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Short abstract:

This paper focuses on “marketing technologies” used to construct durable links between companies and customers. A customer’s electronic identity is material – "this job is plumbing," says one practitioner. Ways of materially organizing marketing technologies' “plumbing” differ considerably.

Long abstract:

In recent years, the term martech, an acronym for "marketing technologies", has come to designate a vast array of IT tools and services that businesses use to automate, streamline, and optimize their marketing efforts. From a demand side view, the term “martech stack” today refers to the assembly of software that make up a company's marketing infrastructure. From a supply side view, Martech is, next to AdTech, a representation used to identify and position the range of software technologies and digital services from which corporate marketing departments source their products and organize their marketing and advertising operations. While the AdTech label refers to third party data and digital advertising, Martech is concerned with so-called “first party data”, that is the customer datasetsthat are built and maintained by companies themselves and the related marketing operations.

The thesis defended in the article is that the process of “stack economization”, of which martech offers a perfect illustration, must be inscribed in the long term of organizations, professions, knowledge, and their material and infrastructural devices. Rather than considering martech as a set of technically and commercially accomplished innovations immediately available and operational, but eventually clashing with the human and organizational reality of companies, we must take into account the plurality economization processes, and associated technological frames, that compose the broader martech ecosystem, and the frictions caused by this plurality. From this perspective, I propose to examine martech as linked social worlds, or “linked ecologies”.