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.
Just over one-third of marketers plan to either buy a new CDP (21%) or replace an existing one (13%) this year, according to this Optimove survey. Unfortunately, it doesn’t report how many have a CDP already in place, which would put the other values in perspective. It does seem that CDPs are a relatively low priority: they rank sixth on the list of new systems and eighth on the list of systems to replace.