When Paul Gottsegen grabbed the CMO reins at Mindtree in 2013, he noticed a major deficiency in both himself and his team—there wasn't a single marketing technologist among them. Throwing down the gauntlet, Gottsegen shocked his team by mandating they all become more tech-centric since until that point, "everybody thought that was someone else's job." While Gottsegen admits there have...

When Nathan Rawlins became chief marketing officer at diagram software maker Lucidchart in March 2017, no one said to him—perhaps unsurprisingly—"Hey, go create a viral campaign that will generate over 80 million views." In fact, his charge was to build a demand generation engine through website optimization, marketing automation and carefully tracked media spending. Having done those things, Rawlins also...

Fourteen years ago, Simon Mulcahy startled his boss by turning down a promotion. He then proceeded to a pub ("This is what you do in England," he said) and was later joined by his wife to ponder their future. Together they reviewed an issue of The Economist that listed the best places to work and live in the world and, remarkably, they...

When I asked Sarah Kennedy, the relatively new CMO at marketing automation firm Marketo, what's the best advice she'd ever been given, her answer set the tone for our discussion: "Jump out of the plane and find your parachute on the way down." It is little wonder that Kennedy, who jumped into her role eight months ago, felt compelled to not...

When the first Lumascape was shared by Luma Partners in 2010, it listed a few hundred marketing technology companies. The latest version shows nearly 5,000 brands, now in an epic struggle to stand out and be part of the mission critical tech stack of modern marketers. Clearly, not all of these brands will make the cut as increasingly sophisticated practitioners...