The Promise of Martech—and the Reality Check
I’ll admit it — I love it when McKinsey validates my “crazy” ideas.
For years, I’ve been saying that most marketing technology underperforms not because the tools are bad, but because the ownership model is broken.
Now, McKinsey’s latest research, “Rewiring Martech: From Cost Center to Growth Engine,” spells it out in corporate Helvetica: despite billions spent, most organizations still treat martech as an operational expense rather than a growth driver.
Their finding? Only a small fraction of companies can demonstrate measurable ROI from martech investments.
The technology isn’t the problem — alignment, governance, and accountability are.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s the same diagnosis I’ve made for years through Web Effectiveness Audits and the development of Centers of Excellence. Martech only delivers value when it’s owned, integrated, and measured against business outcomes — not vanity metrics, volume charts, or tool adoption slides.
The irony is that the martech promise was supposed to fix exactly this: disconnection, inefficiency, and waste. Instead, it’s often become a mirror of the organizational dysfunction it was meant to solve.
For years, martech has been sold as the great equalizer. If you could just build the right stack by integrating CRM, CDP, automation, analytics, and personalization, you’d have a self-fueling growth engine.
After more than a decade advising global brands, I’ve seen the same pattern up close — impressive stacks, disappointing results, and a quiet disbelief that the problem could be organizational instead of technical.
That message perfectly aligns with what I’ve been arguing in my work on Centers of Excellence and Web Effectiveness Audits:
Martech only delivers value when it’s owned, integrated, and measured against business outcomes — not vanity metrics.
The Frankenstein Stack Problem
Martech, like SEO, analytics, or content platforms, has become another corporate Frankenstein — a monster stitched together from dozens of systems, vendors, and “urgent priorities,” often with no single owner accountable for outcomes.
Every new tool promises speed, efficiency, or automation. However, each one also introduces a new dependency, an additional integration point, and one more line item in next year’s budget.
McKinsey puts it bluntly: “Complexity has become the silent killer of marketing performance.”
And that complexity rarely starts with bad intentions. It starts with optimism — the belief that the next tool will be the one that finally makes it all work.
But optimism without ownership is expensive.
A Boardroom Moment
I recall sitting in a global marketing update a few years ago at a multinational headquarters when a slide appeared, showing more than $20 million in annual marketing technology (martech) spending.
The slide looked like a corporate Rorschach test — a sea of logos color-coded in red, yellow, and green.
- Green: tools installed and technically “working.”
- Yellow: tools purchased but underused, waiting for the right operators or integrations.
- Red: tools completely idle — no trained staff, no data wiring, no performance tracking.
Guess which column dominated?
When a market leader asked why, the response was painfully familiar:
“We don’t have the training seats or consulting budget to wire it up right now.”
Millions in investment. Zero accountability.
That’s what happens when organizations start with technology instead of capability.
The tools are fine. The system is not.
The Maturity Mirage: When Perception Outpaces Reality
McKinsey’s data exposes the elephant in the server room.
Sixty-five percent of B2C organizations in their study rated themselves as “developing” or “operational” in martech maturity. That sounds impressive — until you dig deeper.
When McKinsey conducted in-depth interviews, confidence collapsed, dropping their maturity from “operational” significantly. In other words, perception and reality weren’t even in the same building. Leaders believed they were “operational.” In reality, they were fragmented, siloed, and misaligned.
Many of those same organizations lacked the core enablers of maturity: C-suite ownership, cross-channel integration, data governance, a focus on high-value use cases, the convergence of martech and adtech, and the ability to measure true business impact.
That gap between reported maturity and actual capability is where performance quietly dies.
It’s not a technology deficit — it’s a governance deficit.
Or, to put it simply: you can’t mature what you haven’t aligned.
Lived Reality: The Illusion of Maturity
I’ve seen this pattern again and again.
Over the years, I’ve helped multiple global enterprises build world-class search organizations and conducted countless Web Effectiveness Audits. Almost every company walks in believing they’re “best in class.” We used our Search Maturity Lifecycle model to evaluate where companies stood, and everyone thought they were elite strategic thinkers, but few actually reached that level.
And almost every time, once we ask the right questions, the façade collapses.
The reasons mirror McKinsey’s findings perfectly: no true executive ownership, disconnected systems, inconsistent governance, and measurement models that can’t tie activity to impact.
Why do so many companies maintain this illusion of success?
Some are risk-averse — they overstate maturity because admitting dysfunction feels dangerous.
Some don’t measure what matters, so they assume progress.
But the toughest truth is that many simply don’t want to know how broken things are, because knowing demands change.
I saw this daily over a decade managing global hreflang projects.
My previous software platform, Hreflang Builder, was like an engine-assembly factory for websites — integrating parts from multiple suppliers and delivering a finished drive train ready for installation. But input quality varied wildly. We’d receive malformed components, missing connections, or systems that didn’t fit together — and still be expected to make the engine run.
Hreflang itself is just a blip in the larger web ecosystem, yet it constantly reveals how many unseen failures lie beneath the surface: miscommunication, misalignment, and a lack of accountability.
And it isn’t just global enterprise projects.
Just this week, I worked with an agency supporting a client whose web ecosystem includes multiple CMSs, fragmented content workflows, competing legal priorities, and an expectation of flawless performance. Now, leadership is convinced that a “magical AI content tool” will solve all their problems.
The hard truth: none of the AI’s promised magic is even possible until the structural dysfunction is fixed.
Technology can’t solve misalignment — it just accelerates the chaos.
Why Martech Fails to Deliver
McKinsey identifies four fault lines that explain why martech so often underperforms. I’ve seen all four firsthand:
- No Executive Sponsorship – Martech rarely has a clear C-suite owner. Accountability is scattered, and strategy gets lost in translation.
- Stack Complexity and Sprawl – Redundant tools, conflicting data sources, and competing integrations create confusion instead of clarity.
- Misaligned Measurement – Teams celebrate opens and clicks instead of contribution metrics like revenue lift or customer lifetime value.
- Talent and Capability Gaps – The tools evolve faster than the people or processes running them.
Each of these points to the same underlying issue: no system of ownership.
That’s exactly what a Digital Center of Excellence (CoE) is designed to fix.
The Case for a Digital Center of Excellence
A well-structured CoE doesn’t just standardize practices — it institutionalizes alignment.
It creates a single source of accountability for digital performance, linking martech operations directly to enterprise KPIs.
Instead of every business unit building its own disconnected stack, a CoE establishes governance guardrails, shared frameworks, and cross-functional performance goals tied to revenue and efficiency.
McKinsey calls this “rewiring” marketing for growth.
I call it reclaiming control of the digital factory.
When the factory runs on standards and shared measurement, the conversation shifts from “What tools do we have?” to “What results do we produce?”
That’s when martech stops being a cost center and starts becoming a lever for enterprise value.
Martech and Shareholder Value
Boards and CFOs are starting to ask more challenging questions:
- What percentage of our martech investment is producing measurable growth?
- How many tools are integrated into customer journeys versus sitting idle?
- What’s our ROI on integration, not just acquisition?
Those aren’t IT questions — they’re shareholder value questions.
When technology is properly owned and governed, its impact compounds across the organization:
| Dimension | Shareholder Impact |
|---|---|
| Revenue Growth | Better targeting, personalization, and conversion efficiency |
| Cost Efficiency | Reduced redundancy and automation of manual work |
| Capital Efficiency | Reuse of shared data models and infrastructure |
| Risk Reduction | Compliance, uptime, and disciplined governance |
| Innovation Capacity | Data readiness for AI and future experience layers |
Each dimension connects directly to how boards evaluate CEO and CMO performance — operating margins, return on invested capital (ROIC), and economic profit.
When martech works, it doesn’t just drive marketing outcomes — it drives enterprise value.
The Second Chance to Get It Right
McKinsey calls this moment martech’s “second chance.”
AI and automation are rewriting how value is created and measured — but only for companies willing to rebuild from the inside out.
Because here’s the truth: AI won’t fix structural dysfunction.
If your systems, teams, and data aren’t aligned, AI will only automate the inefficiency faster.
The organizations that will win in this new era are those that:
- Simplify the stack to eliminate redundancy and technical debt
- Establish ownership through formal governance or a CoE
- Invest in capability and integration before chasing new tools
- Tie performance metrics directly to revenue, margin, and customer lifetime value
This is how you transform martech from a collection of tools into a system of value creation.
The Bottom Line
McKinsey’s report isn’t a revelation — it’s validation.
For years, many of us have been saying that technology doesn’t create growth; alignment, ownership, and accountability do.
The real opportunity now isn’t buying the next AI tool. It’s fixing the system so the tools you already have can finally deliver.
For leaders serious about digital performance, this is the moment to rewire — not for speed, but for sustainability, scale, and shareholder value.
Because the next time your CFO asks what the martech stack is delivering,
“installed” won’t be an acceptable answer.
