Visualize This: Interactive Marketing Technology Graphic Targets CMOs

In an effort to help marketers find the right tools for their teams, streamline workflow and better navigate the marketing tech landscape, digital content development agency Beutler Ink has partnered with Kobie Fuller, of Silicon Valley-based VC firm Accel Partners, and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff to create an interactive infographic called Growthverse.

Not your standard, showy infographic, the Growthverse serves as a constantly evolving ecosystem within itself, whereby marketers can choose from multiple categories (and sub-categories within) to find a list of companies offering solutions to help take on their most daunting marketing challenges. Inspired by both a regularly updated "supergraphic" developed by Scott Brinker of blog Chief MarTech and predictions that chief marketing officers will spend more money on IT than CIOs by 2017, Beutler Ink and Accel collaborated for months and solicited the input of hundreds of CMOs to complete phase one of Growthverse.

"Existing visualizations do a good job of illustrating the point that the martech landscape is vast and quickly growing, but they don't do much to help marketers sort through the options to make informed decisions," said Jenny Karn, co-founder and vice president of Beutler Ink. "Our goal throughout the process was to not only develop a visualization that allowed marketers to see a high-level overview of the full universe, but to also sort by specific business objectives to identify relevant tools."

Targeted at marketers across the board, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, Growthverse features a list of 600 (and growing) marketing-tech companies divided into categories—ranging from collaboration and content marketing to data centralization and analytics—on a pinwheel display. Despite the enormous amount of information included, the tool is more inviting than intimidating as it aims to provide a handful of benefits for CMOs.

But the project is far from over. The creators of Growthverse aim to turn their expanding universe into a learning "brain" that takes its cues from marketers using the tool. Users are encouraged to submit additional companies for inclusion and other feedback. The team at Beutler Ink—which handled visualization and design for Growthverse and has also worked with clients such as Google, National Geographic, Uber, Verizon and the NBA throughout the years—says plans are underway to join forces once again with Fuller and Kaykas-Wolff to develop Phase Two of their interactive visualization tool, which will include many more companies, easier sharing and more.

As Growthverse's next phase gets underway, the question proposed by its creators still remains the same: "What marketing problem are you trying to solve?"