Mediocrity at Scale: Martech’s Midlife Crisis
Marketing has never been more technologically advanced. With over 14,000 martech solutions available as of 2024, we have an unprecedented array of tools at our disposal. Marketing automation, personalization, and data-driven insights promise boundless opportunities. Yet, for all this innovation, many of us in the marketing community are starting to feel a gnawing sense that we haven’t gotten better at marketing, only better at optimizing advertising mechanics, while forgetting that great marketing isn’t about dashboards — it’s about making people actually give a damn.
Chasing KPIs Down the Funnel
Marketing has become hyper-focused on Key Performance Indicators, not because they are meaningful, but because they are measurable. Marketing automation, by its very nature, pushes us down the funnel. It’s the easiest place to measure performance, so we gravitate towards it. We’re so busy counting tweets, likes, leads, and impressions that we’ve started marketing to the numbers. We lean into measurements because we can, not because they have a real impact on long-term growth or market creation. This obsession with near-term outputs over long term outcomes leaves us trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns.
Or as Human OS CEO and Founder Eric Solomon put it, “perhaps all this marketing technology has just shown a light on the fact that much of our marketing wasn’t any good to start with.”
The truth hurts.
Markets Aren’t Made in Dashboards
One thing is for sure, no one ever built an iconic brand by optimizing open rates. Great marketing isn’t about who can crank out the most nurture emails or squeeze an extra 0.5% conversion out of a landing page. It’s about telling bold stories, taking risks, and giving people a reason to care — not just click.
When Nike launched “Just Do It” in 1988, it wasn’t backed by calculations, it was backed by conviction. Or take Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad. There was no ROI calculator justifying that Orwellian fever dream of a TV spot. But it announced to the world that Apple wasn’t just selling computers, it was starting a revolution.
Even today, bold marketing cuts through. Look at Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign or Liquid Death’s unapologetically weird brand voice. These brands didn’t succeed because they optimized a formula. They succeeded because they broke the formula.Your future customers aren’t hanging out in a funnel. They’re watching culture, scrolling TikTok, debating what brands align with their values, and sharing what surprises or delights them. If you’re just responding to demand, you’re already behind. The real opportunity? Creating it.
From Red Bull to Yeti, brave brands invent demand through story, swagger and sheer consistency, but you might be surprised that technology is playing a role in building creative stories that will drive demand.
Martech Stack, Meet the Creative Stack
One of the more interesting developments in the face of bottom-funnel burnout is the emergence of a Creative Technology Stack, tools designed not to optimize clickthroughs, but to inspire better thinking, deeper human insight, and more resonant storytelling.
And no, I’m not talking about the generative AI arms race, that conversation is already calcifying. I’m talking about platforms that, when paired with skilled strategists, designers, writers, and researchers, supercharge the front-end of marketing: the thinking, the message, the moment.
System1, for example, has built the world’s largest creative effectiveness database by combining the Effie Case Library with its predictive ad testing platform. Instead of asking “did it convert?” they ask “will it stick in people’s brains?” That’s a far better question.
BRANDthro, launched by former IBM futurist Billee Howard, taps into quantifiable data derived from live, not simulated, audience lookalikes to identify the emotional triggers behind customer decisions. It’s not sentiment analysis — it’s strategic empathy. Think of it as risk hedging for your GTM strategy and messaging that drives demand.
Evidenza, the brainchild of former LinkedIn B2B Institute research head Jon Lombardo, is reshaping market research with synthetic AI personas, delivering insights on hard-to-reach audiences that are faster, cheaper, and deeper than traditional methods.
Other players are emerging fast. Zefr enables nuanced brand suitability and sentiment analysis across video platforms, helping brands align with culture without losing control. CreativeX brings measurement rigor to asset-level content decisions, showing what types of visuals or messages work best for different audiences. And tools like Remesh and Sparkinator are turning live audience feedback into rich narrative fodder in real-time.
A New Stack for a New Kind of Marketer
What we’re witnessing isn’t the end of marketing but the beginning of something better. The rise of a Creative Tech Stack signals a return to what marketing was always meant to be: a blend of art and insight, of courage and craft.
It’s technology not as a crutch, but as a catalyst to help us get closer to what customers feel, not just what they click. Helping us make things worth remembering, not just optimizing what’s easily measured.
As legendary creative director Bill Bernbach once said, “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.” Today’s creative technology isn’t a replacement for that art, but it can help us find it faster, craft it sharper, and deliver it with more cultural voltage.
So yes, we still need automation. We still need targeting. But let’s not let the bottom of the funnel be the bottom of our ambition.
The future belongs to marketers who can blend creativity with intelligence, data with daring. Those who use technology not just to find the right audience, but to move them. Not just to follow demand, but to spark it. It’s time to upgrade the stack. Not just for more clicks, but for more connection.
And maybe, just maybe, to make marketing fun again.
Peter Weingard is the Global Head of Brand for Wipro, a $10B purpose-driven information technology consultancy. Before joining Wipro, Peter had a long career in media and technology including as CMO of the largest NPR station group, New York Public Radio, where he led the transformation from broadcaster to a digital audio powerhouse. Prior to joining New York Public Radio, Peter was part of the founding management team that built and grew Food Network’s SaaS dining reservations business, CityEats, from concept through multi-million dollar exit in under three years.
