Confession: I'm an art lover. I can’t get enough of it. Modern. Antiquity. Banksy. The whole gamut.

How much do I love it? Well, along with other, shall we say, more practical specialties, I graduated college with an art history degree. I’ve also dragged my progeny through countless museums during school vacations, much to their delight.

I thought my accumulated knowledge of personalities and periods would play well at parties, or perhaps bestow me with unique advantages in a “Genus” round of Trivial Pursuit. I was wrong.

But that’s OK. My love of Ingres and Giotto still proves useful when explaining vanishing points, color theory, or just impressing a bored docent at the Met.

After seeing this week’s 2024 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic – the annual “Martech Map” published by chiefmartec’s Scott Brinker and MartechTribe’s Frans Riesmersma – I thumbed through my ancient edition of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, looking for Georges Seurat.

The great thing about Seurat is his cultural ubiquity. You don’t need to be an art historian to know his work – or have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where his painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is featured during a particularly fun and poignant vignette:

Like everyone, I’ve been taken aback by the last few “miniaturized” iterations of the acclaimed “Supergraphic” (ubiquitous in its own way). But gosh, this installment felt more like a pointillist landscape, evoking the 19th-century neo-impressionism of Seurat’s signature technique.

Pointillism uses contrasting dots of paint to define images. Up close, those dots are visible to the naked eye. But at a distance, they coalesce into defined shapes, like the people gathered along the Seine in Seurat’s masterpiece.

Seurat's “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and the 2024 Martech Map Supergraphic.

I’m not suggesting this year’s Supergraphic – composed of a breathtaking 14,106 product logos smattered across dozens of categories – is creating an aesthetic worthy of the Louvre. But it is painting a picture, one that should have every marketer pondering how to make sense of such an immense field of choices.

This is the thirteenth year in a row that the martech landscape has grown, with a net addition of 3,068 products since last year’s diagram was published. As Scott noted in his announcement, that’s a crazy 27.8% growth year-over-year.

Dear god. Is this pointillism stirring a sense of fatalism? How can this growth remain sustainable? Can we expect more consolidation – or, gulp, even a collapse at the hands of AI?

Whoa, Picasso. Stop painting such a negative picture. The companion report offers some insight into the data that alleviates (at least some) of the concerns. It also contains interviews with voices from across the industry that help put things in perspective.

Even with this massive accounting, there are still so many questions about where we go from here. That's what makes Scott’s tireless work and unmatched contributions so essential to the marketing technology space. The Supergraphic has long been the crystallization of his research, helping us unpack and track the evolution.

That said, what’s really going on in this year's pointillist landscape? While our interest lies with content management systems, the growth of integrated stacks – and now composable solutions – gives us reason to trudge through the entire categorical diaspora.

So stop squinting, grab your glasses, and let's zoom in for a closer look.

Impressions by the numbers

There’s a cool little tool on the Engaging Data website that calculates how many days it would take to count to a million, billion, or some other custom figure. It measures your speech rate to determine the results and it tries to account for a variety of parameters.

The good news is that counting to 14,106 is easily doable within a day (a million is more like 4.6 months). Now, keeping track of an equal number of martech products? That’s a major undertaking.

If you review the raw Supergraphic as a PDF, it’s impossible to discern any of the products. That’s somewhat intentional, given the sheer scope. To make things easier, Scott and Frans provide an interactive version that allows you to scroll over logos, search based on a range of variables, and get closer to the details. I highly recommend it.

The 2024 Martech Map Supergraphic, an initiative by chiefmartec and Martech Tribe.

Accompanying the Supergraphic is the duo’s 2024 State of Martech Report, a comprehensive analysis that spans the modern marketing tech landscape, diving deeper into some of the aforementioned metrics. It incorporates results from an in-depth survey that focuses on that all-important subject of composability – which, if you've been reading our blog, is a major trend in CMS and DXP.

I’ve read all 101 pages of the free tome, and I can attest that it is indeed “lovingly written” as the authors suggest. They’ve got it down now, having assembled the Supergraphic since 2011, when a measly 150 products populated the map. Since then, the total number has grown by a whopping 9,304%. That’s a 41.8% CAGR over the last 13 years.

These numbers are staggering to be sure. But in terms of the net totals, it’s important to note that martech is just one of the many technology ecosystems that exist – and isn’t even the largest. At Kentico’s Connect conference last October, Scott shared how sales, HR, legal, and even procurement have their own intimidating pools of apps and vendors with even more products.

Another figure that will send shivers up your spine: there are now 1.8 million AI projects on Github. As Scott and Frans deduce, this makes the martech landscape seem “kinda small.”

Who ya callin' small? No one likes that word, but it shouldn't diminish the growth we've seen in such a vital technology sector. Every modern business is digital, and most rely on a stack that incorporates at least some of these tools. But the numbers do leave an impression that the app world is much bigger than we realize – and as we'll see in a moment, AI is changing that by the second.

Consolidation? Extinction? What’s next?

One of the report's most sage observations is that consolidation is indeed happening in the martech space – but at a slower pace.

In the CMS category, we witnessed a lot of buying over the last few years as platforms raced to adopt a complete DXP posture, acquiring and integrating DAMs, CDPs, marketing automation tools, and more. But that buying spree has certainly cooled.

One really interesting and surprising metric was the 2.1% churn rate from 2023 to 2024. Only 263 products disappeared from the landscape over the last year (a relative pittance).

While some have ceased to exist, many have been acquired and are still operating under the same brand. Others are clinging to life – perhaps with just a few customers – despite the challenges faced over the last two years.

As Scott suggested, “SaaS companies are hard to kill.”

Of course, not all 14,106 products in the landscape are large-scale software businesses – or ever will be. Many live in what they call the “long tail” of small businesses and startups, and many won’t be viable in the long haul.

But some of these smaller technologies are viable, and while they might be absorbed into other layers of the market, they are also constantly replenished by new tools. There’s a great chart in the report that highlights this phenomenon over the last seven years, validating that the innovation cycle remains healthy.

Composability is the new canvas

The report devotes a good chunk of analysis to the buzzworthy domain of composability, helping to document its impact within martech stacks. We’ve explored this subject at length on CMS Critic over the last few years, and as the report validates, it’s a techy meme with a fairly simple definition.

I appreciate how Scott distills it for us in broad terms; if there's one thing we do well in martech, it's muddying the waters.

I agree that composability isn’t “new.” But the way it’s being wielded by the likes of headless CMSes, legacy DXPs, and even the MACH Alliance is compounding the confusion. We lack uniformity in its definition, even if every category in the landscape is embracing the Lego-like ethos of connecting software.

The report offers some great insights into how composability is altering the fabric of martech stacks. There’s a dynamite “Spectrum of Composability” diagram that provides a visual reference for where technical and non-technical products exist relative to data and services. This includes CDPs and DXPs, of course – but it goes wider, exploring the relative positioning of code libraries versus no-code website builders. What will really blow your mind is how AI is shifting the whole game.

I found the distinction betwixt composable stacks and composable platforms to be intuitive yet revelatory. As Scott notes, your stack – and any composable platforms in it – represent composable capabilities, which are used to make composed creations. In his words, it’s composability all the way down. And that’s a refreshingly simple way to peer through the veil.

The Martech Composability survey they conducted is well worth a gander. There’s too much granularity to analyze here (spend the time perusing it yourself) but it uncovers some very interesting trends. One data point worth mentioning: the role of CRM and CDP as the central platform within a martech stack, and how a B2B or B2C industry focus influences the gravitational pull.

The survey responses around APIs and integrations were also poignant. Over 50% of people expressed that APIs were very important – and one of the top requirements when considering a new martech product. This reflects what we continue to see as companies drift preference towards composable technologies like headless CMSes that rely on APIs.

Cutting off an ear to spite AI

If there's any part of the tech ecosystem that would drive an artist to madness, it's AI. Much as he did at Kentico Connect, Scott explores artificial intelligence with defined brush strokes in this year's State of Martech report, trying and make sense of its impact and what we can expect in the future.

First: are GPTs martech products? A great question, and as the report notes, “it depends.” There were 159,000 GPTs in OpenAI’s GPT store as of this past January – and of those, Scott and Frans identified 3,135 that are martech-focused (none qualified for inclusion in the map), with the majority focused on content marketing.

With so much continuous innovation, artificial intelligence is a key factor in why the martech landscape hasn’t shrunk. Thanks to generative AI, there’s been a massive acceleration of martech startups, with new software ventures outpacing the rate of exits. AI is also making it cheaper to get off the ground, as less capital is needed – and martech startups are circumventing institutional VCs.

AI is having an undeniable impact on martech, and it’s leading to unprecedented automation. In the report, there’s a Tweet from Alexis Ohanian via Sam Altman, framing the idea of a 1-person, $1 billion company. When we consider how the “2nd Age of Martech” is being augmented by AI, it’s not a stretch that one enterprising person could orchestrate and mobilize a team of AI “workers” to handle everything – including the vast complexities of marketing at scale.

How does CMS fit in this composition?

Neatly? Hard to say. Maybe Seurat would have a more colorful opinion.

In addition to the artistic allusion, the Supergraphic plays like a biological classification chart. In this latest iteration, content management systems are nestled under the Kingdom of Content and Experience, and within the phylum of “CMS & Web Experience Management.”

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Turn on the WayBack machine, and the inaugural 2011 map – which, again, consisted of a mere 150 products – featured content management tools as part of the Customer Experience cohort, bifurcated under “Core Website” and “Blogs.” The former had but 10 platforms, populated by the likes of Sitecore, IBM Websphere, and Drupal; the latter was host to WordPress, Squarespace and others.

The 2011 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic.

By 2014, the category had evolved to “Website / WCM / WEM,” still focused on the core web channel. The field had expanded to almost 50 products, with brands like Elcom, Episerver, and Liferay entering the matrix.

Jump ahead to 2020, and the recognizable grid becomes a map of Westeros (a la Game of Thrones), each category now an island in a vast sea of 8,000 product logos – far surpassing the ceremonious flag of the “Martech 5000.” In this version, the continent of “Web Experience Building & Management” was founded, now home to hundreds of platforms from Acquia to Duda, ButterCMS to Kirby.

The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic.

There are now 436 discrete products in the 2024 map. That’s a big increase since 2011 if we account for the variability in how the category has evolved, but it’s still quite a few less than its sister sector of “Content Marketing,” which features just over 1,400 technologies.

“CMS & Web Experience Management” also shares a similar number of tools as “DAM & MRM & PIM.” It's worth noting that DXPs like Optimizely are featured in both.

Far and away, the biggest change has been to the nature of the category itself. This is an important distinction, as this specific layer is composed not only of content management systems that power the web channel, but headless technologies that drive multichannel or omnichannel content strategies.

Category challenges

From a pointillist perspective, a closer look reveals the existential challenges of tracking and classifying 14,106 products. For example, Swiftype – an AI-powered search utility owned by Elastic – is categorized here. It doesn’t fit snugly under any other category, and it technically fulfills the Web Experience Management promise of the category. Does it feel a bit out of place lumped in with CMS stew? Sure. But again, where else does it fit?

In the case of Directus, which bills itself as a composable data platform for easily creating and deploying data-rich apps, the product is categorized under “IpaaS Cloud/Data Integration & Tag Management.” While Directus does lean heavily on its open source backend-as-a-service (BaaS) capabilities for wrapping databases with real-time APIs, it does focus on its headless CMS as a key ingredient of its positioning. Should it not also be in that category as well?

And that might be the big takeaway: categories are getting harder and harder to define. Some products do one thing exceedingly well, while DXPs, for example, offer a more robust collection of solutions that can be parsed across multiple segments – and now sold as composable products within an ecosystem.

I suppose that if it’s a system that manages content, whether that’s refining search results on a web page or powering flat files, Scott and Frans have done their best to research and filter based on the makeup of each product. It’s Yeoman’s work that can’t be understated.

Composable is still changing the CMS game

The evolution has been fascinating to track as composable continues to be the prevailing trend. As traditional CMS, DXP, and headless CMS platforms accelerate their “race to the middle,” with the latter now offering more features like visualization (or in the case of Directus, a robust DAM), the composition of a CMS is once again changing.

It’s easy to see where the challenges exist. Platforms have struggled to differentiate by adopting unique monikers like Hybrid Headless Composable DXP or Content Platform. Preston So and dotCMS are now positioning their platform as a “Universal CMS,” representing a further hybridization of features. With so much noise around the topic of categories, this is where having an authoritative source of truth can help us understand the whole picture.

I think we can safely predict that the banner of “CMS & Web Experience Management” will remain in place for some time. Web is still the most important channel, and abstracting CMS within the same category allows it to extend beyond that walled garden of websites. And as evidenced by Swiftype, it’s malleable enough to accommodate customer experience tools that complement the specificity of its sister categories like “Content Marketing,” “Marketing Automation,” and “Optimization, Personalization & Testing” (all of which struggle with their own innate challenges).

CMS and AI: never a still-life

Will AI further conflate this conundrum? To conjure a Brinkerism from the report, “it depends.”

Most CMSes (and other WEM technologies) in this year’s Supergraphic are already incorporating AI to generate content, automate workflows, and generally enhance existing features. But as we saw with Uniform this January, it’s getting easier and faster to build a CMS than ever before – just as they did with their visual workspace.

Buoyed by AI, can we expect more features to be introduced at an accelerated pace? Of course. We've been experiencing that already, and the report provides further validation.

Many AI thought leaders like Paul Roetzer have surmised that AI might one day be capable of creating an entire app – like a CMS – without anyone committing a single line of code. As Alexis Ohanian mused, the one-person $1 billion company might come to pass when this much efficiency exists.

But if AI becomes that proficient, wouldn't we see more individuals creating apps themselves that are trained on the types of services they need? What does that do to the marketable value of any single app?

This begs lots of questions about the future of CMS, AI, and the martech landscape.

Why it matters

Seurat may have been the father of pointillism, but he and other neo-impressionists were influenced by Michel Eugène Chevreul – a 19th-century scientist who discovered how the proximity and relationship of different colors can affect visual perception.

In many ways, this is the perfect analogy for the Martech Supergraphic: individual products that, when grouped together, create a new perception.

When zooming out, it's easy to see that the entire landscape is expanding. But zooming in, it's clear that categories like “Content Marketing” are experiencing the lion's share growth – and that “CMS & Web Experience Management” is still a big fixture on the overall map.

And yet, with so much noise in the landscape, it might feel easy for content management to get lost. It used to be the center of the spoke-and-hub, but as the report indicates, other technologies have assumed command based on a number of factors.

The report also details how users and organizations perceive the value and importance of CMS tools, noting the variability across industries. There are some significant differences between Banking & Finance and Technology (just two examples), and the report endeavors to account for these shifts.

One of the most informative parts of the report comes from practitioners themselves. Scott and Frans interviewed five leaders from companies like GrowthLoop, SAS, and WordPressVIP, capturing their views of martech in 2024. It’s clear how data continues to be a key objective and concern (from first/second/third party to the role of data warehouses), but so too is the emphasis on RevOps and the evolution of composability.

I love how well-rounded these examples are – and how CMS is represented on both the commercially managed and open source side of the equation. One nugget that’s sticking with me is an observation about what a customer needs and how it isn’t the same for everyone. Buyers have become more savvy, and we see more confidence in their requirements. But they’re still confused, still prone to buying a headless CMS when an enterprise CMS with a really good web API would do the trick.

14,106 is a big number. For a marketer looking to find a tool or build a stack, it can feel overwhelming. But think about what these technologies power: millions and millions of websites, apps, sales programs, campaigns, and marketing initiatives. If the growth of the Martech Supergraphic tells us anything, it’s that marketing is more vital than ever – and composability is powering choice.

Sure, choice is good for the customer. But I’m still chiefly concerned about the buyer and how they make sense of it all – particularly as categories continue to evolve, lines blur, and definitions become less worthy of a stone etching.

Will we see consolidation or even contraction this year? If history is any indicator, what goes up often comes down. According to the report, some of that might have already happened, we just haven’t seen it show up in the latent data. Yet.

Once again, what Scott and Frans have given us is a masterpiece. A hard one to look at, sure, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Their research is a gift to our industry and a vital resource for understanding where we’re headed. It’s also far from being a magnum opus, as AI is proving to further accelerate and expand the frontier.

I look forward to Martech Day every year, because the Supergraphic is a reminder that we’re all handling the brush, all painting some part of this impressionist work. And like Seurat’s pointillism, things look different depending on your perspective.

It’s also a reminder to check the prescription on my glasses.

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Painting by numbers: Where CMS fits in the 14,106 products on the 2024 Martech Supergraphic