has changed in how people discover content online. The change is not loud. There is no big platform migration or overnight traffic collapse. But it is already affecting how traffic is classified, interpreted, and explained. We are already seeing this show up quietly across GA4 accounts, usually in places teams are not actively…
In the modern business world, AI is often treated as a buzzword. From boardrooms to breakrooms, you hear terms like “machine learning,” “deep learning,” and “generative AI” tossed around. But what do they actually mean for your business? AI adoption has rapidly accelerated. It’s no longer just about experimentation, it’s about execution and scale. Today,…
The cannabis industry is one of the fastest-growing and most competitive markets, with brands and dispensaries constantly fighting for customer attention. Since cannabis products can often times be undifferentiated in the eyes of consumers, promotions have become a key strategy for driving sales, increasing brand loyalty, and acquiring new customers. However, running promotions without measuring…
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, data is more than just numbers and figures—it’s a strategic asset that can drive growth, innovation, and competitive advantage. Yet, having data isn’t enough. Without a thoughtful data strategy, businesses risk drowning in information rather than harnessing its power. Let’s explore what a data strategy is, why it’s essential,…
Each year (OK, this is the first year) we poll all ‘Solvers’ on their favorite ‘top of mind’ songs. These don’t have to be your all time favorites or even songs from this year, just some go-to songs that you are listening to this time of year.