Martech, short for marketing technology, is the software a marketing department uses to store customer data, send messages, publish content, run campaigns and measure what happened. Gartner defines it as "the platforms and tools marketers use to plan, execute and measure campaigns." The category exists because digital channels generate more customer signals than people can process by hand. Every email open, product view and form submission is an event that has to be recorded, attached to a person and acted on. PPC Land's explainer on digital marketing draws the working line with its closest neighbour: martech manages customer data, email, content and automation, while ad tech buys and sells paid media.

What a martech stack contains

The software a company runs is usually called a stack, because the tools sit in layers and pass data to one another. Scott Brinker, who has tracked the market on his chiefmartec blog since 2008, sorts products into six classes: advertising and promotion, content and experience, social and relationships, commerce and sales, data, and management.

Most enterprise stacks follow a similar layering. The system of record is usually a customer relationship management (CRM) database, which PPC Land's CRM explainer describes as the database and discipline for recording every customer, prospect and interaction. The data layer is a customer data platform (CDP) or a cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake or Databricks, unifying behavioural and profile data. The engagement layer sends messages through email service providers (ESPs), marketing automation suites and customer engagement platforms. Braze reported $738.2 million in revenue for the year to January 31, 2026; Klaviyo served more than 205,000 brands as of June 30, 2026. Content management systems, digital asset libraries, web analytics and attribution tools complete the picture.

How the pieces work together

A typical flow runs in five steps. Collection comes first: tags on web pages, software development kits (SDKs) in apps, forms and server feeds record events such as "product viewed" or "added to cart", each with a timestamp and identifiers. Identity resolution then stitches those events to a profile, matching a hashed email address, a loyalty number, a device ID and a cookie to one person. Segmentation groups profiles by rules or predictive models.

Activation sends the segment somewhere. A retailer might configure a journey that waits 60 minutes after an abandoned basket, sends an email and, if the message is still unopened 24 hours later, pushes the hashed address into an advertising audience. That last step is where martech meets ad tech. Customer lists travel to Meta or Google, while purchases flow back to ad platforms through server-to-server links such as the Conversions API. Measurement closes the loop, writing opens, clicks and orders back to the profile.

The connections are the fragile part. Vendors expose application programming interfaces (APIs) and webhooks, and integration platforms such as Zapier, n8n and Make move data between them. Two architectures compete. Suites from Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and HubSpot bundle the layers under one contract. Composable stacks keep customer data in the company's own warehouse and plug specialist tools into it.

Marketing operations teams build journeys and segments, IT departments own security and data governance, and the chief marketing technologist, a role described by Brinker and Gartner's Laura McLellan in the Harvard Business Review in July 2014, sits between them. Pricing is moving from seats and contact counts towards usage: in Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, 56% of respondents raised spending on consumption-based martech and 9% cut it.

Origin and evolution

The building blocks predate the word. Siebel Systems launched its first CRM product in 1993, and Salesforce was founded in 1999 to deliver CRM through a browser. Suites followed. Adobe agreed to buy the web analytics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion on September 15, 2009, and Salesforce agreed on June 4, 2013 to pay $2.5 billion for the email provider ExactTarget, which became the base of its Marketing Cloud.

Brinker's landscape gave the category its shape. The first version, in August 2011, held about 150 companies. The January 2014 edition counted 947, the 2016 edition 3,874 and the 2020 edition 8,000. Third Door Media held the first MarTech conference in Boston on August 19 and 20, 2014, with Brinker as programme chair. McLellan had predicted in a Gartner webinar, reported by Forbes in February 2012, that by 2017 chief marketing officers (CMOs) would spend more on technology than chief information officers (CIOs). In November 2016 Gartner put CMO technology spending at 3.24% of company revenue against 3.4% for CIOs, according to CIO.com.

The marketing clouds then reached into advertising data. Oracle agreed in 2014 to buy BlueKai for about $400 million and Datalogix for about $1.2 billion. Salesforce bought the data management platform Krux in October 2016 for about $700 million, according to Ad Age, and Adobe agreed to acquire Marketo for $4.75 billion on September 20, 2018. Not every bet survived. Oracle's advertising revenue fell from $2 billion in 2022 to $300 million in fiscal 2024, and the company ended its advertising products on September 30, 2024, Moat and its data management platform among them.

Data then became the prize. Salesforce agreed to buy Informatica for $8 billion on May 27, 2025 and completed the deal on November 18, 2025, with chief executive Marc Benioff calling data and context "the true fuel of Agentforce", its AI agent platform.

Why it matters for marketers

Martech is a large but shrinking slice of budgets. Gartner's 2026 survey of 401 marketing leaders put marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue and martech at 19.4% of the marketing budget, down from 26.6% in 2021, the only major category to contract. Paid media rose to 31.4%. Forrester, measuring absolute software spending rather than budget share, forecast in January 2024 that global martech spending would grow from $131 billion in 2023 to $215 billion in 2027, a compound annual rate of 13.3%.

For advertisers the link is direct. First-party data held in a CRM or CDP determines what an ad platform can target and measure as third-party cookies and device identifiers thin out. A Hightouch integration with The Trade Desk, reported in June 2026, matches the DSP's exposure logs to a brand's own customer IDs inside its warehouse, work that previously ran through third-party identity providers and took days.

Limitations and disputes

Utilisation is the oldest complaint. Gartner found marketers using 58% of their stack's capabilities in 2020, 42% in 2022 and 33% in 2023, blaming skills, governance and "stack sprawl and complexity"; its 2025 survey recorded 49%, according to Marketing Week. Data quality is a second weakness. CMOs surveyed by Adverity said 45% of the marketing data used for decisions was incomplete, inaccurate or outdated.

Ownership is contested. In an Acquia survey fielded by Coleman Parkes in July and August 2026, only 41% of CMOs were confident their teams could govern AI, and control of content platforms was split between marketing (25%), IT (24%) and heads of digital (18%). Usage pricing makes costs harder to forecast; half of the CMOs in Gartner's 2026 survey said they continuously renegotiate contracts to avoid spikes.

Even the market's size is disputed. Consolidation has been forecast for a decade, yet Brinker found in 2017 that 61.3% of the companies on his 2010 slide had been acquired or closed, roughly the base rate for US businesses over nine years. His 2026 landscape grew by 121 products to 15,505, an increase of 0.79%, as 1,367 removals nearly matched 1,488 additions for the first time in 15 years. Brinker declared "peak martech"; whether the plateau marks AI-driven attrition or a pause is unresolved.

Not the same as

Ad tech - software for buying and selling paid media, such as demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs) and ad servers. The overlap is real: Brinker's landscape includes an advertising class, and "madtech" is sometimes used for the combined field.

CRM - one component of a martech stack, the system of record for known contacts, not the stack itself.

Marketing automation - the subcategory that triggers emails and nurtures leads, typified by Marketo, Eloqua and HubSpot. B2B teams sometimes use it as a loose synonym for martech.

MarTech - the Third Door Media publication and conference series launched in 2014, which shares the name.

Recent developments

AI agents are changing how the tools are operated. Gartner's survey of 413 martech leaders, published on October 29, 2025, found 81% piloting or running agent initiatives, while 45% of those with agents said vendor-offered versions fell short of promised performance. Platforms are opening up to outside agents. Salesforce's Headless 360, announced on April 15, 2026, exposes every capability as an API or Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool, and Meta released MCP connectors for its ad system on April 29, 2026. The integration layer is under strain, with traffic to Zapier, n8n and Make showing double-digit declines as agent usage climbed.

Deals have followed AI search and data. Adobe agreed to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion on November 19, 2025 and completed it on April 28, 2026. HubSpot agreed to buy XFunnel, which tracks brand mentions in AI answers, on October 31, 2025, and Canva bought the CDP and automation vendor Ortto on April 8, 2026. Databricks launched CustomerLake, a CDP built inside its own platform, in June 2026. Publicis agreed to buy LiveRamp for $2.5 billion on May 17, 2026; shareholders approved with 99.88% of votes cast on August 17, leaving regulatory clearance as the remaining condition as of September 2026.

Timeline

  • 1993: Siebel Systems launches its first CRM product
  • 1999: Salesforce is founded to deliver CRM through a web browser
  • 2008: Scott Brinker begins writing the chiefmartec blog
  • September 15, 2009: Adobe agrees to acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion
  • August 2011: First marketing technology landscape published, with about 150 companies
  • February 2012: Forbes reports Gartner's prediction that CMOs will outspend CIOs on technology by 2017
  • June 4, 2013: Salesforce agrees to acquire ExactTarget for $2.5 billion
  • January 2014: Landscape reaches 947 companies
  • 2014: Oracle agrees to acquire BlueKai and Datalogix
  • July 2014: Harvard Business Review publishes "The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist"
  • August 19, 2014: First MarTech conference opens in Boston
  • 2016: Landscape reaches 3,874 solutions
  • October 2016: Salesforce agrees to buy Krux
  • November 2016: Gartner puts CMO technology spending at 3.24% of revenue against 3.4% for CIOs
  • September 20, 2018: Adobe agrees to acquire Marketo for $4.75 billion
  • 2020: Landscape reaches 8,000 solutions; Gartner measures stack utilisation at 58%
  • 2023: Gartner measures stack utilisation at 33%
  • June 12, 2024: Oracle announces its exit from advertising
  • September 30, 2024: Oracle's advertising products reach end of life
  • May 2025: Landscape reaches 15,384 solutions, up 9%
  • May 27, 2025: Salesforce agrees to acquire Informatica for $8 billion
  • October 29, 2025: Gartner reports 81% of martech leaders piloting or running AI agents
  • October 31, 2025: HubSpot agrees to acquire XFunnel
  • November 18, 2025: Salesforce completes the Informatica acquisition
  • November 19, 2025: Adobe agrees to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion
  • April 8, 2026: Canva announces acquisitions of Ortto and Simtheory
  • April 15, 2026: Salesforce announces Headless 360
  • April 28, 2026: Adobe completes the Semrush acquisition
  • April 29, 2026: Meta releases Ads AI Connectors
  • May 2026: Landscape reaches 15,505 solutions, up 0.79%
  • May 11, 2026: Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts marketing budgets at 7.8% of revenue
  • May 17, 2026: Publicis agrees to acquire LiveRamp for $2.5 billion
  • August 17, 2026: LiveRamp shareholders approve the Publicis deal

Summary

Who: Marketing departments, marketing operations teams and chief marketing technologists on the buying side; vendors ranging from suites such as Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and HubSpot to specialists such as Braze, Klaviyo and Hightouch on the selling side. Scott Brinker's landscape and analysts at Gartner and Forrester track the market.

What: The software marketers use to plan, execute and measure campaigns, typically layered as a CRM system of record, a CDP or warehouse for customer data, engagement tools for email, SMS and push, and content and analytics tools. It is distinct from ad tech, which buys and sells paid media, though the two exchange audiences and conversion data.

When: The components date to the 1990s, with Siebel's CRM in 1993 and Salesforce in 1999. The category took shape with Brinker's first landscape in August 2011 and the first MarTech conference in August 2014, consolidated through deals from Omniture in 2009 to Informatica in 2025, and reached 15,505 products in May 2026.

Where: Worldwide, inside marketing and IT departments. Vendors are concentrated in the United States, and Gartner's budget surveys cover North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Why: Digital channels produce more customer events than people can handle manually, and first-party data now determines what advertisers can target and measure. Martech took 19.4% of marketing budgets in 2026, although utilisation, data quality, ownership disputes and usage-based costs remain persistent problems.