If you have spent any time hanging around marketing events and conferences – and I know that you have – then the chances are you will have seen a famous chart from Scott Brinker detailing the growth in the number of martech vendors.

You could see the logos of the 150 companies that were included on it in 2011; skip to 2025 and there are now a preposterous 15,384 marketing technology solutions for marketers to choose between. This a 9% growth from 2024 and it is a category that is a staggering 100 times larger than it was 15 years ago.

McKinsey estimates that the martech industry will be worth the better part of $215bn (£160bn) in 2027. Safe to say, marketers have made a lot of businesses very wealthy indeed.

It’s an explosion that has left some marketers confused about where to turn next.

Victoria Lennon runs her marketing consultancy GoTheia and specialises in helping marketers tackle their operational challenges. She points out that marketing technology is still a relatively nascent industry – only really entering the marketing vocabulary around a decade ago.

“We weren’t talking about martech,” she says. “We probably didn’t even talk about systems. Most marketers were probably going, ‘Oh, I’ve got a CRM and an email marketing system’. That was it. Now it’s inherently more sophisticated and so incredibly complex.”

She believes the biggest challenge with martech is overcoming the innate human desire to always want the biggest and best of everything. “I’ve done a lot of work in user experience and one of the big things you learn about people is they will say, ‘I need it to do this, this and this.’ And the reality is that they don’t,” she says. “What you want is very different from what you actually need.”

It’s very easy for a marketer to be presented with the dozens of new metrics a tool can track and the personalisation options it could bring to the team and be blinded by possibilities. But, ultimately, you end up failing to make use of even half of it.

“The reality is you don’t use it,” she says. And while marketers often say they’d love a particular figure, she suggests more often than not, they “end up not having time to look at it.”

It’s an answer that rings true for those brand-side. For Barney O’Kelly, head of solutions and product marketing at global consultancy AlixPartners, often the problem comes down to marketers thinking about what tech does, rather than what it is meant to achieve. “That sounds really glib and an obvious statement,” he accepts. “But if you know what you’re trying to achieve then the problem of an overwhelming amount of choice can be managed more effectively, you realise that what you now have is just a series of options.”

If you’ve got a piece of technology that you’ve had for 10 years, but it’s still doing the job that you need it to do, don’t replace it just because you feel you need to because it’s old.

Barney O’Kelly, AlixPartners

Anna Jaycocks, marketing director at loyalty tech firm Reward, agrees that there are usually more tools in the organisation than a marketer realistically needs and, similar to O’Kelly, believes the problem often comes back to lack of a clear roadmap.

“The real issue is around selection without strategy,” she says. “People are going, I’ll add this tool in, but it’s not about more tools or fewer tools; the goal is having the right tool to what you need.”

She recalls her most recent martech purchase, a Braze CRM, and accepts that despite how impressive many of the offered integrations were, she didn’t need to unlock every part of it. She adds: “It’s all about what outcome you are trying to achieve. And, ultimately, if you’re growing and you’re hitting the objectives you set out to with that particular piece of tech, that’s the important bit.”

O’Kelly believes that it can help to make one large decision before making a series of smaller decisions. He points out that many marketers will end up using a Salesforce or HubSpot CRM because they are the largest players in the market. Once you’ve done that your conversation then becomes “what integrates with these platforms”, he says, and then “those 15,000 options become far less”.

And it’s not always a bad idea when all else fails to stick to what you know. “I’ve been an enthusiastic shopper for technology throughout my career, but I have tended to use a lot of the same platforms repeatedly, because I know what they do, I know where they fit, and I know how to get them to work in the business,” adds O’Kelly.

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More choice to come

With the proliferation of AI solutions, choosing the right platform for the right job is only set to become more complex. In September, the UK government published research showing the UK’s AI ecosystem has grown to include more than 5,800 AI companies – an 85% increase over the past 2 years.

Not all of these will offer a marketing technology solution, of course, but we can look to Scott Brinker’s research again to see that 2,489 AI-focused martech tools were added to the already extensive choice in 2025. No matter which way you cut it, there’s even more confusion and complexity on the way for marketers. As well as an element of risk.

“As it relates to AI and generative AI, this is peak hype,” says Ben Bloom, vice-president, analyst at Gartner, specialising in martech. “What that means is there’s a lot of new vendors and some of them are selling things that ultimately will not survive. And so that requires a lot of risk management in terms of how you’re managing that for procurement.”

Robert Tas, a partner at McKinsey, again specialising in martech, has sympathy for any marketers getting caught up in the hype cycle. There is an undeniable level of pressure from above to implement an AI strategy across the business and “people are trying to figure it out and not get left behind” at the same time. “It’s human nature and the martech vendors are certainly seizing that opportunity today,” he says.

It also comes down to the fact that it can be difficult for marketers to get sign-off to improve a tool they’ve had for the better part of five years compared to acquiring a “shiny new toy” that can hopefully solve the business challenge the previous tool was meant to.

It’s not about fewer tools. It’s about the right tools, and ultimately, you have to find the right tool to deliver for the customer.

Anna Jaycocks, Reward

“It’s hard to go to management and say, ‘Hey, I bought this thing five years ago, and I need money to make it better’. That’s just hard to sell,” explains Tas. “And our martech leaders are not equipped to have that executive that’s driving the use cases and being able to hold themselves accountable to what they already have.”

And, of course, the experimentation that marketers are doing with AI tools isn’t necessarily driving results – but Bloom is adamant that marketers have to be honest with themselves about that rather than digging in and spending more. Its recent 2025 Martech Technology Survey showed that 81% of marketing teams have AI agents in pilot or production – but 45% report that existing capabilities are not meeting business performance expectations.

“That should be a cautionary tale. Experimentation with AI is great but you have to link it to a valuable use case that’s going to make a difference,” says Bloom. “It’s totally fine to say, we tried that, it didn’t work, and it either can’t work right now or is not something that is going to matter to our organisation over the long-term.”

‘Good technology won’t make up for a bad creative idea’

Getting the most of it

There’s no denying that many marketers across the industry are struggling to get the most out of the tools they have. McKinsey research shows that 47% of martech decision-makers cite stack complexity and data integration challenges as the key blockers preventing them from getting full value out of their martech tools. Despite this, 80% of organisations will continue to increase their martech spend over the next five years. For too many, the solution to a martech problem is just whack another tool on top.

“They get excited about a new system, they go buy it, they plop it in, and only use 10% of it,” says Tas. “Then they realise that they didn’t connect the data, they didn’t train people, they didn’t do the change management. Put that together and it usually takes five to seven years before they actually get to a more mature state. It’s crazy.”

Bloom points to Gartner data that shows 49% of marketing teams are using the totality of the stack – up from 33% in its 2023 survey – as a positive sign that perhaps the industry is turning a corner on this. But he accepts that a 50% wastage level is still far from ideal.

It’s something that experienced B2B CMO Jon White, with stints at engineering brands RS Group and Flowtech, finds particularly frustrating at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure. “We’ve all got less resource,” he says. “You’re going to have to be more and more confident about where you’re going to spend your time and your effort and your money – and that includes technology choices. Stay rooted in the big picture and don’t get lost in the micro.”

It’s a point that resonates with O’Kelly who believes reducing wastage is a matter of “understanding what you are trying to achieve” when you buy a tool in the first place and knowing how to drive it successfully in your organisation. “Some of those objectives will be directly commercial, and some of them will be demonstrating that, yes, we can do things that the business didn’t think we could do,” he notes.

White adds: “Where’s the sweet spot between the business and marketing objectives and the technology objectives? Where do they overlap? That’s probably the core challenge. Because if you spent your time sitting there going, ‘What’s our martech strategy?’, you’ll be there forever. The key question is what are my business challenges and opportunities and which bits of the martech opportunity can help me unlock that.”

Otherwise, as he puts it, you end up with “technology looking for a business problem” rather than solving a business challenge with a smart application of technology. And just because a piece of tech is old, doesn’t mean it is obsolete.

“If you’ve got a piece of technology that you’ve had for 10 years, but it’s still doing the job that you need it to do, don’t replace it just because you feel you need to because it’s old,” laughs O’Kelly.

What can be done?

The one certainty in all of this is that the number of martech tools on the market is only going to keep going up. Tas believes the figure will be topping 30,000 before we know it. Marketers, then, cannot rely on a contracting marketplace to make decisions easier for them – and most likely with the advent of AI there are going to be some tough decisions to make in the next few years. The answer, though, seems to lie in what should always be at the forefront of a marketer’s mind: the customer.

Lennon accepts that when it comes to looking at what tools to buy, it can be easier to default to what will help the marketing team work “quicker, faster and better” – and that is undeniably a key factor. But what marketers sometimes forget, she says, is the impact on the end user and how a martech tool will improve processes around pitching, acquiring and retaining clients.

It’s a point that Jaycocks believes can be too easily forgotten: “It’s not about fewer tools. It’s about the right tools, and ultimately, you have to find the right tool to deliver for the customer.”

It all comes back to what you are trying to achieve, says Jaycocks, there’s no point having a social media platform that delivers paid ads when you don’t have a paid ad budget. That’s where wastage comes in.

“But if you are really super clear on your strategy about where you are going as a business and what your function is delivering, that will help you find the right tech stack, and you can work with partners, agencies and vendors to help pull it all together,” she concludes.

As part of Marketing Week’s Unpack the Stack series we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities of martech. In the coming weeks we will be looking at the skills gaps that have emerged and how to get the best out of the tech marketers already have, as well as digging into why marketers’ tech stacks have got out of hand and what can be done about it.