The Delusion of Marketing Technology
A no-BS look at why your martech stack isn’t working—and what to do about it before AI buries your brand in beautifully optimized nonsense.
I. The Promise and the Problem
Technology is a miracle. We are lucky to live in a time where modern tools make life easier, faster, and more connected. But not all tech is good for us. Some of it solves one problem and creates five new ones.
Knives cut food and whittle wood—but also stab people
Light bulbs chase the dark—but rob us of the stars
Pesticides protect crops—but poison ecosystems
Calculators solve equations—but distort communal decision-making
Marketing tech fits the pattern. It helps automate, scale, and optimize—but also distances us from the craft. There’s a story we’re told about how it will unlock value. But there's also the part we experience: complexity, confusion, disconnection.
Every tool has a darkmode. And in marketing, we rarely pause to examine it. We're chasing light, but often working among the dim gleam coming off our tools.
Everything under the sun casts a shadow. Our task isn’t to flee from the dark—but to understand it, and learn how to find our way back to the spark.
II. Marketing Tech’s Great Mirage
Marketing tech promised to help. Hubspot was supposed to help. Chatbots were supposed to help. CRMs were supposed to help get us closer to customers.
Instead, many tools became band-aids for problems we never diagnosed. Or worse, they became the excuse not to think or engage.
AI is pitched as the next savior, capable of cutting costs, driving ROI, and operating at lightspeed. But what happens to the time and money we save?
Do agencies reinvest it into deeper thinking? Do brands aim for broader campaigns, richer creative, or braver media plays? Only if the AI tells them to. And if AI is optimizing for short-term ROI, it’s unlikely to advise risk, originality, or ideas that don’t deliver by next quarter.
This is how the trap springs: technology promises relief from pain points, but without a strong strategy behind it, it just reshapes the pain. Faster, cheaper—but not better.
If we run marketing operations on a Miller High Life budget, we risk never knowing what champagne even tastes like. And worse, we might stop asking.
III. The Real Reason Marketing Tech Fails
Most tools don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because we don’t know what to do with them. Or we don’t want to.
We unbox them, expect magic, and skip the settings menu. We don’t read the instructions because we don’t want to be bothered. The whole point was to not think harder.
By the time the contract’s up, we’re disappointed. We blame the platform, the data, the vendor. And we rinse and repeat with the next shiny tool. Meanwhile, the tech graveyard grows.
Only a small group of marketers actually use these tools well. Not because they’re tech wizards—but because they understand their teams, their processes, and their strategic goals. They apply tech after they’ve figured out what matters.
For everyone else, the tech becomes a kind of camouflage. It covers a lack of clarity, coherence, or accountability. It gives the illusion of sophistication without the substance of strategy.
IV. The Illusion of “The Future”
The future isn’t something that happens to us. It’s not a product roadmap or an inevitability. It’s not something that knows you exist.
And yet we talk about it like it’s a destination—a thing you can “get ahead of,” “disrupt,” or “future-proof” against.
But you can’t future-proof something that hasn’t happened. Predictions aren’t plans. They’re guesses dressed up with confidence.
In marketing, we see this constantly. People mistake strategy decks for certainty. ROI projections are treated like guarantees. But no business leader actually believes their Q4 forecast is a promise—they’re just looking for confidence thresholds, not truths.
When marketing misses, we rarely blame macro conditions. We blame the team. But the same market dynamics that derail financial plans also wreck marketing efforts. The real world is chaotic, probabilistic, disorganized. It rarely fits into PowerPoint.
The future isn’t something we wait for—it’s something we build, moment by moment, by showing up.
V. The Danger of Fake Certainty
Modern marketing is obsessed with attribution. But we often mistake measurement for meaning.
Just because something is quantifiable doesn’t mean it’s causal. That’s why counterfactuals matter. As Dale Harrison puts it: To understand what worked, we need to compare what happened to what would’ve happened if we’d done nothing.
And, you can’t get that from a simulation. You can’t get that from AI-generated forecasts or synthetic data. Those are guesses, not evidence.
A real counterfactual requires a control group
A real experiment requires the risk of being wrong
A real insight doesn’t emerge from a dashboard—it emerges from contrast
AI can simulate any scenario—but simulation isn’t science. Causal inference without real-world testing is just marketing cosplay. And if we don’t know how to tell the difference, we’ll keep mistaking confidence for clarity.
VI. The Pace Problem: Tech Moves Fast. People Don’t.
Tech evolves fast. Human beings? Not so much.
No matter how many martech stacks you implement, people still only have 24 hours in a day and two eyeballs. Attention is finite. Trust takes time. Legal is slow. Budgets are slower. Execution has a pace—and it’s usually not “real-time.”
We’ve got a velocity mismatch.
The fast-moving layer of technology sits on top of a slower-moving layer of human reality. That friction creates confusion, misalignment, and fatigue. We’re out of sync. We’re trying to force the old world to keep up with new tools instead of adjusting the tools to the world we actually live and work in.
Maybe the next revolutionary idea in marketing isn’t speed—it’s pace.
Not acceleration, but synchronization. Not disruption, but thoughtful integration. Not adding more, but finding the rhythm that helps things actually move.
MAC ACTION STEPS: Ask Better Questions Before Buying More Tech
What human problem are we solving?
What internal process will this make better, faster, or more creative?
Will this help us focus, or will it add more noise?
Are we buying this to improve outcomes, or to avoid making hard decisions?
MAC Leadership Check-In:
If you’re signing the checks, you’re setting the standards.
So before you greenlight more martech, ask:
What real human friction does this solve?
Will this deepen our strategy—or just automate our mess?
Who owns the outcome?
Are we investing in clarity, or hiding behind complexity?
Most tools don’t fail. Leadership does—when it confuses motion for progress.
Tech can’t replace judgment. AI can’t replace courage. And efficiency without direction is just faster nonsense.
→ Ready to challenge your stack—and your thinking?
Let’s talk strategy, substance, and how to bring marketing back to meaning.
Truly insightful.