ai in martech: promise vs. reality

Before diving into the challenges and opportunities marketers faced this year, let’s take a step back to reflect on the progress made in 2024.

In terms of the numbers, marketers had it a little better in 2024 than in 2023. Budgets were higher, company growth was better, and many people we spoke to this year saw continued growth on the horizon. In our interviews, we heard decision-makers adopting new solutions to help make marketing more efficient, effective, and measurable. Hopefully, you felt some of that growth yourself!

From generative AI to improved ways to measure marketing lift, 2024 had no shortage of innovations for marketers to consider. That said, the new data and tech have many marketers overwhelmed.

In other words, if you have AI whiplash, many feel similarly. GenAI came on the scene fast and furious with a lot of fanfare and headaches. We heard from many marketing leaders this year that AI-based solutions offered big opportunities but also posed the potential to create a lot of painful changes to their organization. Using AI for content creation shifted the focus to editing and managing numerous iterations of creative, all requiring new approval processes that couldn't provide direct oversight for thousands of AI-generated emails, images, and ads.

On the operations side, AI-based analytics can be a game changer – but if and only if your data is in perfect shape, you have a strong data analytics team, and you’re empowered to act on your newfound insights. Then there’s all of the stuff competitors seem to be doing with AI, from personalization to chat assistants that might not be ready for prime time in your own organization.

While AI is the shiny new object on the block, marketers are still contending with the rest of their martech stack, from CDPs to marketing automation. Many marketers feel like they aren’t squeezing as much value from these big and expensive products as they could. There are many options and places to focus, like getting first-party data in good shape, establishing an influencer marketing program, creating personalized triggers, and pushing social content to other channels. It’s nearly impossible to do it all.

If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. Check out what marketers said were their top challenges in 2024:

AI: With tons of choices and lots of questions, marketers struggle to implement AI in the right places. 

"One challenge is as we think about our roadmap in the future, everyone's always talking about AI and the role AI plays, and it's like trying to find the balance of what feels right for our business and our customers in the AI space, but not just putting all of our trust into that space either... We want to make sure that we create something actually relevant and not just because we should be adding something around AI."

VP, SALES
$10M-100M BOOK RETAILER

"We haven't gotten to the point where we're looking into AI specific tools outside of Medialake. We definitely, that is the direction we want to move into though. I think that'll be a huge conversation for next year, what AI tools are available out there that we can leverage for our goals. But we haven't really done anything just yet…"

MANAGER, MARKETING
$1B-10B WATCH GROUP

CDP: CDPs are bulky, costly, and difficult to implement and use… so marketers have figured out how to use tools that aren’t specifically CDPs, but serve a similar function.

"How we approach (the CDP-buying) initiative might be a bit different than I was thinking in the spring where it was buying a specific CDP. I think now it's leveraging a tool that could do other things and also has CDP-like functionality."

VP, OPERATIONS
$100M-500M APPLIANCES RETAILER

"(Going) back to the CDP… It's a CDP lite, it's a marketer-friendly CDP. So it's not intended to support your data team, it's intended to support the person who's doing email and give them a higher probability of optimizing email because there's a second layer of data. That's all it's there for. It's not going to record every little tiny thing that happens on the site because it's not going to overload us with information, it's going to help us make key decisions."

VP, MARKETING
$500M-1B FASHION BRAND

Identity Resolution: Users are skeptical about retail-specific Identity Resolution vendors’ value proposition – especially since they’re unable to get ‘under the hood’ of certain platforms.

"█████████ is a black box. You don't know what's going on in there. Their pricing makes no sense. I looked at our contract here and I've negotiated contracts with them in the past, and they've come in at very high proposals and I just say no. And they come down to one-tenth the cost. And so I feel like the way they work is they're just making up costs and then they will sign at whatever price they can get a deal done. So from a downstream data perspective, there's literally no visibility. You can't bring any of the data into your data warehouse, you don't know how things are working, you don't know why they're calculating things the way they do. I just don't think they really do much."

DIRECTOR, OPERATIONS
$100M-500M BRAND PORTFOLIO COMPANY

SMS/ESP/Comms: There’s no brand loyalty when it comes to communications platforms… Retailers that leverage multiple platforms are looking to consolidate into a single one that does everything (i.e. Push, Email, SMS) and can do it well.

"Right now, our email is out of HubSpot because we are historically a B2B brand, and the plan is to go to Klaviyo for email. I've used it before. I would like to consolidate and put SMS under Klaviyo, but I've done this before, and █████████ will hang on you so tightly to keep you as a customer they kind of really won't... They have a really tight grip. So I would move out of them... I have no loyalty to █████████."

VP, MARKETING
$100M-500M CARPET RETAILER