I was recently at an event where there was a roomful of CMOs and the chair of the event decided to have a debate about the number one thing that kept CMOs awake at night and the result was?

"how on earth do we get all of these marketing IT systems too talk to each other"

I hadn't realised it but there are people making careers out of this dysfunction.

So when I saw this research from Anteriad and Ascend2.

You can check out the marketingprofs article here and the original report here. 

Where they said ...

"Some 19% of respondents say their martech stack is more complex than a black hole, 42% say it is too complex, 21% say it is not complex enough, and 18% say it is just right."

It's interesting to see that marketing is still reliant on analog data to make digital decisions, which for me seems strange. If life is about data and making decision from data, why isn't marketing using the data that's free and the most accurate? 

It's not the platform

At a client of ours, the then CMO announced that the reason why they didn't get any response from their email marketing campaigns was that the email marketing platform was rubbish.  We thought it highly unlikely it was the platform is a market leader.  Anyway they went out and purchased another market leading email marketing platform and still they got no response from their email marketing. She left not long after that. 

The email marketing company that doesn't use email marketing

And the irony of the year award goes to the email marketing company that had no pipeline and in the end stopped using email marketing and decided to use social selling instead.  I wonder what their clients think that they don't use email marketing themselves and have switched to social selling?