Marketers don’t need to rely only on the big-name martech stack. Specialized single-solution tools can deliver real wins in 2026. The tools below may not be household names, but each is designed to address a specific marketing challenge. Here are six under-the-radar solutions that can help you in 2026 — and no, I’m not getting …
Read more “6 under-the-radar martech tools to make your work day easier in 2026”
Salesforce today announced a significant update to its foundational data platform, unveiling a unified data engine that brings together Data 360, Informatica, and MuleSoft. The goal? To give enterprise AI systems the trusted context they need to stop hallucinating and start reasoning — a shift with significant implications for marketers. AI hallucinations are a significant …
Read more “New Salesforce engine aims to make enterprise AI trustworthy”
The holiday season of 2025 is one of the most psychologically complex shopping seasons we’ve seen in years. Shoppers are cautious. Budgets are tight. Brand trust matters more than ever. Yet beneath all that fragmentation, Google’s new Holiday Essentials 2025 report reveals something deeper. People aren’t just behaving differently. They’re thinking differently. If you’ve followed …
Read more “4 takeaways for email marketers from Google’s 2025 holiday report”
Most martech teams I spoke with this year admitted the same thing. They weren’t sure whether their stack was genuinely flawed or whether they never learned how to judge it. That uncertainty is the real source of friction. When people can’t distinguish between workable and harmful complexity, everything starts to blur. Features get duplicated, journeys …
Read more “Why martech teams need diagnostic talent in 2026”
Thanks in part to its 2024 IPO, the social media platform Reddit is a hot topic in many circles, including marketing. That’s quite the accomplishment for a company that’s been around for 20 years, which in internet terms is the equivalent of having lived when dinosaurs roamed. To help you understand the platform and determine …
In 1997, Apple launched a campaign that became cultural gospel. “Think Different” celebrated the rebels, the misfits, the troublemakers. The ones who saw things differently. The ones who changed the world. Apple understood something fundamental: the constraints that limited imagination weren’t real. They were inherited. Accepted. Assumed. And the people who broke through weren’t smarter …
Read more “Think different: The Positionless Marketing manifesto by Optimove”
For decades, marketing leaders guided buyers through a neat sequence from awareness to purchase. Today, that linear funnel model is breaking down. Buyers now chart their own course — jumping between channels, self-educating via digital content and often engaging sales late, if at all. As buyers became harder to corral into a predictable path, marketers …
Read more “Why today’s buyer journey no longer fits the funnel”
We’ve updated our page on RCS with data showing an increase in RCS usage for Black Friday 2025 compared to the previous year. By adding support for RCS (rich communication services) to iPhones with its iOS 18 update in the fall of 2024, Apple gave U.S. marketers a larger audience to engage with new tools …
Read more “Mobile marketing with RCS: What you need to know”
In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Question: What’s the biggest shift in marketing tech and media beyond AI — and how should marketers adapt right now? The most …
Read more “Why privacy, not AI, is the biggest marketing shift to watch”
Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma’s “Martech for 2026” keynote opened with a wall of logos — AI agents everywhere. Content production agents deployed by 70% of marketing teams. Customer service chatbots are now commonplace. McKinsey projections show that by 2028, roughly $750 billion in consumer spend will flow through AI-powered search, with 20%–50% of traditional …
Read more “How to level up your AI maturity from tools to transformation”