Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Enterprise Marketing Crisis
Enterprise marketing teams today are operating in an environment of unprecedented complexity. Over the past decade, the martech landscape has exploded, with thousands of tools promising to solve specific problems. Large organisations now rely on sprawling stacks of disconnected tools — each with its own data models, workflows, and governance rules.
The result is a tangled web of systems that rarely speak the same language. Data is siloed, content is duplicated, and processes are slowed by manual handoffs. Marketing leaders lack a single source of truth, making it difficult to measure performance, adapt campaigns in real time, or ensure compliance across regions and channels.
This fragmentation is more than an operational headache — it’s a strategic liability. As budgets tighten and management demands measurable results, many CMOs find themselves unable to fully leverage the technology they already own. In fact, already in 2023 the study “CMO Spend and Strategy Survey” by Gartner demonstrated that a majority of marketing leaders feel they have lost control of their martech stacks.
The currently available alternative is by no means better — monolithic martech solutions. While once seen as the safe and convenient choice, these solutions become a significant constraint for modern marketing organisations. Their closed architectures and rigid licensing models often lock businesses into a fixed set of capabilities, making it difficult to adapt quickly to new channels, customer expectations, or emerging technologies like AI.
Integrations with external tools are typically limited or costly, leading to data silos and fragmented workflows that undermine the promise of a unified customer experience. As these platforms grow in size and complexity, they can become slow to implement, expensive to maintain, and resistant to customisation, forcing marketing teams to work around the technology rather than with it. This lack of flexibility not only stifles innovation but also prevents organisations from fully leveraging their existing investments, leaving them less agile and less competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
The AI Paradox: Promise Meets Unpreparedness
Artificial intelligence has emerged as both a beacon of possibility and a source of pressure. AI can enable hyper-personalised experiences, predictive insights, and autonomous campaign optimisation. But most existing stacks were never designed to support AI at scale. Without clean, connected, and compliant data, AI initiatives risk becoming isolated experiments rather than enterprise-wide capabilities. Governance is another critical gap: without clear guardrails, AI can introduce compliance risks, bias, and inconsistent brand experiences. The paradox is clear: AI could be transformative, but the foundation it needs is often missing.
Personalisation at Scale Remains Elusive
Customer expectations have shifted dramatically. Audiences now expect brands to deliver relevant, timely, and personalised experiences across every touchpoint. Achieving this at scale requires more than just marketing automation — it demands orchestration.
True orchestration means aligning data, content, tools, and teams so that every interaction is informed by the same intelligence and executed in harmony. Yet in many organisations, personalisation efforts are hampered by disconnected systems, inconsistent taxonomies, and the inability to adapt content dynamically in response to customer behaviour.
An Open, Composable Ecosystem
To break free from these constraints, a new approach is necessary, one that treats marketing not as a collection of tools, but as a connected supply chain. Instead of forcing “rip-and-replace” migrations, this approach embraces openness and composability, integrating existing investments into a unified operating layer.
In this paradigm, AI agents can orchestrate workflows across the entire stack: planning campaigns, managing assets, personalising experiences, and measuring results in real time. Compliance is embedded by design, ensuring that every action aligns with enterprise governance and regional regulations.
By connecting the dots between disparate systems, this approach transforms complexity into clarity. It enables marketing teams to run more campaigns, faster, with insights they can trust — and to scale personalisation without sacrificing control.
From Cost Centre to Growth Engine
When marketing technology operates as a cohesive ecosystem rather than a patchwork of tools, the impact is profound. Campaigns can be launched in days instead of weeks. Content can be adapted dynamically for different audiences and markets. Data flows seamlessly between systems, providing the intelligence needed to make better decisions.
Most importantly, marketing regains its strategic role. Instead of being consumed by operational firefighting, teams can focus on driving growth, deepening customer relationships, and innovating at the pace the market demands.
What CMOs really need
What organisations and their CMOs need now is not another tool or add-on to a monolithic martech solution. Rather, the whole industry needs a paradigm shift towards a new category — Ecosystem-as-a-Service (EaaS): a composable, community-powered platform that replaces rigid marketing stacks with a dynamic, AI-orchestrated operating system for tailored marketing at scale.
Rather than forcing CMOs to replace existing investments, EaaS needs to orchestrate them through open APIs, AI-driven workflows, and built-in governance, creating a dynamic operating layer for marketing at scale. This approach will enable brands to connect best-of-need solutions, automate complex processes, and deliver personalised, omnichannel experiences with speed and precision, all while maintaining compliance and control. By combining the flexibility of an open ecosystem with the scalability of a platform service, EaaS can transform the marketing stack into a living, evolving network that grows more powerful with every new participant, partner, and integration.
