Martech has been a hot topic for the best part of a decade. Organisations across every sector have made significant investments, implemented platforms, and waited for the transformation to arrive. Yet, for many, the results have been underwhelming.
So what’s going wrong? We spoke to AAR’s Principal Consultant Paul Stevenson and Partner Hannah Astill to get their views.
The Four-Phase Problem
Most martech implementations follow a familiar arc. Phase one is buying the technology. Phase two is getting it implemented and integrated. Phase three is changing how the organisation operates to adopt it. Phase four is driving measurable commercial value.
The problem is almost universal: organisations pour energy and attention into phases one and two, then run out of steam. Leadership changes, structures shift, the people who owned the vision move on, and the organisation is left stranded somewhere between a strategy that made sense at the time and the returns they were promised.
The hard truth is that the value lives in phases three and four. And those are precisely the phases that get neglected.
Technology Is Never the Silver Bullet
There’s a quote that sums this up well: you can’t run a next-generation platform inside a last-generation operating model.
Technology should always be an enabler, not an answer. When organisations treat a platform purchase as the solution, rather than the infrastructure that underpins a broader business strategy, they’re setting themselves up to fail. The technology gets layered on top of old siloed structures, old channel-first thinking, unclear data ownership, and legacy measurement frameworks. Nothing meaningfully changes.
The operating model is the real issue. Fix that, and the technology does what it’s supposed to do.
The 80/20 Rule of Transformation
When you break down what actually drives transformation success, technology accounts for roughly 20% of the challenge. The other 80% is people and process.
On the people side, adoption doesn’t happen by accident. It requires capability assessments, honest conversations about skills gaps, structured training, and genuine change management, not just a platform launch and a few onboarding sessions. One of the most memorable early lessons from martech implementation: after all the journey-building and template creation was done, the hardest part was getting someone to actually press ‘send’. That fear of the unknown is real, and it matters.
On the process side, the question isn’t just whether the technology works, it’s whether your organisational processes have been redesigned to work alongside it. Decision-making forums that meet fortnightly, data still living in spreadsheets, approval chains that haven’t evolved, these create constant friction that no platform can overcome.
What CMOs Should Actually Be Measuring
Too often, martech success is measured in platform utilisation: how many journeys were built, how many campaigns went out, how many emails were sent. These metrics tell you very little about whether the investment is working.
The outcomes that matter – growth, retention, efficiency, speed to market – need to be translated into measurable targets that the technology actually tracks. Boards care about commercial results. Every KPI tied to a martech programme should be traceable back to those outcomes.
There’s also a broader shift happening in how CMOs are thinking about integration. The old siloed model, separate conversations for media, creative, CRM, PR, and more is giving way to something far more connected. CMOs are looking for the flexibility to move budgets fluidly across channels based on where they’re seeing returns, underpinned by common first-party data sets, proper identity resolution, and audience understanding that cuts across the organisation.
Measurement Is Hard, and Getting Harder
Even with the right intentions, measurement remains genuinely complex. Attribution is becoming more sophisticated, but understanding which touchpoints are actually driving conversion across an omnichannel landscape is a significant challenge. Add in the question of how to value brand-building activity versus direct response, and you have a picture that resists easy answers.
There’s also the problem of data abundance. Organisations now have access to more data than ever before, with real-time dashboards, journey analytics, and audience signals all shouting for attention. But more data doesn’t automatically mean more clarity. Without a clear strategy for what you’re trying to measure and why, it’s easy to become paralysed. You can’t see the wood for the trees.
The answer isn’t better dashboards. It’s sharper thinking about what success actually looks like, and governance processes that ensure the right people are reviewing the right metrics in the right forums.
Future-Proofing Against Change
People move on. Leadership changes. Strategies get rewritten. The organisations that weather this best are the ones that have embedded the strategy at a senior level and created genuine alignment across the leadership team, not just within marketing, but across the C-suite.
That means CFO engagement, not just as a budget approver but as a genuine stakeholder in the commercial outcomes marketing is driving. It means procurement teams that understand marketing, not just contracts. And it means CMOs who can articulate marketing’s role not as a cost centre but as a growth engine, and have the data to back it up.
When leadership is truly aligned and the strategy is genuinely shared, individual departures become less destabilising. The culture carries the strategy forward.
The Pattern Keeps Repeating
Here’s what’s striking: this is exactly the same conversation the industry was having about martech a decade ago. And it’s the conversation we’re now having about AI.
The organisations that made martech work weren’t the ones with the best technology stack. They were the ones that put in the hard work on their operating models – their people, their processes, their partnerships – and used technology to underpin that, not replace it.
As AI moves from buzzword to business reality, the same principles apply. The fundamentals don’t change. Audience targeting, segmentation, data strategy, knowing who you’re talking to and when; these are timeless. The technology evolves; the thinking that makes it work does not.
If you’ve invested millions in martech and aren’t seeing the returns, the answer probably isn’t a new platform. It’s going back to basics: reviewing your segmentation, auditing your data strategy, redesigning your operating model, and being honest about whether you’ve actually done the hard work to get your fundamentals right.
The platform is ready. The question is whether your organisation is.
