15 reflections on martech and more from 15 years of writing chiefmartec.com
15 years ago, sitting at a wobbly kitchenette table in our cramped apartment, on a frigid February morning outside Boston, I started this blog for marketing technologists.
Of course, at the time, almost nobody knew what a marketing technologist was. It sounded like an oxymoron. While there were certainly people already working at the intersection of IT and marketing, they were few and far between. Their roles were often ill-defined and underappreciated. But it was clear they were forging a future that was coming at us fast.
I related to them, as a strange hybrid with a non-traditional career myself. My parents had run a small ad agency, with my dad as an exacting copywriter. As a teenager, I developed — and marketed — multiplayer games for dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSes), a precursor to the Web. In the heyday of the dotcom boom and bust, I was the CTO of an agency building enterprise websites for marketing departments. And in 2005, I launched a SaaS product for marketers to build no-code (!!) landing pages and interactive content.