Faced with Spamageddon where is the Martech industry in 2024?

It was interesting that Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma published their Martech 2024 report*, not long after the announcement of spamageddon.

If your not aware, Spamadeddon is the name given to the fact that Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail will block email domains that are deemed spammers. Add this to the legislation already in place such as GDPR. 

The current place of Martech in the world still sits rather difficult, after all, anybody involved in Martech is making millions of people in this world miserable.  If Martech was a war or an economic situation the UN would have stepped in and tried to negotiate an end to it.

Martech the current context

The report starting quoting some recent reports on martech.

“A recent Gartner report claim that companies were only “utilizing” 33% of their martech capabilities”

Just shows that people are not using the products they purchased and

"Gartner also reported that 75% of CMOs now agree with the statement that “our marketing organization is facing increasing pressure to cut our marketing technology spend to deliver better ROI.”

Martech have to put their hand up, if they are not generating ROI, that is revenue, what place do they have in a business?

Is Martech generating any revenue?

In any business effort in, must equal effort out.  If you take the plough, when it was invented it, one person and the plough, could help create enough food that previously took 4 people.  The plough revolutionised society so that one person create food and the other three people could do other things that were not food producing.  Be in the church, be a tailor, or a tax collector.  It moved people from constant food production to doing “value add”.

The same must be said of Martech, it has have a place, that isn't just' “you need an email list, because you need an email list”.  It has to be able to contribute to the business in terms of dollars. We have to be able to attribute “we won that business, because we have an email list”.

We are finding more and more email marketing companies coming to us and asking to be taught how to social sell.  When we ask them “surely, you have all the leads you need from the email marketing systems you sell?” at that point they look sheepish and admit “our email systems don't generate leads, we have no pipeline and we are desperate”.  It's ironic that email system providers are having to social sell to make ends meet.

“We must innovate!”

The report talks about the need to innovate. I agree.  3,000 new tools have been announced in the last year. But does this change anything? So we are using AI to write more targeted spam. So what?  I get AI written emails from companies trying to sell me IT development services, I don't need IT development services, where is the targeting in that? Let's not forget an AI LLM is just predictive text, which is why all the AI written emails I get are factually incorrect.

Manage the Hype Cycle

To quote one of my articles

"According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% in April. Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed.

With conversion down, what did we do? You guessed it, we increased the number of emails sent during the same period by 50%, according to Hubspot’s survey of 70,000 customers. We are playing a zero-sum game, and it’s literally a race to the bottom."

This is Hubspot and they make email systems!  It does not matter how much BS you write in a report, when the party's over, the party is over.

The universal struggle of Martech’s Law

The RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner, that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. Everybody was told is was unsinkable. Everybody was told it had new technology that was iceberg proof.  There is a lot of talk about, tactics this and tactics that, the problem is that Martech has hit it's iceberg and it's sinking. And AI won't save a sinking ship.

The number of Martech vendors keeps growing

But Tim, the number of Martech companies keeps growing. Of course, did people stop making horse and carts after Ford had made the model T car? No. There was a vested interest and people didn't want to believe that something could be more efficient and lower cost. And didn't create so much dung.

About 35 percent of startups fail simply because there is no real need for the product.

*Sorry but the report is gated and the irony is that the gating isn't GDPR compliant. Readers will know I love a bit of irony.