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Marketing leaders today face enormous possibilities – and an enormous challenge. Thanks to the rich troves of data now available to them, they see the opportunity to compete on the basis of personalized customer experiences. But they also inhabit a marketing technology landscape that is complex, fragmented, rapidly evolving – in short, overwhelming. This landscape is replete with overlapping technologies, integration challenges, data fragmentation, and technology management that borders on the labyrinthine. Just search for Scott Brinker's marketing technology landscape infographic to see one person's attempt to bring some order to this dizzyingly complex picture. But be prepared to zoom in deep to this almost comically dense graphic. As helpful as it is, it doesn't at all capture the integration points between the technologies.

What the vast breadth of technologies in this cluttered field tells us is that investors have fully bought into the notion that marketing technology can make better customer experiences possible, and will thus drive competition in the future. Indeed, powerful solutions are emerging, solutions that allow us to understand our customers (and potential customers) like never before. Insights from Big Data make it possible, for instance, for Facebook to know when a user is likely to exit a romantic relationship, in many cases before they actually do.4 That's an extreme example, to be sure. But the point is that these technologies help us better understand our customers so we can serve them better and build stronger relationships with them. Among these technologies, to name just a handful:

• Web technologies that allow us to track people across the web and to understand browsing behavior.

• Social technologies that let us measure influence and understand who is driving the conversation on specific topics.

• Advertising technologies that enable us to test messaging and understand which messages resonate most with which market segments.

• Retail technologies that let us track how customers navigate our stores and understand what merchandising methods are most effective.

• Business intelligence technologies that allow us to establish correlations between the above data sources.

All such discrete solutions demonstrate that marketers can leverage new technologies to benefit the business overall. But there's a greater need: a complete, integrated marketing platform that combines the discrete benefits of specific technologies into a whole. That whole includes a complete picture of the customer and an apparatus to engage with that individual in a personalized way – and to do so at scale. If we marketers could realize this need, our impact would be profound: multiplicative rather than additive.

By “integrated marketing platform” I do not mean a single interface that marketers can log into to manage all of their marketing programs and data. Rather, I'm referring to a technology stack that includes discrete technologies (such as social listening, ad retargeting, data exchange, influencer management, and community platforms) that are layered on top of foundational technologies (such as customer relationship management, marketing automation, content management, and databases).

The integrated marketing platform is one that includes an established framework for connecting discrete technologies and a consistent approach to data management, aggregation, and intelligence. Such a platform, in turn, supports agility, the ability to innovate, and the ability to scale. Investors (and the biggest technology companies) are already making this vision a reality. They know it's no longer a question of whether, but of when – and of which companies will be the winners.

The Marketing Buyer's Perspective

Mind the modern marketing vision gap. On one side are so-called best-in-class solutions, developed by smaller and more agile firms. These solutions don't suffer from the bloat associated with maturity. This is part of what allows them to compete with solutions from bigger, more mature companies. Their offerings feel more contemporary, easy to use, and focused. On the other side are solutions that promise deep integration between systems, solutions that are only achievable by the biggest tech houses. I'm talking about tight integrations between point-of-sale, customer relationship management, human resources, finance, and marketing systems that don't rely heavily on systems integrators. These solutions come with sophisticated permission models that manage access and address compliance issues that the small firms typically cannot.

In this battle, the big companies have war chests with which to acquire up-and-comers. These acquisitions target the best technologies and the best talent while filling portfolio gaps. If you've been watching the marketing technology landscape in the last couple of years, you could not have missed the breathless pace of acquisitions by the biggest players.

Admittedly this description is a bit of an oversimplification. The fact is that the big guys like Oracle are becoming more agile through a steady diet of acquisitions. And the little guys are getting really smart in building interoperability into their applications. In short, a race to the middle is taking place. Recent history has shown that the majority of top technologies get picked up and absorbed into the portfolios of enterprise players. The biggest tech companies can afford to address the overlap between technologies while also developing deep integrations, although this does take time – time that gives up-and-comers room to innovate and kick off the cycle all over again.

Smart marketers consider this reality as they survey the landscape and contemplate their own marketing platforms. But there are other issues to consider as well, such as how they'll develop and manage their platform. Will they manage the service internally, or will they rely on partners and agencies to support them? Figure 1.1 is a common representation of these decision points and the trade-offs.

Figure 1.1 Misleading Technology Decision Graph

The reality, of course, is much more nuanced, because “best-in-class” and “integrated” are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, the below graph is actually misleading because integration will ultimately be a qualification of what makes a product/service best in class. And the boundary between internal management and external management will be blurred by the fact that every company will be working with hybrid stacks. They'll manage some of the platform and rely on partners for other parts. Some technologies will be managed on-premise and some will be managed in the cloud depending on the degree of customization, security, and integration that is required. So those partners that can support a hybrid stack will be most competitively positioned.