One hidden cost of unused martech is the effort that went into installing and integrating it. This Digibee study of large enterprises found that 16% to 25% of IT spend goes to integration, and half the companies rebuild six or more integrations each year. Worse still, 79% of those new integrations cause significant downtime, which can easily cost more than $1 million per hour.
How big a problem is zombie martech? Half (51%) of the respondents to this Demand Metric survey for Integrate said they have a great or very great amount of redundant or unused tech. But they don’t seem too worried about it: 64% said their current martech stack supports them well or very well, 44% plan to increase their marketing ops and martech spending, and more plan to add new systems (32%) than to make their stack smaller (26%). Interesting.
Tech budgets increase pretty much no matter what, but spend on creative is more volatile. Lions Advisory found that 53% of brands expect to reduce creative investment this year, while just 17% expect an increase. They’re blaming the prospect of recession, not AI, in case you’re wondering.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.