In October 2025, McKinsey interviewed about 50 senior marketing leaders at Fortune 500 companies. Not one of them could clearly articulate the return on the organization's marketing technology investment, or explain how the stack drives value.
That finding should set off alarms, because the spend behind martech is increasing at the same time that the use of purchased tools is falling. Gartner found that the $131 billion spent on martech in 2023 is projected to hit $215 billion by 2027. Concurrently, the share of stack use fell over a three-year period from 58% to 33% between 2020 and 2023, a trend that's still holding in 2026.
Companies are paying for more capability every year and putting less of it to work.
Unused technology with no line of sight into its value is not a neutral state. It works against the business in three ways, and all three compound.
- 1.Runaway cost. Duplicative licenses accumulate, each one renewing on schedule while the capability it promised sits idle.
- 2.Operational drag. Technical debt builds as duplicative and disconnected tools pile up, snarling the operation until the work grinds down.
- 3.Declining confidence in marketing. When a CMO can't show the return on investment in marketing technology, the C-suite loses confidence in marketing as a value driver to the business.
The research findings cannot be left alone. The question is, what to do about it?
There are three actions that marketing can take to recover the return on technology investments and increase overall marketing capability maturity at the same time. Each action lays the foundation that the next one needs.
Measure the right things
The first action to unlock marketing technology value is to measure what matters most.
Most marketing stacks are instrumented to count activity. Sends, opens, click-throughs, impressions, reach. Those numbers matter, operationally. Marketing should track whether the machinery is running efficiently.
But those metrics aren't answering the questions that the business and C-suite are asking. Are our investments in marketing capabilities returning top-line value? Is the technology paying back against the strategic priorities it was bought to serve?
Myopic focus on operational outputs creates a measurement discipline built on data that's unable to measure its own worth. But strategy-anchored measurement gives marketing the evidence to show the rest of the business what its work is worth, in terms the C-suite recognizes.
Measurement tied to strategic priority showcases the capabilities that are producing value, and shines a diagnostic spotlight on the ones that are merely consuming budget. That diagnosis is the insight that the next two actions need, shaping guesswork into directed action.
Put the operating model underneath it
The second action is to build operational rigor. In general, a marketing technology platform delivers functional capability and little else. It arrives able to do the work, but with no inherent understanding of how the organization wants the work done.
The people who run the tool. The processes that route work through it. The governance that decides what good output looks like and who can overrule the machine. The clear ownership that makes someone accountable when the output goes wrong at volume.
None of these ship in the box.
And every one of them is a decision the platform will otherwise make on its own. Which audience wins when two campaigns collide. What counts as good enough to send. When to hold back and when to act. Left undefined, the tool resolves these the vendor's way, using defaults set by people who have never met the organization's customers or carried its risk. The operating model is where the organization's own judgment gets into the system in place of theirs.
Without it, the capability runs on those defaults and whatever the team can improvise. The underlying operation is what delivers the return on capability investment. Or, if left to the vendor's baked-in operational assumptions, erodes it.
Solve the underlying data sprawl
Data sprawl is a well-established, and almost universally experienced, cause of marketing technology underutilization. Siloed, unstructured, and duplicative data sets stymie marketing capabilities second only to inefficient operations.
Unifying marketing data into a well-structured, privacy-secured, and enterprise-governed asset is the third action and the fuel that drives the engine of martech ROI. It's also the hardest of the three actions, because data proliferation is a self-perpetuating problem that's tightly coupled with martech duplication.
In large enterprises, business and product lines will often acquire marketing technology on their own because data is fragmented. The assumption being a new tool offers a way to ingest data and activate a particular use case faster than building pipelines into the existing stack.
But the effort to fast-track a solution compounds the problem as every new tool lays down its own data in its own shape. And each new tool increases technical debt which, over time, makes it exponentially harder to de-duplicate and simplify martech functions in the future. The effort to simplify eventually complexifies.
In our experience, the two most impactful levers to solving data sprawl are:
- 1.Slow the proliferation. That calls for governance around tool selection. When a use case arrives that seems to need a tool, the first step is a deliberate evaluation of what already sits in the stack and can solve the problem, so a new provider comes in only when nothing already owned can do the job.
- 2.Treat marketing data as a product in its own right. That means giving it an owner, a business case, and its own governance and operating model. This also includes resourcing with product ownership as a capability that exists to serve the other capabilities around it. This stops data from being treated as a byproduct of whatever tool happened to generate it and becomes something built and maintained on purpose. Enabling data as a product calls for a leading analytics platform that supports composable datasets. The same governed data can then be used across business lines and products without replication, and with the controls around privacy and security intact.
Without a clear read of where the value is and where it drains away, the operating model gets rebuilt half-blind and the data problem gets diagnosed by guesswork. Get these three actions in place, and the marketing technology already purchased for finally has what it needs to pay back.
The capital that makes it possible
None of this is easy work. Building marketing capability means serving several groups and lines of business at once, each with its own priorities and its own areas of ownership, and the three actions all run straight through that crowded terrain. Measuring against strategy, building the operating model, and treating data as a product each require other people to agree, to fund, and to give ground.
That is why the work runs on relationships. The people accountable for building capabilities need deep working relationships with the groups they serve, both to understand what those groups need and to draw on that standing when an internal force threatens to stall the work. Relationship is the capital that keeps a capability moving when budgets, boundaries, and competing agendas would otherwise hold it in place.
For the CMO, the leaders in these roles have to be chosen and held to that standard. Technical skill builds capability. Relationships enable building at all.
