• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, February 26, 2025

The trend these days is to try and get lean.  For individuals, there’s diet, exercise and ads for drugs like Ozempic all over TV.  For the government, it’s a daily news topic about this cut or that cut, regardless of the impacts.  For marketers, it’s about a leaner tech stack to make it easier for them to do what needs to get done.

Ad tech bloat was a real thing for the last 15 years or so as more companies created a vast array of tools that enabled better targeting, better email open rates, better personalization and more.  Marketers were convinced they needed the next best thing as an add-on to their tech stack to drive better results. 

Along the way, the industry took what was a complex concept that emerged from the decoupling of data and media and made it infinitely more complicated.  You began with a CRM and a DMP (or CDP) and added in an average of four to five plug-in tools, plus a DSP (or two) as the “core” of your stack. Sometimes this came from a single provider, but oftentimes you mixed and matched what you considered the best options for your needs and stitched together the right solution like an ad tech patchwork cardigan.  And companies kept adding 3-letter acronyms to differentiate one tool from the next. 

Too often marketers will see a problem or a challenge in their GTM, do a search to figure out how to fix it, and sign up for some additional tool to solve for it.  This is not efficient, because it’s likely they could have solved the challenge either by a) making a tweak to one of the existing tools they already have, or b) revisiting the challenge itself and seeing if there might be a better way to do things. 

Many marketers try to craft a stack that meets their needs, rather than adapt how they do things to maximize the stack itself.  This latter strategy can be very effective, while also saving you money.

Adding layers and plug-ins to your stack gets expensive.  It also creates complexity that can paralyze your organization.  It’s like “Back to the Future. “ What Doc Brown did with that DeLorean was far too complicated, and nobody from any timeline would have been able to go back and fix, much less replicate, that design.  They may get close, but one small error, and they are off by 80 or 90 years, at least. 

Some marketers create these complicated stacks to justify their role in the organization.  The problem is that eventually, someone in IT figures out that the stack is too complex, or too much money is being spent. More than likely, something breaks down and there's just no simple or easy fix.  In these cases, it’s not completely uncommon for IT to tell marketing to undergo an RFP evaluation to upgrade the stack, and then everything will get ripped up and replaced, creating unnecessary work that can take as long as three years to execute.  This is typically unnecessary, even if the bloat got to be too unwieldy.

You probably don’t need too many new elements in your stack. If you do, you should adopt the philosophy that every time you add a new element, you have to get rid of one. This simplifies your stack and makes it easier for you to execute. 

Consolidation in the ad tech space will help as more companies get gobbled up over time, but you can’t depend on that, and the wait can kill you.  No, it is squarely on your shoulders as  a marketing leader to look, evaluate what you have, and see if you really need that addition.  This will help you in the long run and make you more valuable to your organization, too.