a Brearton, the spotlight on an expert

This series will take you deeper into the lives of our experts. This interview was edited to make it more concise and clear.

Anita Brearton, founder and CEO at CabinetM Marketing Technology Management Platform, is a well-known face in the martech world. She’s also a MarTech contributor. She is also , a MarTech Contributor.

A: Before founding CabinetM, in 2014, you were a marketer. How did this happen?

A : This is not very strategic. I was in engineering at a high-tech company when I realized that my career growth in that role was limited. I did not have a degree in engineering. When I was 25, I answered cockily that I would like to go into marketing.

It was a crazy answer. The company was 1500 people, a publicly traded company. They told me to “go figure it out”. It was an intensive learning experience.

Q. You have held a number of marketing leadership positions for different companies. Was it all done quite quickly?

It did. I moved to Australia, and planned to leave the company to get a new job there. The chairman of the board called the day before I was to leave and told me, “We do not have a presence in Asia-Pacific.” “Do you want to do that?” I asked. I had to learn about channel marketing, and work with 13 different countries.

Everything happened very quickly when I returned to the States. I joined Cascade Communications, an incredibly successful company that went public six months prior. I was hired to clarify their marketing position. As the twenty ninth employee, I joined Sycamore Networks and positioned them, developed their marketing strategy, and 18 months later we were the 25th largest IPO on the NASDAQ.

I eventually stepped out of that world and did some consulting for other high tech startups. I then took a left turn and got into angel investing. I managed a Golden Seeds chapter for a few years. Golden Seeds is a group that invests in female-led ventures, and provides strategic business advice to women entrepreneurs.

Sheryl and myself got together. Sheryl had been investing in martech firms while I was struggling to figure out how to utilize the martech. CabinetM grew from this.

Q. Have you met Sheryl Schultz in the investment area?

No, I knew her before. We were brought together by people on advisory boards. We had to travel for this advisory board, so we began spending days together. When I entered the world of angel investing, I brought her along with me.

Q. When did the idea of CabinetM come about?

A :When we first started CabinetM I believe the general consensus was that there are 500-1,000 martech tools. Scott Brinker’s landscape had about 750 tools on it at the time. I had seen how difficult it was for my team to decide what to use. The original idea was to build a marketplace that would allow us to expose all of this technology because there were no directories at the time. Scott’s diagram is useful, but at the time it did not really go down.

We started by manually building a product database. Naive as we were, we thought we would be fine if we reached 500 products. We’re now at 15,000 products and adding more than 100 per month. It’s crazy.

We talked to a lot of people and they told us that yes, finding the technology can be difficult, but managing what we have is more challenging. The stack is becoming more complex.

Q. Talk about the current state-of-play in martech.

A:Two big things are happening. The pace of innovation continues to accelerate. With generative AI, the line between content and tech is becoming increasingly blurred. We pass through a phase where we accept these guys as the big platform players, market leaders. These are the foundation of your stack. Now that we are in this period of AI innovation, it’s not certain that these will be the leaders of the future.

A: Many marketing tech solutions are infused with AI. CabinetM is a new category. How does it deal with AI?

A :That is one of the issues that we have been grappling with. Our database now has a category of generative AI-based products. Does anyone really write an RFP for AI? In the case generative AI, I believe they are. For other products that leverage AI for its sheer size, you wouldn’t say, “I need an AI driven x, an AI-driven warehouse for example.” We’ve reached a point where we ask “Is AI enabled and critical to the function of this product?” If not, then it remains in its original category.

As we enter turbulent times, marketing operations are being restricted due to concerns about the economy. The economy is causing companies to freeze their budgets. At the same time, marketing departments are unable to articulate the value they get from the technology that they use.

Will you get further if you say that this technology is crucial to acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers – we cannot lose this technology -? I don’t think so, but it could.

Q. Next year, CabinetM will celebrate its tenth birthday.

A :It is frightening to think that it has gone so fast! Tik-Tok did not exist when we began; CDP was a small category; ABM wasn’t discussed; AI was talked about, but in a more abstract way.

Since ten years, people have talked about the consolidation of this industry. It has only grown.

Ryan Phelan, expert spotlight

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