Marketing technology is mainstream enough now that you can major in it

When I started chiefmartec in 2008, the term “marketing technologist” was almost an oxymoron. Marketing and IT were still largely on opposite ends of your high school guidance counselor’s career chart.

But as it is with emerging ecosystems, the interesting stuff is always on the boundaries. A few technology-curious marketers and marketing-curious technologists, fascinated by what was still a separate discipline of digital marketing, found themselves building across the divide.

Nobody knew what to call them. Frankly, most senior leaders in marketing and IT barely had a clue that they existed. Sure, there were web developers. And somebody handled the email subscription list and that whole Google search thing. But it was largely seen as boiler room work.

If there was any sense of a larger, strategic capability, it was in the hands of a chief digital officer — whom the rest of the executives with “real” jobs mostly ignored. I’m generalizing and exaggerating, but pretty close to the truth.

Yet more and more marketing technology products kept arriving on the scene, adopted — in a fragmented fashion — by different teams, working on different pieces of that expanding digital marketing domain. Still, for the most part, without the CMO recognizing it collectively as a new pillar of the department.

The original marketing technology landscape that I produced in 2011 was my attempt to persuade CMOs to see the forest for the trees. “Look at the span of technology your organization is now running! Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have someone leading that more strategically?”

That was the inflection point where marketing operations, which was the most natural home to bring these pieces together, saw its star begin to rise. Slowly at first, as any marketing ops pro from those days will attest. I still remember one famous analyst back then calling marketing ops “the island of misfit toys.”

But just because martech had a home, the marketing technologists working on it were still far from well-defined in their roles, their skills, their career paths. When we launched the first MarTech Conference in 2014 — which sold out! — the diversity of backgrounds and responsibilities in the room was wild. And almost everyone in the room had been self-taught for the role they were in.

These marketing technologists were frequently called unicorns back then. Partly because they were strange, mythical creatures, these technologists who loved marketing. Partly because they could work magic (that was my opinion). But mostly because they were rare and hard to find.

The people in the room of that inaugural conference were the first generation of marketing technologists. But if we were right about where marketing was headed as a spectacular technology-powered discipline — and we were — the world was going to need a whole lot more of them.

Martech needed to go mainstream.

I don’t know the exact date when martech went mainstream. But I do know the exact date when I realized it definitively had: October 14, 2026.

That was the day when I participated in the first Martech Oktoberfest event, hosted at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia this month. That’s when I finally met Dr. Jason Pallant, the director of the university’s new marketing technology lab and the emcee for the day.

I’d been connected with Dr. Pallant for about a year or so and was aware that he was teaching a class on marketing technology. I had beamed in remotely to give a short talk to one of his classes. He had told me a little about the program he was developing, but I confess, it didn’t fully register with me.

Until I showed up at RMIT two weeks ago and started meeting undergraduates who were earning their majors in marketing technology (!), graduate students who were pursuing original research on the frontier of the field — one of whom has a thesis that I daresay could upend a major body of traditional marketing theory — and dedicated martech faculty members who were joyfully leading it all with passion and purpose. I’d died and gone to martech heaven.

To say that it all clicked for me would be an understatement. I was stunned.

About this undergraduate program: it’s a 3-year Bachelor of Commerce degree with a major in marketing technology. As part of the degree, students take core courses in economics, international business, business law, business analytics, and digital business security and risk management. (Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate their required course in security and risk management!)

For the major, they must complete 8 martech courses. Some are pure martech topics: Introduction to Marketing Technology, Consumers and Technology, Marketing Analytics, Omnichannel Retailing, CX Strategy, AI in Marketing, and a Strategic Marketing Technology Implementation capstone — more to say about that in a minute.

A couple are more traditional marketing courses, such as market research and marketing communications, but with martech deeply integrated into their material.

And this isn’t martech “book” learning. The vision that Dr. Pallant and his colleague Dr. Linda Robinson, who initiated the charge to rethink marketing education through a technology lens as the head of the marketing department, was that students needed to get hands-on.

That’s the seed from which their Marketing Tech Lab sprung. It is an actual lab space that was designed to enable hands-on technology access for students, to demonstrate martech working in context (not in isolation), and to provide a place for engagement with industry and the broader martech community.

Crikey, this is one seriously cool space! They’ve created their own physical pop-up store, with connected point-of-sale, digital signage, and AI vision cameras. Of course there’s an e-commerce layer to the store, which students design and run with analytics, marketing automation, and personalization. The whole martech stack is a composable mix of enterprise suites and best-of-breed tools — just like every real retail and e-commerce business.

Oh, there’s one other pretty wild installation in their lab, a 220-degree immersive “igloo” with a wraparound projection system that surrounds an audience in a fully-rendered virtual environment. They use it for virtual walk-throughs of spaces (current or rendered) as well as immersive collaboration, such as walking through a customer journey flow. I felt like I was walking on to the holodeck of the starship Enterprise. (The starship Enterprise Marketing?)

But all of this is in the service of letting the students use real martech to build and run real projects with industry partners. First, so they really understand the technology and what it’s capable of. But also so they graduate with skills that they can immediately put to use in a marketing job. Their capstone course brings all of this together.

And I’ll tell you, these students are impressive! The ones I spoke with were so smart, poised, and eager to make their mark on marketing. The companies that hire them will be beneficiaries of the great work Dr. Pallant, Dr. Robinson, and the whole RMIT Marketing Technology Lab team are doing.

Honestly, seeing all of this in person nearly brought tears to my eyes.

As I walked back to my hotel from the campus that evening, the one thought that kept echoing in my head — but really, in my heart — was: martech is most definitely mainstream now.

(A big shout-out needs to go to Michaela Aguilar of Helium, who was the force that brought the Martech Oktoberfest event to life, as well as arranging a full Australian martech speaking tour for me. I hear they might be planning to do this again next year, so APAC friends, keep an eye out. That was one helluva inspiring symposium.)

Too late to go back and change my major?

Scott

P.S. Working with ABM? The folks at Influ2 have a cool launch coming up next week that unlocks intent signals from people, not just accounts. And in fact lets you leverage those insights to build account lists. I’ll be joining them for a live webinar next Thursday, November 5, at 12pm ET to discuss what this means and how to leverage it. Register for free to join us.