tl; dr The martech landscape grew once again because in 2014, up 9 % to 15, 384 remedies. While new AI locals continue to blossom, the previous generation is consolidating much more. There’s likewise an exploding “hypertail” of custom software. We cover all of this and more in our new State of Martech 2025 record (cost-free and ungated).

Over 15 years back, I threw a lot of martech logos on a slide to present the Rise of the Advertising Technologist to an area of CMOs, making the instance that advertising was becoming a extremely technology-integrated discipline. (For our more youthful visitors: “marketing engineers” were what we called go-to-market designers back then– you know, before electrical power and interior plumbing.)

The following year, I defined the slide right into the first authorities marketing modern technology landscape , with a monstrous 150– wheeze! — services classified. From there, points got surreal. The market of martech expanded significantly to thousands and thousands of products. Yearly, experts anticipated it would break down within the succeeding year. And every subsequent year, empirical reality showed otherwise.

Which brings us to today’s launch of the 2025 marketing technology landscape , now with 15, 384 solutions arranged in 49 groups. Yes, it expanded. Once again. Up 9 % from in 2014’s 14, 106 Enormous debt goes to Frans Riemersma, who has been co-producing the landscape with me since 2022 with a small army of researchers and volunteers.

Of course, as a plain slide, it’s been totally unreadable for many years. But to show that it’s not just arbitrary dots on a web page, you can:

“If you maintain scrunching up your eyes in all those little logo designs, you’ll go blind!” I’m sure my mommy would have recommended. So let’s go back and check out the development quantitatively, year-over-year. The heading– literally– is that the martech landscape has actually grown 100 X given that 2011 Or 10, 156 %, which appears bigger. (Yeah, I’m bad at mathematics.)

Death of a Martech Salesman For some, yes

Currently, prior to you charge us of sandbagging this by consisting of anything thrown our way with an URL and a favicon, I’ll note that we really examined 11, 133 brand-new candidates this year, out of which only 2, 489 certified. At the very same time, we removed 1, 211 from last year’s landscape that disappeared either with procurement or just shutting down. That’s a churn rate of 8 6 % (Once again, being bad at math, the 1, 211 number really feels bigger to me.)

You could expect that most of those that vanished were flash-in-the-pan items from in 2014’s massive explosion of brand-new AI-native products that rose after the release of ChatGPT. As a matter of fact though, 2/ 3 of the ones that went away were from the previous years, 2010 – 2020

Yes, the combination of that very first huge wave of martech products is finally happening. The legislations of gravity can be resisted only so long. While most of the ones that vanished were smaller, naturally moneyed remedies in the “long tail,” the more relevant ones had increased considerable equity capital as the beloveds of their time.

A salute to them from Four Weddings and a Funeral , “May all of us in our dotage be proud to state, ‘I was adored once as well.’”

Yet the fantastic circle of life martech proceeds …

However that hasn’t dissuaded others from diving in. With AI more decreasing the obstacle to access for structure software application– while simultaneously broadening the panorama of brand-new chances for technology– martech startups continue to be birthed at a relentless rate.

Last year, there was an extraordinary explosion of brand-new start-ups in content and sales, at 35 % and 47 % growth price respectively. These were 2 domain names that right away benefited from the conversational magic of generative AI.

This past year, development has been somewhat extra controlled– and more evenly distributed– with ~ 7 – 10 % growth in each of our 6 significant martech landscape domain names.

Digging down right into subcategories, it interested see SEO had the highest percent growth of all– an eyebrow-raising 24 %– albeit more modest in outright numbers, broadening from 212 to 262 items. It’s ironic, offered all the “SEO is dead” broach the past year. However in martech as in life, when one door closes, another one opens up: there are brand-new item to assist you maximize your material for AI solutions, AI Optimization (AIO), which we have actually abided right into this subcategory.

With the ongoing expansion of brand-new products, especially AI-native ones, the typical technology stack grew a little in 2015 , by 2 2 %. For more mature advertising and marketing groups however, the fluidity of their toolset has been stabilized by lining up and integrating these new AI items with a well established platform at the facility of their pile.

We re-asked the concern of which platform martech and advertising procedures leaders taken into consideration to be the facility to see any kind of changes from 2024 to 2025 In B 2 B firms, there was extremely little adjustment: most consider either their CRM or their advertising and marketing automation system (MAP) to be the center.

One remarkable change in the B 2 B segment was the 5 X increase of “Other” as a response, from 2 % to 10 %, that includes customized martech platforms. While that’s still a little slice of the pie, it’s an interesting turnaround of a decade-long shift from personalized to industrial martech.

With B 2 C and crossbreed B 2 B/B 2 C firms, the most remarkable change was with CDPs, which went down from 26 9 % to 17 4 % of those checked citing them as the facility of their martech pile.

CDPs show up to have actually been pressed between two layers of the pile. At the data layer, we saw cloud data storage facilities climb as the recognized center system, from 20 9 % to 23 9 %. At the engagement layer, we saw advertising and marketing automation platforms (MAP) and customer interaction systems (CEP) grow from 19 4 % to 26 1 %. CRMs also grew from 17 9 % to 19 6 %. CDP capacities appear to be transferring to either the warehouse layer (“composable CDPs”) or the involvement layer, where they are increasingly embedded right into customer-facing systems.

1, 000, 000 X more martech that runs out view

Yet probably the most remarkable advancement in martech isn’t the long tail landscape of commercial items. It’s the rapid expansion of custom-built apps and representatives, what we call the hypertail

There’s constantly been the choice for services to develop their very own customized software application services. For most companies, that represented a small amount of their technology stack– if any in any way– since customized software was costly to create and maintain, calling for engineering skills that weren’t readily at the disposal of many marketing teams.

Yet the rise of low-code/no-code systems over the previous 5 – 10 years has continuously changed that formula, making it simpler, quicker, and more affordable to develop, triggering “citizen developers” that might progressively scratch their very own impulse by producing lightweight applications and automations.

Similar to virtually everything else it touches, AI is having a large multiplier effect on this. It’s increasing software production at a blindingly fast price. Professional developers now go crazy concerning “vibe coding”– whipping up brand-new programs in a matter of hours that used to take days or weeks to construct.

For person programmers it’s an even bigger benefit. If they can explain something in a natural language punctual, the AI can construct it for them. True, today that works ideal for basic applications and automations. But this is Clay Christensen’s classic pattern of disruptive technology: serving the underserved with straightforward use situations, and after that steadily going up capital to advanced ones. In our last report, we called this “instant software application”– just include ideas.

And it gets wilder. Popular AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini– that have countless non-technical customers– are usually creating software programs behind the scenes to do the bidding process of their individuals without those users even recognizing that software was built and operated on their part.

The outcome? Not millions but billions of custom software application multiplying companies’ electronic operations. Probably trillions, many blinking in and out of existence on demand.

That is the hypertail.

Download and install The State of Martech 2025 absolutely free

I’ve just touched on a few of the many searchings for and insights from the complete State of Martech 2025 record, which is available to download and install, free and ungated.

We intend to give thanks to GrowthLoop , Hightouch , MetaRouter , MoEngage , Progression , and SAS for sponsoring our study. We also intend to give thanks to Goldcast for giving the occasions system for our #MartechDay sessions, which you can still enjoy on-demand for the month of May by registering at martechday.com And we likewise thank G 2 for sharing scores data with us for our evaluation of the martech landscape.