Martech is consolidating, but what will the 2022 landscape reveal?

You may well by now be leaping to a conclusion. “It appears like each individual other week, I read about a significant acquisition. Absolutely the 2020 martech landscape with its 8,000 answers was Peak Martech! The only question is by how a lot has the 2022 landscape shrunk.”

Probably.

In fact, the martech field sees a huge amount of money of M&A activity. LUMA Companions, one of the primary expense banks in martech — and the creators of the primary adtech landscape that influenced us in excess of a 10 years back — publishes quarterly reports of recognised specials. There were being 157 in 2019, 85 in 2020, and 166 in 2021.

About a single out of each and every five of all those was a offer valued at $100 million or far more. This kind of large acquisitions nearly generally make the information. Previous yr, there were 37. On regular, which is 3 per month that possible garnered headlines in marketplace publications.

It’s a testament to just how massive the martech sector is that so lots of significant acquisitions are continually developing. All all those headlines normally give the impression of huge consolidation.

Yet though that consolidation is actual, as a share of the complete quantity of martech solutions, these acknowledged acquisitions are 2% or so of the overall landscape. Meanwhile, new martech startups and other far more recognized providers carry on to enter the place. Ironically, consolidation is often a catalyst for much more software program to be established.

Consolidated platforms make it less complicated for application developers to construct apps on top of them. If you are standing on the shoulders of giants, the even bigger the huge the better. And the less giants you have to pick amid, the better way too, as it’s a lot more probably it is that the one(s) you opt for will have scale and staying electrical power.

These favourable opinions loop dynamics — generally framed as “winner takes all,” even if in reality there are normally quite a few major winners — is why AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are so dominant as cloud platforms. And they’re still growing at a remarkable tempo. But in the system, they’re birthing thousands and thousands of applications created on top of their foundations.

The increase of ecosystems and marketplaces in SaaS businesses more permits the Cambrian explosion of professional specialist applications as nicely as tons of personalized apps tailor-made to specific organizations. They support clear up the difficulties of discovery and integration.

In the meantime, demand for specialised computer software proceeds to increase also, as described by the selection of SaaS apps that firms have in their stacks:

We’re coming into a article-digital-transformation era, the place corporations are no lengthier arranging to grow to be “digital.” They are electronic. And as they now compete ferociously for aggressive advantages in their electronic functions and electronic purchaser ordeals, they’re progressively comfortable getting and constructing additional specialised software package.

Advertising and marketing stays one of the most extreme domains in which that competition will take spot — supplying martech entrepreneurs ample opportunities to create price.

Investors continue to believe in these possibilities much too. They go on to fund new and increasing martech ventures. If you select up a duplicate of LUMA’s Q1 2022 Sector Report, you’ll see the hundreds of tens of millions of bucks in funds place into martech companies just in the initially three months of this year.

That said, there are rational limitations for how a lot of martech corporations can exist at a person time and how numerous martech apps any just one enterprise can usefully adopt. Even though new martech products and solutions are constantly born, previous kinds fade absent into mergers, pivots, and discontinued oblivion.

The issues the martech landscape has answered each 12 months are: (1) what is the balance in between martech growth and consolidation and (2) what’s the composition of options inside the overall martech field? Individuals responses expose a whole lot about the ongoing evolution of marketing and advertising.

What will the 2022 martech landscape expose? Tune in next Tuesday to discover out.

We’re heading to release something truly specific this yr that I warranty you will want to be one of the initial to have accessibility to.

P.S. Looking into the martech landscape has turn into a project of epic proportion in excess of the yrs. And with the distinctive shock we will be unveiling this yr, the hard work to deliver it has developed even extra. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without the economical assist of various generous sponsors:

If you have not taken a search a short while ago at the innovative martech solutions these firms are manufacturing, verify them out. It is extraordinary.