B2B Marketing
15K Tools Later — Why Marketing Still Feels Broken
Jul 24, 2025
Marketing technology was supposed to simplify, integrate, and empower.
Instead, it’s become a set of disconnected tools, siloed data, and fragmented dashboards.
Despite thousands of options and billions in spend, many marketing teams feel more overwhelmed than equipped.
Why? Because the stack has outgrown the strategy.
Let’s break down three core Martech frictions that are holding teams back:
Challenge #1: Too Many Tools
The Martech ecosystem has exploded — but that hasn’t made execution easier.
In 2011, there were 150 tools on the Martech landscape.
In 2025, there are over 15K+ Martech solutions in the market (ChiefMartec 2025).
The average enterprise uses 90+ marketing cloud services—yet many still lack end-to-end orchestration (ChiefMartec analysis of Netskope data).
More tools often mean more complexity — not more clarity. Marketers spend more time managing platforms than orchestrating outcomes.
Challenge #2: Data & System Silos
Each tool collects valuable signals — but very few communicate.
Data lives in platforms. Execution lives in workflows. Neither sees the full journey.
Only 28% of marketing teams have a unified customer view across platforms (Salesforce).
59.5% of executives report that their companies were driving business innovation with data - Fragmented systems cause repetitive messaging, missed personalization, and channel conflict leading to poor utilization of data.
Only 17% of marketers report high utilization of their CDP (Gartner) — a signal that even the most promising tools aren’t solving the problems they were built for.
Disconnected data doesn’t just limit insight — it disrupts the buyer experience and reduces campaign precision.
Challenge #3: Lack of a Trusted View of Performance
Despite dashboards and attribution tools, most marketers still struggle to answer:
“What’s actually working — and why?”
Attribution is rarely consistent across platforms and campaigns.
Despite heavy investment, only 17% of business leaders report that the components of their marketing technology stack work extremely well together (Adobe Business)—a clear indicator that the tools aren’t delivering seamless insight and trust needed for ROI confidence.
Success is often based on surface metrics.
If teams can’t agree on what’s working, they can’t scale what works. Strategy becomes reactive instead of Insight led.
Martech Is Built for Marketers, Not Buyers
Today's Martech is optimized for managing funnels — not helping buyers move through their buying journey. It tracks lead volume and campaign reach, but rarely captures whether those interactions are meaningful, timely, or actually useful to the buyer.
There’s no visibility into how easy or hard it is to buy.
There’s no system measuring buyer clarity, confidence, or decision progress.
Very few tools consider what buyers need in the moment —but just what marketers want to say.
We’ve built stacks that are great at delivery — but poor at discovery.
What buyers often need is less messaging and more momentum. That’s a blind spot most Martech can’t see — but an intelligence layer can.
Where Martech Needs to Go from Here
The next chapter for Martech isn’t just tighter integration — it’s intelligence that delivers signal-rich insights and true buyer-focused enablement across their buying journey.
To get there, marketing teams need to:
See the full performance picture - Not just about marketing metrics, but about their business and buyer success.
Act on signals, not assumptions - Tap into behavioral insights from true engagement, beyond internal attribution models.
Connect execution to insight, in context - Understand not only what worked but why it worked
The right intelligence & insights — like Media AI offers— can help advertisers close the loop between discovery, engagement, and business outcomes.
TL;DR
We are currently optimized for marketing efficiency, not buyer success — for campaign output, not outcome relevance. This gap won’t be closed with one more dashboard.
It will take a smarter buyer signal engine — one designed to enable buyer progress, not just measure marketing activity.
And that shift will make all the difference.
Join the conversation on LinkedIn — where we explore what it really takes to succeed in B2B marketing.