Marketers have been sailing through the high tides of theMarTechsea for a while now. With Gartner recently pointing out how MarTech tools are underutilized (only about 33%), marketers have started facing the pressure of cutting down on their tech spends. The C-suites had to now consolidate or eliminate unnecessary products from the stack.

While 75% of CMOs had agreed that to maintain ROI, they need to cut down on the spends, it was also about reining in new purchases. SaaS management and procurement services firm Vendr, showed that net new software contracts in 2023 dropped relative to renewals, as firms become more cautious about adding more tools to their stack.

Making the MarTech stack simple and bringing in more discipline in MarTech management have been crucial for marketers. However, according to ChiefMartec and MarTech tribe’s recently released  ‘MarTech for 2024’ report, the value of tools can’t always be measured by the frequency or depth of their usage.

And some redundancy or overlap among tools in the stack may actually have value and serve important use cases — even if they’re edge cases — that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Basically this means that sometimes, having some tools that do the same thing can actually be helpful and have a purpose, even if it's not all the time – they shouldn't just be ignored.

However, there’s more to the story.

The number of MarTech tools is on the rise, and that too very rapidly. The last MarTech Landscape report (from May 2023) showed that there were a total 11,038 tools available to marketers.

Cut to December 2023, the total is now 13,080. The number of MarTech tools increased by 2,042 which is precisely around 18.5%. And thanks to Artificial Intelligence, 1,498 or 73% of these 2,042 tools were AI-based.

During a joint video conference for the launch of the report, Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec and HubSpot said, “From 2011 to 2015, this was about a four year period to grow to about 2000 MarTech tools in total, on the MarTech Map. We have added that many, in just six months. So that is a testament to the acceleration of softwares that AI has driven.”

Speaking of the abundance of generative AI tools in the map, Frans Riemersma of MarTech Tribe answered where the tools actually land. “And the usual suspect, of course, is content. But the truth is you can build an empire with all the genAI that has been surfacing — and by an empire, I mean, of course, a business,” he said.

Content marketing tools comprised around 34% of all the new AI tools, far ahead of video, the second-place category, which had only 4.85%. Looking at it geographically,  U.S. companies were responsible for 61% of these tools (the AI behemoths are based here, so that’s no surprise), U.K. was second, at 5.7%, but third place, surprisingly was Iceland — with a population of 373,000, that launched 4.6% of all AI MarTech tools.

This was significantly ahead of fourth place India (3.5%), whose population is 1.4 billion and which has a large tech industry.

However, if one looks at categories beyond content and experience, one would most likely feel that a majority of the new AI-based MarTech tools have been made for categories like display and programmatic advertising, live chat bots etc.

The bubble bursts here. Barely 0.57% of new AI tools were for display and programmatic advertising, only around 4-5% of the tools were for live chat bots and 0.08% new tools were for Customer Data Platforms.

“Digital advertising is the least affected part, with respect to generative AI,” Riemersma said. “This is kind of surprising, I am thinking it will change.”

The Future of Marketing Landscape

Brinker and Riemersma added that even though there are lots of companies joining together or closing down in the MarTech world, things aren't getting more compact or combined. Instead, because tons of new start-up companies keep showing up, the MarTech space just keeps on growing and growing.

The MarTech world is mostly online and based on subscriptions. Starting a MarTech company doesn't need factories, storage, or a big team. It's more about putting an app on the internet. That's why new companies can start up so quickly in this space