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"If you don't understand your internal customer, you're failing both the internal customer and the business." Jacqueline
Jacqueline and Juan tackle Martech's second-biggest pain point: integration complexity, data silos, and the operational fragmentation that's threatening to cost the industry $215 billion by 2027.
Drawing on McKinsey's latest research and exclusive insights from enterprise leaders preparing for Martech World Forum Melbourne, the hosts dissect why marketing technology stacks are still failing to connect — and what you can do about it. From the composability-versus-suite debate to the cultural dynamics between marketing and IT, this episode explores how Martech professionals can move from reactive duct-taping to proactive, federated infrastructure. Whether you're navigating AI decisioning demands or simply trying to get your CDP and engagement platforms to speak the same language, this conversation delivers practical, no-BS guidance on governance, data gravity, and working forward instead of backward.
The episode also previews the newly launched Enterprise Martech Outlook (EMO) research project, a major initiative mapping the evolving enterprise Martech landscape.
Timestamps
00:00 — Enterprise Martech Outlook (EMO) research launch and Melbourne conference preview
05:05 — The $215 billion black hole: McKinsey's warning on Martech losses
09:50 — Three root causes of integration complexity: language, legacy, and IT dependency
18:30 — Interoperability planning and working forwards, not backwards, and misaligned incentives
28:00 — Data gravity and governance: Identifying your center of gravity and mapping data flows
35:30 — Best-of-breed and the monolith vendor problem
Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.
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Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
You. Will be. Welcome to the Making Sense of MarTech podcast. I'm Jaclyn friedman and I'm one Mendoza, and this is office hours. And we cut through the noise and discuss the latest and greatest in the martech landscape. So to get us started, where are we headed to? Very, very shortly. Oh, yeah. We're heading to Melbourne while I'm already in Melbourne, Australia.
But Jacqueline, you're taking. Is that your very first flight to Australia? In about two weeks? It sure is a sure, yes. Yeah. Very cool. It's a long one. And to be like 21 hours and but on the other side you get to see kangaroos, which is pretty cool. This is true. I am very excited. Yeah. So Jacqueline, we're heading to MarTech World Forum Melbourne, our first conference of the year.
I'm very excited. Yes. Yeah. We're less than two weeks away now from kicking off in the middle of March, and, yeah, we're looking forward to it. Almost sold out. We've got some incredibly senior folks, huge brands. Probably I would say about, I would say about 30 to 40% of the ASX 100. So the top 100 largest companies are coming down in the country.
So yeah, we're we're really excited. We got some fantastic speakers. It's just going to be awesome. I'm looking forward to it. Me too. But I'm actually a little bit emotional over here. I think I already embarrass myself a little bit too much on LinkedIn. Having a little more fun on Canva, per usual. Taking the license away from me people.
But why am I emotional? I so I saw your LinkedIn post the other day. Jacqueline. It was a photo of you. In the background there was the Maytag landscape of the 15,000 tools. And then I don't know if you did it yourself or you got AI to do it, but there was all these, like, email.
That was all me. Was that all you? Wow. Well, there's a there's an, there's an artist inside of you, Jacqueline. But there was also a photo of you when you were, like, a fruit or something. Oh, if I was, like, 12 or 13, let's be honest. Going to the emo era, I love it. We all love it, you know, era, I think I fell generation done with the emo era.
And you quoted obviously one of the great emo songs, and then I immediately was like, here's a recording of her singing it live a couple of years ago. Is that Evanescence? Is it Evanescence? It was. It was Evanescence, yeah. Amy Lee cannot be defeated in terms of a goal. Capabilities. She's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. So. So what is emo?
Yeah. Well. I'm excited. You're excited? We have just officially launched, the opening of surveys for the enterprise martech outlook, which is a brand new research project. It's a major research project for the year. What we're doing is we're setting up, basically an enterprise landscape for marketing technology that is just for that specific segment. Consumer brands in the enterprise space, in which technologies are actually thriving in that specific, category.
If you look at the larger martech landscape, there's 15,000 tools and there's small business and B2B and all these different types of technologies. Now, for the first time I think ever, there will be a landscape just for you, the enterprise marketer in large consumer brands. But alongside that, we are also collecting data insights from 300 and across practitioners and leaders, all about all the major trends, where their budgets are going, what their major challenges are, whether investing in AI and composability and the data cloud and generative AI.
So there's going to be some really, really interesting insights that come out of it. So we've just launched it two weeks ago and the responses have been fantastic. We're getting some incredible brands to come in and share exactly what's going on with their marketing technology stack right now. So we're really excited to release a report and more to come in more news in the in the coming months.
But, if you are looking checking it out, you can go to the website, the MarTech weekly.com, click on enterprise MarTech outlook, and there is a cheeky little $50 gift card, or a charity donation of your choosing, or a substantial discount of a martech World Forum ticket, to get involved in the survey, because it takes about 15 minutes to do.
It's a bit of time, a bit of thinking and said at that time. Yeah, there's, we wouldn't be good marketers without a small incentive, would we? Jacqueline. So, so, yeah, that's such a and to tie the emotional loop, it's the acronym is IMO. And so the internal codename is IMO, which is why all of the IMO things keep coming out and I'm not going to stop.
I have a very deep cut of photographs and experiences that can intertwine, but nonetheless, I want to dive right back in to our Pain Point series, which we're so grateful for. All the feedback. Everyone's really enjoying it. And so just we're doing this because we saw an overwhelming number of responses last year, over 300 brand side folks just wanting to understand the pain points and not feel alone.
And so we're going to dive into the second one. What is it? Oh yeah. Number two on the massive challenges pain point list for marketing technologists. Number two is integration complexity across the martech stack operating model and adoption challenges, self-aware undertrained teams, misaligned governance, lack of ownership, and insufficient internal capability. Massive. Yeah. Very big, very big topic.
And it also maps. Well, first topic on data fragmentation and data silos, these two, systems. So we've put them together as a number two pain point, but very, very different problems. Integration across your stack is quite different from harmonizing your data and and removing data silos. And so this is a really interesting topic. It's one of those things that really hold enterprise companies back.
I don't know how many companies, I guess we both talk to you over the past few years that, yeah, they've had massive problems integrating this stack for a bunch of reasons that we'll get into. But maybe let's talk a bit about the stats. So we talked about some stats earlier this week when we research this topic, what's the big number that gets you actually quite frustrated at the moment?
It's a daunting abyss. And it's called the $215 billion Black Hole. It is a 2025 McKinsey report that is warning that global martech spending risks that much money. $215 billion losses by next year 2027. If companies cannot solve their measurement crisis caused by stack complexity. I know you dug into this report. What else do we need to know besides, it is far more of a vast universe than we're dealing with, and I don't want to be sucked into it.
Yeah, it's a fairly recent report, certainly came out last year, and McKinsey have, they do have dedicated martech teams. So they do a lot of research in this space. But what they're kind of saying there is that $215 billion is the total potential loss in vendor contracts primarily, and also to business by, not getting this integration problem solved, a loss across all the countries.
So one of the problems I think they're saying is that, that the brands minimizing their budgets because I can't make the technology work together, and if they can't make everything work together, then everything slows down. Their ability to to provide proven ROI is diminished. Then they face challenges. And then downstream of that, the vendors also see the impact on yeah, they're going to lose vendor contracts.
They're not going to get renewals, are not going to increase their customer size by, but by that. So like integration is actually pretty cool. It's a massive commercial risk point. And yeah, it's actually pretty challenging. This is very hard to solve this problem. There's a few other really interesting systems around this. About 42% of martech people at the moment can actually fully utilize their martech stack.
So that's actually down from 2020 as well. And, you know, utilization dropped further to 33%, in 2023. So and very, very interesting. Like problems. Right. Like there is such a massive, massive problem here around martech stack integration. And so I wanted to share a bit of a quote. This is a quote that came from our primary research leading up to MarTech World Forum Melbourne.
In fact, so ahead of our conference, we asked all of our enterprise martech leaders several questions. And one of those questions is what is their major challenge? And here's what one person had to say. They said, honestly, it's not the tech, it's the operating model around it. Many teams invest in best in class tools but haven't adopted the structure, the governance.
All the ways are working to actually unlock the value. Tech becomes shelf aware or ends up creating more silos. And so you can see that even just from some anecdotal evidence there, that, a lot of brands of figuring out the process and the governance and how do you actually make all of these technologies work in your marketing technology stack?
It's been a problem that's never gone away. I don't think in the history of martech that this has not been a problem for most companies. It is a huge problem, and I'm calling it the square peg in the round hole problem. But Jacqueline, back to you. Like I'm curious, have you seen companies struggle in this way and what kind of struggles a, b, c saying just in your travels?
Yeah. I mean, I think this is a prerequisite and a post requisite, if that makes sense of bi. You know Mattingly's as if I'm will from Stranger Things is perking up. Just like, why is no one thinking about interoperability? That is one of the core functions of any platform to be able support the team and create processes to support them in a seamless way.
And so either the systems are outdated and predate interoperability options, or it's time for a reassessment and folks either are not including that as part of their requirements, or they're not thinking through the downstream effects of any one platform. And a number of teams are, you know, they're buying what they consider to be best in class, except for they're maybe not recognizing best in class means either other things need to be uplevel or upgraded, or it's not going to fit with what you have.
And so you have to be very mindful of what stage you're at. In the maturity level, there's a complete matrix around this. No matter the size of the company, you're in a different space. If you don't have all your data in one place, it's not bad. It happens. But if you're relying on everything to be based off of one source of data, you got to focus on that first to then have the downstream effects.
You can do workarounds. There is duct tape, but it all comes to really kind of architectural planning, and it often is impossibly hard to do at large organizations. Yes it is. It feels like the problem is often impossible to solve. There's is a bit of despair. It's a bit of, you know, often, you know, I from time to time I see some really amazing martech leaders.
They'll come into a company with a lot of integration problems. They'll come in, they'll spend three years solve it. Then I'll move on to the next company. And then they thrive off like huge complexity, huge integration challenges. And they come in, solve it and move on. But those people are probably like one then like 1% of the workforce.
Right? There's a very specific mindset oops for I yeah. Oh person that can actually solve massive like I'm talking hundreds of stakeholder got problems in enterprise companies where you have to align the people. You have to get the governance. You have to get the exact buy in. You have to deal with the technology vendors. You have to actually do the technical work to make it happen.
There's a very small population of people that can actually do that. Well, there are people that we've actually interviewed on the Making Systematic podcast around this as well. You know, you can check out some of our catalog around that. But I guess this whole square peg, round hole problem, I've kind of thought about, okay, what are the three main causes for this?
So what causes this lack of integration and the siloing that's happening and this lack of sort of governance and proper structure around marketing technology? So here's the thing, right? The tools don't speak the same language. Legacy tech, M&A sprawl has slowed everything down. But what we mean there is mergers and acquisitions, sprawl, big technology companies acquiring certain things, trying to make them integrate as a double up effect on the businesses that use them.
And the last one is heavy IT dependency. So overreliance on it to make critical decisions on the marketing technology stack. So three problems. Let's talk to the first one. Tools don't speak the same language. Now square peg in a round hall I think. Yeah this problem often is related to often the API infrastructure that sits around the technology stack.
I'll give you an example. I just spoke with a company, recently commented the name, but they actually built their IT team, and the engineering team built a microservices infrastructure to pull data out of different sources in order for it to be populated in braze so that it can actually you can do email personalization, but they had to invest a lot of money and years and time into building that microservices that would pick stuff up from snowflake and AWS and GCP and their Salesforce CRM instance.
That is very rare. I don't see a lot of companies thinking like that about microservices, and how that can actually enable the data source to the data activation point actually work. A lot of CDPs and their initial value proposition was literally this, that you cannot integrate Salesforce with you and your platform or your data cloud with experimentation tooling.
And so CDPs initially were designed to solve this. And then now we're in a sort of a new world of composable as well. Yeah, we've entered the new era, thankfully. Yeah. Yeah. So but and so like there's all these different technologies that have their own API infrastructure. They have their own taxonomy of data, they have their own labeling and naming of different values.
They have different normalization rules. And if you extrapolate that to, say, ten different tools in your stack, as an example, that can become so complex and so heady. But that's why it's a major pain point, is that the vendors themselves, they haven't federated. There's no commonality around language. Often, there are specific strategic partnerships between vendors where they will build things for each other.
But beyond that, you're kind of relying on having to make sense of every single different, data schema yourself in order to connect it all. But Jacqueline, this is what you see as well. How do you see this tools not connecting together. Maybe you got a few small stories around this. Oh man, so many war stories. But I, I would rather focus on the solution.
So a lot of the trend of saying data warehouse has become Data lake because what's been marketed to to then we're kind of reverting back and having a semantic layer, all these different things. It still holds true. You want to structure your data and it can start in an unstructured place like a data lake. But once you do structure it, you have to start creating at the core infrastructure level.
You need to have the taxonomies, the clear definitions, so that everything else downstream can speak the same language. It becomes an issue when if you're thinking of every different tool, it's inputting all this information and you can't make sense of each because they're literally it's like you're having Hindi and Spanish and Swahili coming into the same place, and you need a centralized component to just make it make sense.
Yes, I'm aware that is the name of our podcast. However, it's true. You really have to have those trans layers so that you can unify around one singular language. And that's not literally language specific, but it's at least company language. I mean, every company has their own data dictionary of every term. You can imagine different acronyms custom specific to the company themselves.
I mean, anyone who's worked at any number of companies the first couple months is just learning the language. It's the same thing. So why not standardize it so that all of your downstream tools can leverage it? So legacy tech and M&A sprawl definitely do slow down everything. I myself have gone through nine acquisitions at one company. It was special.
I'm appreciative of all the the scars and and learnings. And I know a number of other folks who are in a very similar phase, and it does slow down everything, especially. And this is where I would say even just like it's the people that you have to to navigate with. For example, if you have two sales reps and there's already and are a fully set up sales funnel on a B2B component, you don't change your entire sales model.
And the way the processes flow, because when you acquisition that has two salespeople. So you have to really barter reason and get aligned with these new company, especially if you're being forced to integrate. If it's separate, that's a horse of a different color. And we got plenty of things to talk about there. But if you really are trying to do the true and right thing of architecting it all together, it gets tricky because also often many companies have completely separate tech stacks, and consolidation is always one of the top goals, plans, and the smartest thing you can do.
However, it just makes it that much harder. But that doesn't even step into the realm of it. Dependency. What are your thoughts there? I think often especially older businesses, they often still live in a world where it gets to choose all the technologies, and because of that, it will choose technologies that will integrate for their specific use cases, but not for marketing.
So I'll give you an example that when a company say, for example, they bring on SAP and SAP is for ERP and for a whole bunch of transactional data, and there's important customer data that sits within those systems and those processes. It will optimize that for literally the logistics. Say, for example, a retail business, literally logistics of the business, fulfilling the transactional emails, fulfilling the core customer actions that need to happen.
But then marketing comes to and says, hey, where's the API endpoint for SAP eight? Oh, hold on, we need an engineering team with ten people to build that. What? How does that make any sense? It's all of these platforms. I don't understand how they're still like this. Yes. Frustrating. I'm going to push back. I should also be thinking in that direction.
These platforms should have API connections. You shouldn't have to have an engineer involved outside of just passing the API keys. We can get it set up. It is I think we're in. There's obviously this this world of potentially amqp protocols and a lot of different native integrations and different capacities that are potential in the future. TBD, but the moat some of these companies have making it difficult to connect it to your systems is the problem.
It is a feature, not a bug. Unfortunately. And as a result, it has transitioned into how different departments assume functioning. They assume that's just how they do their work. When in reality technology should make their work easier. And this is always going to make things more complex in different capacities, not to mention different languages, you name it. But I'm going to push back.
And I think actually it should step up to the plate and demand these things from ERP, ISPs, anything that they have, ownership over from a kind of business perspective or a technical perspective, depending on the company I am for IT teams to take that to task, take that on and partner more closely with the end users. Because if you don't understand your internal customer, in my eyes you're kind of failing both the internal customer and the business as a customer.
Yeah. And I think there's definitely a world where IT marketing can partner. And, I think most of the more successful programs that we see with that is really true. Oh, yeah. Like the martech person is that bridge between both. In fact, you know, when the martech person isn't doing their job, then you're going to end up with a lot more integration complexities.
You know, that's that's the reality of it. Is that bridge between both worlds of I.T and marketing 100%? Is that marketing technologist role. But in saying that, you know, it has there are other small things that marketing's driving ROI. It is driving security, scalability, speed, you know, different different types of metrics. I actually think this is an opportunity within the martech space to really take life by the reins and become that partner with I.T.
The magic words to make them know you are thoughtful is principle of least privilege automatically. But some guards down in it, which is what you want. Just like any other stakeholder partner within the company that you need to be working with, you want to level with them. You understand their goals so they can understand your goals and how they actually are enmeshed.
Granted, I understand it's harder if it's just a ticketing system. You don't actually ever meet these individuals, but I implore you, try try to jump on a call and be like, hey, that said, I really do think it's an opportunity on both sides of this aisle to come together in different ways. And really, I would say it is more upstream, really challenging the industry as a whole to make things easier for them.
And then on martech, not that we should be pleasing another department, however, I think there's a lot of value in really trying to bridge that divide so that goals are aligned. Brought to you by our sponsors looking for a smarter way to activate your customer data? Meet High Touch, the leading composable CDP, an AI decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime or Retire and PetSmart.
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Marketing really just wants to make it. They want to jump in, get something done, get a campaign out, get analytics analyzed. You know, figure out a do opportunities sizing across different customer segments. You know, all those things that that marketing need. There is no way forward. Like really there's no way you can ignore this problem. There is really no way.
Correct. Because because if a company wants to compete in a digital world, in an AI world, integration becomes a force multiplier for whether or not you're successful. And this is even more relevant to AI. Like if you think about even the role of AI right now, AI is forcing the issue. We've had several conversations with, some of our advisory customers recently, and those conversations have all been about, hey, the executives want AI this and that and AI agents and AI decisioning, but our data is a total mess.
Our our systems are not connected or integrated. There is a massive problem there. But, you know, solving this problem is, is so incredibly important. I cannot state how important it is to get this right. And so investing in those IT partnerships, investing in that alignment, actually moving towards now solutions and how do we actually overcome some of these challenges.
One of those things you actually say Jacqueline, is solving interoperability. You know, plan for plan for it. You say work forwards, not backwards. How do you how do you see that working out as a solution here to solve this integration challenge? Yeah, I mean anytime a potential technology is up for renewal, reconsideration on top of mind. Is this working?
Are we satisfied with the flow of things? Is this a technology problem? Is this an internal problem? I mean, as an example, I think interoperability can expand way beyond just data flow. I in the past couple weeks have had dinner and spoken with three different banks, very large corporations in the US. And when I say these companies take six months for a campaign to go out and it's not because they're not capable.
They have the right tools yet. They don't have the access they need. They have to wait on the prioritization of other teams. And I'm fully on board with this, particularly in the banking industry being highly regulated, taking some time to be precautious, privacy forward, you name it. However, if you need to send this email and another trend I noticed was both a frustration and also an acceptance of resting on laurels.
As in because it takes six months to send this, which is mind boggling to me. I know the platform. Sorry cuz it's not that hard. But at the same time, if they rock the boat, it's not a good thing internally. If they just take their time, do the busywork, wait until it can go out. Everything is fine. And so it's really a matter of both cultural approaches that vary from companies, maturities, you name it, not to mention technology.
And so there is this cultural internal component that is part of interoperability. If you're truly blocked from doing all of your job, you're going to make it as easy as possible to just do what you can. And there's nothing wrong with it. I think if it's going to require three months to get legal approval on something because you want to add two words to a headline or subject line, it's not worth it, even if it might have been a better customer experience.
And so there is just a fascinating push and pull here of how do you proactively plan, but also retroactively avoid obstacles in the future and deliver a good experience? It's a tricky one. I wish I had answers, except for, everyone needs upgrade. Get off legacy tech and try again. I think it comes down to interoperability is when you're coming to choose new technology.
Interoperability should be one of those key criteria. And on your request for proposal, it should be part of your requirements interoperability. You know, and this is something that can be a trap, but also an incredible benefit. It can be a trap because interoperability could main or Salesforce integrates with everything. Oh, so go with that. Adobe integrates with everything.
Oh, why don't we go with that? However, I will avoid saying futz. Yeah. And we we already know that like Salesforce, Oracle, even Adobe like a lot of their own internal business units, don't integrate well with each other. We know that. We see that every single day with brands that, you know, we want something to speak with Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Guess what? You need yourself to do that. You know, there is the promise of, oh, this integrates with everything. That's great. But the reality is for marketing technology laid out to actually sit down and go, right, exactly how what is a native connect up between this app and this app and what needs the middleware? What needs API infrastructure, what needs microservices, what need to create?
And then mapping that out is a massive bowl of spaghetti of like so many different ways that everything integrates. However, if you like. And one thing I learned really only my career. It's a principle here is if you want to be proactive, work forwards or backwards. You have to do the detail. You have to understand the the nitty gritty of exactly how things integrate.
And you don't have to do it for everything, but for the areas under the most value, adding the highest risk, the the most consequential to your stack. Understand it like nobody else. I highly encourage folks to do that because you can you can push that on to a data engineer. You can push that on to it. But if you're a marketing technologist, your world is the bridge and you have to understand how everything works and an integration level before you can go and buy that CDP, or buy that engagement platform as an example.
But, you know, interoperability, I think this whole idea of moving forwards, working forwards, instead of trying to retrofit stuff, you're going to set yourself up for success more. No one likes to go, oh, how well, and we haven't even discussed the elephant in the technology room. What if you have a homegrown solution? What if you have something that you know?
First of all, native integrations don't always actually work as they purport to. So double check those. However, a homegrown solution could be just as much of a problem you're mentioning. Okay, we're going to bring this on. Are we going to migrate? You can't easily migrate it with a consultant to, you know, supercharge for the next few months just to speed things up and lessen the load on the internal team.
If it's homegrown, that makes it a whole lot harder and less transferable. Talk about speaking a different language. It was probably created well before current days and also not product managed and program managed for that matter, to ensure it is up to industry standards and needs of the actual internal users. So it's a whole other can of worms with a homegrown solution.
And one of those financial institutions that I was talking to, ironically, had both a third party, but also a homegrown one for a certain segment. And not only are those skills not transferable or are operable elsewhere in the same capacity, no one's going to know what is on your resume, but also they just set you up for failure.
Unless you are literally building the email infrastructure and the A platform that you're going to white label. Otherwise why do it? If you're going to become Gmail, please do it. Go for it. I believe in you. However, very few are going to try to overtake Yahoo and Gmail and Outlook and you name it. So on that I think it's time to talk about governance and privacy.
Oh yeah, and what we can do about it. So governance and privacy. Who's actually overseeing, owning and controlling where your data is flowing? Do you have it mapped out? I am a huge proponent of data maps. It's maybe a little overwhelming to some, but it's for me. Make sense of the spaghetti we have talked about. So in governance and privacy, one of those big areas that we see is a sore point is the marketing technology team have very little control over the integration stack.
All of those things we just mentioned API microservices, different ways in which that integrations actually work. They have very little say, we've seen some companies that have absolutely no control over that. It's actually handed off to a separate consultancy or a technology vendor. And so one of those areas is part of solving the integration problem is figuring out who controls that.
How do you do that? Is it documented? Is it set up in such a way that it can be, informed? Can it be changed? Because, you know, often things are changing and the tech level that things are changing. Data level things are changing, the requirements for marketing are constantly changing. But having a API infrastructure that's flexible enough to deal with change, but is rigorous enough that it doesn't break constantly, which is another massive pain point.
Yeah, that the integrations between tools break and there's very little observability. That's an area where there could be some massive improvement. And, you know, a one way to start with that is to do a discovery, to do a deep dive and go, hey, what is actually going on in this specific API layer in our business? How do all these things integrate?
And, and then figuring out how that's working and then adding some recommendations to okay, well, who should who should manage this now? Who should actually set this up for success? That could actually really put you in a really good spot. But more importantly, I think as part of governance from the marketing perspective, we have this kind of concept of, data gravity, which is this whole idea of where is your most valuable data living right now?
Is it in your data cloud? Is it in your CDP? Is it in your engagement platform? Like where is the most valuable source of data? And the answer often that question is, we don't know. It's it everywhere. It's all just all different systems. You know, it's talking to a company the other day, a large consumer company. They do consumer electronics.
And they said, oh, we've got six different systems. We pull like critical customer data from okay, that's fine. But one area to really simplify and to look at how to actually improve in this area is where is the core data. And then focus your API infrastructure around that first and then build out from there. Because you can post aggregates, all the main things.
For example, where's your customer profiles? What where is the transactional data? Where is the source of your engagement data with your customer? Where does a lead up to your key metrics? If you can consolidate around that first, it's going to give you more wins and more success before actually trying to tackle the more squarely difficult, harder to reach data.
And every enterprise company has really hard to reach data. It's like, you know, we want to get this, but the only way we can get it is by exporting a flat file out of a transactional system. Oh, don't remind me of all of the FTP files I've had to deal with. Yeah, so, you know, we don't want that.
However, if you focus on your core data gravity, where where is the API cluster we should live, that's going to set you off for success a lot more. But before we wrap this episode, we do have to address the monolith in the room. All this center of gravity, who owns what it's hard to make sense of. It's hard to really navigate because most of the time it is in the minds of data engineers.
Or if you don't understand systemically your holistic ecosystem of platforms and how they intersect, how they talk to each other, what the flags, what the like, really think of it as a city infrastructure. You need to know how things are oriented. And so one of my absolute favorite things to do is whether it's macro, lucid, chart, sigma, I don't care.
Anything that works to your fancy map out your data streams. So with this centralized chart mapping everything out, it might not be the end all be all solution, but at least a starting place. And to your point earlier, you need to identify who's going to oversee and maintain this because we need that documentation to be shared. What if you leave the company?
What if, unfortunately, there's a layoff, every company goes through some sort of trial and tribulation like that. And if you're not documenting in a centralized place and the number of companies, you don't even have wikis that they actually enforce and use is deeply upsetting. But especially with AI, like make it happen, you can do it. It literally one step at a time.
You know your ISP and what is or isn't connected. Great. That's all you need to start with. And then, as you have slowly but surely accustom yourself to other platforms, build it, ask the owner and be like, hey, is this correct? I'm just trying to make sense of this and you'll slowly but surely everyone will at least acknowledge like, oh, this is helpful and it'll become a resource.
I think just rounding out this conversation, a lot of large companies, they really struggle with the monolith. They really struggle with the company, the vendor that has been with them for ten, 15, 20 years that they've gone all in on one, marketing suite. And, you know, there's several vendors in that space that are offering almost everything that a marketer could want, in their marketing technology stack.
But we see with the evidence just comes up constantly across the major marketing suites. We see that across our membership, at least, we see that that is the number one, those sort of top three, vendor suites. Those are the top three that are constantly mentioned as, as core to their marketing technology stack. They're also the top three that are constantly mentioned as deeply unsatisfied with as well.
And I think the big reason for that is there's a difference between like composable, federated and then, you know, willingness to integrate, like as a technology philosophy. And then there's another philosophy which is suites take on, which is we want to pull everything to ourselves. We want the data pulled into our systems. We want all the workflows and processes built into our systems.
All the integrations should be reliant on our systems, and often it's quite adversarial. Between the large monolith vendor and the marketing technologist in the brand going, well, no, we want best operate or we want to integrate this specific solution downstream with another app, and then often those large vendors just don't have the business model for it. And so often I think that what that tension there is, what's causing a lot dissatisfaction, is that a lot of the large marketing suites expect brands to work of their business model.
But what we're saying, especially with composability, is the business model is blown wide apart, because you could start to use systems that integrate off different data and connect together and have more of an open, freeform, API infrastructure. That means that you can actually integrate things and then have best breeds of different solutions. I was talking a great brand yesterday.
They had a fantastic, approach to this. I had best break for literally everything customer data, platform engagement, systems, experimentation, personalization, you know, and the list goes on. And they've selected each specific tool. Why is because they want to control the API for structure. They want to they want to set the terms and they don't want to operate within a large marketing suites business model.
And I think that, you know, part of breaking free there is I think generally speaking, it's part of saying, well, what is the real need and role of this marketing suite? Evaluate it. You'll be pleasantly surprised if the integration capability between the apps within a suite versus several different point solutions and a best of breed, it's probably the same amount of work.
We see that constantly. It's roughly the same amount of work. One is actually probably a lot slower as well. The suite is much slower. But yeah, I think like busting the monolith. It's like suite fatigue. It's a whole other definition, which if you haven't listened to that episode, I highly recommend it with Adam Greco. We had so much fun talking.
Yeah. But yes, the suite fatigue continues. So that that concludes our second pay point integration complexity across the marketing technology stack. I hope this is solved you well, and giving you some insights to bring back into your company to make the transformation that you need to make. But in saying that, thank you for joining us for making sense of my podcast.
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