The martech mirage: $160bn spent. But ROI is still elusive

This is no parochial failing: global businesses will pour $160bn into marketing technology this year, ballooning to $215bn by 2027. Tools for email orchestration, personalisation engines, analytics suites, each a gleaming widget in an ever-swelling stack, yet 47% of leaders cite complexity and integration woes as the chief barriers to value realisation.

The irony is stark: martech, meant to turbocharge revenue and customer loyalty, has morphed into a cost centre, its promise diluted by silos, underutilisation, and metrics that dazzle without delivering.

Tech is a Ferrari that gathers dust

As CEO of Brave Group, Africa's vanguard in integrated marketing communications, I have steered clients through this fog. We've witnessed stacks balloon to 20-plus tools, each devouring licences while languishing at 10-15% utilisation. This is a phenomenon McKinsey likens to buying a Ferrari and driving it only in summer.

Talent gaps exacerbate the malaise: 34% of decision-makers flag under-skilled teams as the culprit, leaving c-suites to view martech as mere overhead rather than a growth engine. In South Africa, where budgets are taut amid economic headwinds, this opacity is unforgivable. At the same time, marketers chase vanity metrics like open rates and impressions, while ignoring the holy grail: incremental revenue, customer lifetime value (CLV), and operational efficiencies that directly tie to profits, losses, and revenues.

The diagnosis is damning, but the pathology traces back a decade. The martech landscape, once a tidy ecosystem, exploded post-2011, birthing 8,000-plus vendors by 2019. Hasty adoptions, often sans strategic audit, bred redundancy: duplicate CRMs, overlapping analytics, siloed data lakes.

This isn't an indictment of martech itself. The tools work when wielded correctly. Instead, it exposes a deployment crisis that separates winners from wastrels. At Brave Group, our confidence in martech's potential is matched only by our realism about its current misuse.

Measurement myopia reigns

Gartner's 2025 survey underscores the fallout; martech utilisation has dipped to 49%, exposing firms to redundancy risks and eroding ROI. Worse, measurement myopia reigns. As Forrester notes, many equate ROI solely to subscription fees, blind to integration costs, training, and opportunity costs.

With privacy regulations like POPIA tightening and the cookie's demise accelerating signal loss, martech must evolve from a tactical crutch to a strategic fulcrum. The C-suite's underestimation, treating martech as "write a cheque" expenditure, starves it of sponsorship, relegating it to IT's periphery. As Robert Tas of McKinsey observes, it's akin to gym equipment gathering dust: potential abounds, but without disciplined use, it atrophies.

Yet herein lies the pivot: artificial intelligence, wielded through agentic orchestration, offers not a panacea but a pragmatic reset. McKinsey envisions a four-layer architecture – data, decisioning, design, distribution – bound by AI agents that autonomously cleanse, integrate and activate. These 'orchestrators' dismantle silos, automating the grunt work while surfacing actionable insights. Imagine agents negotiating data across CRMs and DSPs in real time, or design agents crafting hyper-personalised offers that boost CLV by 25%.

The prescription for a better future demands rigour. First, audit ruthlessly: apply the 80/20 rule, culling tools where (revenue generated – total cost)/total cost yields a return below 1x.

Why remain bullish

At Brave Group, our conviction isn't in martech per se, it's in martech done right. The ROI crisis isn't a technology problem; it's an implementation and orchestration problem. When clients approach martech strategically rather than opportunistically, the results tell a different story.

We've guided brands to 3–5x returns by doing three things differently: ruthless consolidation (reducing 20-tool stacks to 6–8 integrated platforms), obsessive measurement discipline (tracking revenue impact, not vanity metrics), and embedding cross-functional governance from day one. The companies achieving martech ROI aren't those with the most tools – they're those with the clearest strategy and strongest execution muscle.

Our bullish posture stems from firsthand experience of this transformation. The $160bn isn't wasted on bad technology; it's squandered on bad deployment. Fix the latter, and the former becomes transformative.

Multi-touch attribution wins

Second, measure holistically: eschew opens for multi-touch attribution linking martech to business outcomes.

Third, upskill relentlessly, McKinsey's 34% talent gap closes via modular training, with AI copilots as accelerators.

Finally, govern with RAFT (respect, accountability, fairness, transparency) to embed ethics and create a martech governance playbook.

For South African CMOs, the stakes are acute: in a market where digital ad spend nears R40bn yet fragmentation erodes efficacy, martech must deliver value beyond cost.

By 2027, Gartner predicts agentic AI will permeate 85% of stacks, yielding 40% ROI premiums for the prepared. The alternative? Perpetual drift, as budgets evaporate under scrutiny. The billion-dollar riddle resolves not in more tools, but in orchestration with AI as conductor, humans as composers.

From noise to signal

At Brave, we're betting on resonance over noise.

We've seen both sides of the martech equation. The wastage is real, but so is the opportunity for those willing to do the hard work. Our bullish stance isn't naïve optimism; it's evidence-based conviction, shaped by guiding clients through successful transformations. When martech is deployed with strategic intent, measurement rigor, and AI-powered orchestration, it doesn't just deliver ROI; it creates competitive moats.

The question isn't whether martech works. It is whether you're willing to wield it with discipline.