👋 Hello fellow Ladderers!

This week, we’re diving into one of marketing’s most expensive open secrets: Martech waste. Why half your stack is likely gathering dust, why “more” rarely means “better,” and how digital leaders can finally stop confusing tool accumulation with progress.

Here’s what you’ll discover:

• Why the “more tech = better marketing” mindset has trapped the industry in a cycle of waste.
• The psychology behind our obsession with shiny new platforms (and how vendor FOMO fuels it).
• The hidden costs of underused tools — from lost budget to lost credibility with the C-suite.
• A practical playbook for auditing, trimming, and actually using the tools you already own.
• A simple scoring matrix to separate the keepers from the shelfware.

If you missed our latest edition on what Shadow AI is doing inside your business, you can catch up here ⏪

🗞️ In The News

• 🧠 Salesforce Users Revolt: “Helpful” AI Assistant Sparks More Rage Than Results (CXToday)
• 💸 Buyer Beware: “AI Tax” Has Arrived For SaaS Platforms (PricingSaaS)
• 🔐 Nation-State Hack Hits F5: Source Code Exposed, SEC Grants Rare Breach Delay (BleepingComputer)
• 🇦🇺 Australia’s AI Future Starts Here: Labor Meets with Tech Giants Behind Closed Doors (CapitalBrief)

💼 Case Studies: Case Closed

• 📣 Chaos Meets Clarity: 7 Marketing Campaigns That Turned 2025 Mayhem into Pure Gold (MarketingDive)
• 🛒 How to Optimise for ChatGPT Shopping Experiences (SearchEngineLand)
• 💳️📺 Thinking About CTV? 4 Must-Ask Questions You Should Answer First (MarTech)

🧰 You Won’t Blame These Tools

• 📊 Betterlytics.io - Privacy-First Web Analytics Done Right.
• 🔍️ FontSniff - Detect Fonts, Translate Text, and Extract Data — All from a Single Image
• 🤖 Typist - Look Mum: No Hands! Transcribe Voice to Text in Seconds With Unmatched Accuracy

Today’s feature

70% Of Your Martech Spend Is DOA

💀 And It’s Killing Your Credibility, Not Just Your Budget 🚨

⏱️ ~ 8 minutes 47 seconds to read

THE GOOD HALF 😁 

John Wanamaker’s century-old lament still haunts marketing departments to this day: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

He was talking about billboards and newspapers, but fast-forward to 2025 and the ghost still lingers — only now it’s also hiding in your martech stack.

Digital leaders keep piling on tools with the verve of a dad on a Sunday Bunnings trip, who only went in for a bag of soil and came out with a chainsaw, three extension cords and a pizza oven.

And like that chainsaw and pizza oven, these tools spend the majority of their time on the shelf, unused and radiating a tiny sense of shame.

Studies show companies only use about 30% of their martech capabilities.

The other 70%? Dead on arrival.

If you’ve ever invested a flashy new automation platform, slogged through months of integration, countless onboarding and training sessions and then watched enthusiasm flatline within weeks, you’re not alone.

Entire marketing departments are haunted by these “ghost tools” — expensive software licences taunting you in every annual budget review.

You stare at that line in the budget, with that sickly feeling and the thought “I know we’re only using half of what this thing is capable of, but what we are using it for is too integral to stop and too costly to switch”…. click: “renew”.

So why does this matter? Well, every dormant tool isn’t just wasted spend — it’s budget you can’t put into campaigns, headcount, or customer experience. And when your CFO or CEO spots a stack full of underused platforms, it doesn’t just raise eyebrows, it raises doubts about you and your the team’s decision-making.

Yet somehow, the cycle continues — as if the next shiny platform will fix the adoption problem the last one left behind. Let’s change that.

This article will help you:

• Spot the signs of the “shelfware epidemic” in your own stack.
• Avoid repeating the same mistake of overcooked tools (I’m looking at you monolithic platforms)
• Learn how to resurrect existing tech so it actually delivers value for the business.

If half your martech budget is already wasted before it is switched on… the real question becomes “should I even turn this thing on and add more problems to my stack?”

YOU’RE NOT ALONE 🤝 

The obsession with stacking more martech doesn’t come from nowhere — ironically, it’s baked into the psychological tactics of modern marketing. Digital leaders aren’t buying their third tracking tool because they’re bored. They’re doing it because the entire industry whispers, shouts, and sometimes screams: “You’re just not doing it right. Here use this new technology, you’ll fall behind if you don’t.”

Every week, another headline promises a “major shift” — AI Decisioning etc. I won’t rattle off the list, you know what I’m talking about.

At every conference there’s always that brand-side practitioner on stage — the one who looks like they’ve got their sh*t together more than anyone in the room — showing off a stack of sweet, sweet tools, all neatly wrapped in a presentation quietly and in-directly sponsored by a billion-dollar martech vendor.

B2B vendors thrive on this pressure and urgency, positioning every new platform (heck even new feature) as the missing piece. The subtext: if you don’t act now, you’re not only out of date, you’re irresponsible.

This creates a cycle of professional FOMO:

• Industry pressure: vendor sponsored conferences, trade press, and analysts reinforce the idea that tool adoption equals modernity.
• Competitive pressure: leaders feel they must keep pace with peers who flaunt more sophisticated stacks as proof of success.
• Internal pressure: when performance stalls, it feels easier to point to “well that’s because we have a big gap when it comes to….” than admit strategy or execution gaps.

Psychologically, it’s the marketing version of chasing a new diet fad. Each promises transformation and a sense of progress. Each feels easier than admitting the treadmill in the garage — or the tools in the stack — are already more than enough if we’d just use them properly.

Ironically, more often than not, these purchases complicate the very problems they’re supposed to solve. Integrations multiply, teams get spread thin across platforms - paying the context-switching, QA and data movement tax, and inevitably adoption barely scrapes past minimum utility.

Yet the cycle continues because the industry has conflated buying tools with buying credibility.

I’ve been around long enough to know that this isn’t always the martech leaders fault either. Often they’re the unlucky ones who find out very late in the day that they’ve just had a new enterprise monolithic platform foisted upon them by the CMO, CTO or even CEO.

Greg from Qualtrics really knows our business and this is going to make everything so much better…Cheers Greg 👍

The truth is simple but hard to swallow: it’s not the martech that’s failing us.

We’re failing it, by letting fear and hype dictate buying decisions and overwhelm crash adoption and utility.

The Upside of Exorcising Your Martech Ghosts 🔑

Most discussions about martech wastage stop at the depressing bit: bloated stacks, wasted spend, and Gavin who insists on sending an email instead of ticking the box in platform. Truth is, cutting the dead weight and fully adopting the right platforms doesn’t just save money — it creates competitive advantage.

Here’s a few reasons to pick-up that holy water and get to work.

Efficiency That Actually Shows Up in the P&L

Every redundant licence retired is real budget freed up. For digital leaders under pressure to “do more with less,” eliminating shelf-ware is the easiest cost win available. Better still, when tools in use are clipped back to basic feature sets that actually drive value and are working for you, not only do you save money - teams can end up spending less time navigating complexity and more time actually marketing.

Upside: Lower costs, leaner operations.

Focus and Simplicity for Teams

Marketers don’t need more dashboards; they need clarity. A trimmed stack means fewer logins, fewer overlapping attribution touch points and workflows, and less training fatigue. It also means teams can master a smaller set of tools, unlocking capabilities and ‘hacks’ that were previously not even considered.

Remember: Constraint is a gift to innovation.

Upside: Teams become more skilled, confident, and productive.

Credibility with the C-Suite

When half the stack sits idle, finance sees waste. They may not fully understand it, but they can smell it. When leaders cut fat and demonstrate discipline and strong adoption, they earn trust. A lean, well-used stack signals authority over your craft — that marketing isn’t dazzled by shiny objects but grounded in driving value for the business. In budget conversations, credibility is currency. When you tell your CFO, “No, we’ve had a good look at that part of the stack and we can see savings there”…. their heart races.

Upside: Stronger influence, credibility and defensible budgets.

Greater Marketing Impact

When platforms are fully used, they deliver the outcomes they were originally bought for — sharper insights, better, more on-point personalisation, faster execution — and most of all clarity in operation. Full utilisation means martech stops being a grudge workflow and starts being a growth driver.

Upside: The tools finally deliver the impact they promised.

The wastage problem isn’t just a liability for you to quietly sweep under the rug or smother in the dead of night; it’s an opportunity to demonstrate leadership.

Leaders who tackle it unlock efficiency, team focus, credibility, and impact — the four things every marketing department is desperate for. The next step is moving from theory to practice: how to actually bring your martech back from the dead.

TRIM THE STACK AND RAISE THE DEAD ✂️ 

So, the opportunity is clear: but how do you do it without sparking a mutiny from your team or a guilt trip from your vendors? Here’s the pragmatic, no-nonsense playbook from the guy who’s broken more than a few vendors hearts (don’t worry we’re still friends).

Step 1: Run a Martech Audit

Turn Gut Feel into Hard Evidence with a Simple Scoring Matrix

If you’ve ever been involved in a martech audit of any kind, you know that they start all tough guy, “Mr. objective” to begin with but over time it gets vague, complicated and almost always ends with a spreadsheet full of vibes.

To turn that chaos into clarity, score each tool simply and objectively. A simple 1–5 matrix works wonders.

For every tool, give a score out of five on each of the following attributes:

1. Purpose clarity – Is the tool’s role clearly defined and understood?
2. Operational outcome – Does it drive a tangible operational benefit (ships emails, drives web engagement, gives visibility)?
3. Business benefits – Does it contribute to broader business impact, like site traffic or lead generation?
4. Primary Capabilities Alignment – Are the key features of that tool actually being used?
5. Adoption – Who uses it, and how regularly?

While you’re at it, include a field for listing out all the key functionalities it includes - dont go too deep, just a list for now. This will be handy for later.

How to interpret scores:

• 20–25: Consider a keeper and invest further — it’s earning its keep.
• 12–19: Look to improve adoption, training or integration before deciding.
• Below 12: Perhaps it’s time to retire, replace or consolidate.

This matrix cuts through bias and politics. No it;’s not perfectly scientific, it’s directional in nature. But suddenly you’re not debating opinions — you’re looking at a calibrated playing field. The conversation shifts from “Do we like this tool?” to “Does this tool deliver measurable value?”

Step 2: Identify and Map Overlaps

Every marketing stack has feature overlap — it’s unavoidable. The goal isn’t to eliminate it entirely but to understand it.

• Feature mapping: Use that list of the core functions of every tool and highlight duplicates.
• Primary vs secondary use: Determine which tool performs the overlapping function best, and whether that feature is truly critical.
• Integration value: Sometimes an overlapping tool stays because it connects other systems efficiently — just make sure that’s intentional, not accidental.

Once you’ve mapped overlaps, decisions on what to keep or cut become strategic, not emotional.

Step 3: Decide What to Keep, What to Cut

Use three filters for every tool:

1. Business alignment/ Scoring Matrix: Does it directly support revenue and business outcomes?
2. Adoption potential: Can your team realistically use it to full potential?
3. Redundancy check: If another tool covers its core capability, what makes this one indispensable?

If it fails two of the three, it’s probably ready for retirement.

Step 4: Make Adoption Work

This is where most stacks collapse. Buying the tool is easy; embedding it is hard. Practical tips:

• Assign an owner: Every tool needs a named individual accountable for its usage and outcomes.
• Mandate usage in workflows: Don’t let tools be optional. For example, all campaign reporting must come from Platform X.
• Create flagship use cases: Pick one initiative the tool must power (e.g., automate abandoned cart emails, build a personalised landing page, run attribution reporting). This proves value and builds confidence and momentum.
• Track adoption visibly: Usage dashboards, monthly check-ins/ showcases, and leadership reviews make it clear whether the tool is thriving or failing.

Another really important aspect of this is enthusiastically challenging your team to ‘hack’ their tools. Ask you group to find ways to push this product beyond what it’s planned capability is.

This helps your team to not only push themselves, but positions the tools and unique competitive advantage makers for the business. Powerful stuff.

Step 5: Set Usage KPIs

Before buying a new platform — or keeping an existing one — tie it to measurable KPIs such as:

• % of active users logging in weekly.
• Number of campaigns or tasks executed through the tool.
• Percentage of features in active use.
• Business outcomes tied to tool usage (e.g., revenue uplift, conversion rates).

If the tool can’t demonstrate impact within six months, it either needs a recommitment plan or a proper burial.

Done well, this process doesn’t just save money. It builds a culture where tools are genuinely embedded into marketing execution — proof that martech can finally live up to its promise.

STOP HOARDING. START USING. ✅ 

Let’s be real: most digital teams don’t have a technology problem — they have a utility problem. The average stack already has everything it needs to perform brilliantly. It’s just buried under years of shrinking enthusiasm, inertia, and vendor promises.

Solving martech waste isn’t just a cost exercise. It’s a credibility one. Every dormant licence is a message to the CFO that marketing doesn’t know how to manage its toys. Every unused feature is an opportunity cost — a capability you’ve paid for but never leveraged to drive growth.

But the moment you get your stack under control, the whole dynamic shifts. Suddenly, conversations with finance stop being defensive. Your team stops feeling overwhelmed by tool fatigue. Your dashboards start reflecting real data, not noise. And your marketing starts to move faster, leaner, and more intelligently.

Here’s the paradox: by having less, you’ll achieve more. Cutting the clutter brings focus. Focus drives confidence. Confidence earns successes. And success gets you the one thing every digital leader craves — trust from the top.

So, before you approve that next shiny new platform, ask yourself one question:
What would happen to our performance if we used 90% of what we already have — instead of 50%?

Because the smartest digital leaders aren’t building the biggest stacks. They’re building the most used ones.

If you enjoyed this edition, please forward it to a friend who’s looking to level-up their growth game - they’ll love you for it (and I will too) ⏭️ 💌

Troy Muir | The Ladder

PS. Don’t get the guy who last week was MC’ing a carpet industry conference. If you’re in marketing, CX or digital I can help make your conference a memorable delight for your attendees.

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