The Great Unwinding: Marketing Tech Under Fire

Marketing technology is having a reckoning.

In the early 2010s, with the internet maturing and social media opening up new channels for distribution, the savvy marketer new they had to get ahead of the curve.

Brands started a shift from traditional ways of marketing to the digital world, seeing it as the new frontier which was opening up faster, cheaper, more measurable ways for marketing teams to track, optimise and chase that elusive white whale - ROI.

Solutions evolved, incumbents were challenged. Fragmentation saw stacks on top of stacks as the digital layers became more ingrained and more complex. Since that heady time, the number of martech solutions have increased from a meagre 150 odd, to almost 10,000.?

“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business”? - Bill Gates

Then we all started working from home, through a screen. Probably a few of them. And we started buying.

A lot.

Martech alone was never going to fix our marketing problems. But it was peddled out as the best solution at the time for so many of us, when visibility and clarity were in short supply.

The pandemic accelerated the diffusion and adoption of digital technologies. The stack wasn’t stacked enough!?

Unprecedented challenges loosened purse strings across the corporate Universe, with consultancies big and small eagerly lining up to sell in the latest digital solution or accelerate previous investments into rapid deployment.?

It all moved so fast. The feeling at the time was that speed was essential.

Literally a case of life or death.

Nothing like universal fear to expediate decision making processes and provide adequate cover to paper over objections, circumventing the usual procurement protocols.?

Turns out, those regulations, checklists and protocols are there for a reason.

Last year Gartner identified that the majority of technology purchases came with a high degree of regret.?

Fast forward to 2023 and we’re seeing the outcomes of those hasty decisions. Call it buyer’s remorse, but the martech stack which was supposed to save us from our productivity woes is looking more on the nose.

The criticisms have not been kind.?

Marketing professor and profanity propagator Mark Ritson was pretty clear on how he feels.

Rather than optimising marketing investment, is martech more often a stupid but significant drain on them? - Mark Ritson

This was in response to a neat illustration of one of the biggest sources of waste in modern marketing budgets, shared by Shane O’Leary on LinkedIn:

Companies are now spending 5% more on their martech stack than they are on actual media. Money going to find the right moment, rather than the right people.

The worst part, O’Leary continues, is that 44% of martech licences go unused and yet 63% expect their spend to increase in 2023. Madness.

Closer to home, a straw poll of Australian marketers on Mi3 showed a rather emphatic lack of enthusiasm for their martech investments:

This was hammered home in a recent study by The Lumery & Customer Experience and Insight Research Group at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Stacks on Stacks on Stacks. In it, the group aimed to shed light on the state of the martech industry, including the opportunities and challenges businesses are facing in this space.

The first question? What *is* martech.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise.

Marketers must select from thousands of technologies offering dozens of functions ranging from data and analytics to customer experience design, communications, automation, and more. It’s no wonder marketers are left feeling overwhelmed and concerned that their technology is not delivering effectively.

Just like all of that overpriced exercise equipment and the ostentatious flatscreens we stocked up on during those extra hours confined to our homes, the martech stack is looking just as reckless.?

Yet despite all of this, the martech sector continues to grow, even with the economic conditions of 2022 continuing into 2023. All those unused licences have to be powering something.

Though the tide may be shifting.

An overriding theme finds organisations are looking to extract more value from the tech they have. The money has been spent, so why not find out what you have?

Marketers can lead this charge. After emerging from the COVID fog masking the folly of hurried deployment and rushed rationalisation, marketers have plenty of scope to achieve higher levels of martech maturity.

This should also bring into focus the obsession of ‘futurists’ and metaverse-cum-AI-experts spouting the revolutionary nature of their chosen tool. It’s easy to talk about the possibilities.

It’s quite a different story when the theoretical rubber hits the road.

A lesson we’ve all had to painfully learn. One which should be front of mind when your agency partner starts talking about an Apple Vision Pro strategy.

The Obsession With Personalisation

The importance of martech rose to its exalted status due to a focus on delivery of a seamless and personalised customer experience.

However, if only 5% of your audience is in market at any one time, according to the preeminent marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute - why is so much time, energy and resources being committed to being hyper-personalised in that one moment?

Especially when the tech isn't even being used to its full capacity.

The goal is to be familiar enough. Get 80% of the way there so customers go with the one they recognise, the one they can rationalise to themselves, rather than competitors who know the weather at the destination or bring up their last purchase.

From The Lumery study, they identified that personalisation at scale is not a customer term. It is a term used by vendors to sell tech.?

If a business is using personalisation at scale to drive a customer opportunity or initiative, then it has left the customer out of the whole narrative.

And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? The human element has been sidelined for a robotic interpretation of what people want and when.

Perhaps a timely revisit to the paraphrased wise words of Ogilvy UK Vice Chairman, Rory Sutherland who said: "We spend too much time trying to understand how technology and media function, and not enough time trying to understand how people function."

If the last few years have taught us anything, the pendulum has swung too far. Getting allocations back in balance is the key to a marketing tech stack which returns real value.?

Return focus to the problem, then finding the tech to support the vision and direction.

Define the customer’s optimal experience and then craft a roadmap which allows technology to be strategically planned, implemented, and maintained. One which delivers on the exact experience desired.

We spend too much time trying to understand how technology and media function, and not enough time trying to understand how people function.

Back to our mate Ritson.

“I believe the human instrument remains the best one to understand, communicate and create for other humans.?

When did we start believing in machines over men and women? For everything? Even the most human of tasks?”

It’s time to put the ‘person’ back in personalisation.

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Trying to work out what to do with your martech stack? Get in touch via [email protected] for a free audit and recommendations on how to get the most from your marketing function.