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Drako Podcast

Episode 02 · Marketing stack configuration · Cross-regional

Fifteen Thousand Tools

Configuring a marketing stack when the landscape has plateaued — fewer platforms, used fully, priced by the outcome.

This episode is scheduled. Audio, transcript and video highlight publish with the episode.

Why this episode, why now

For fifteen years the marketing technology landscape only grew — from about 150 products in 2011 to more than 15,000. In May 2026 Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma published the 2026 landscape at 15,505 products, up 0.79 per cent on the year: effectively flat, and possibly the peak. Underneath the flat number the market is churning — 1,488 products added, 1,367 removed — and their accompanying "Martech for 2026" study argues that the stack itself is flattening: SaaS is devolving into infrastructure while AI agents take over the decisioning layer above it.

At the same time the people who buy these tools are spending a smaller share on them and using less of what they buy. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts martech at 19.4 per cent of the marketing budget, a five-year low, down from 26.6 per cent in 2021, while 15.3 per cent of budgets now go to AI initiatives and paid media has risen to 31.4 per cent. Gartner's marketing technology survey found marketers using only 33 per cent of their stack's capability in 2023, down from 58 per cent in 2020; the 2025 survey reported a partial rebound to 49 per cent. And the pricing model underneath is changing: 56 per cent of CMOs have increased their consumption-based martech allocation, HubSpot moved its Breeze agents to outcome-based credits in April 2026, and Salesforce now runs three pricing models for Agentforce after its per-conversation rate priced out smaller buyers.

This is the episode on the second stage of the firm's framework — marketing stack configuration — and on one of its named deliverables, platform selection. The thesis is simple and unfashionable: a startup needs far fewer tools than the landscape offers, it needs to configure them against the blueprint rather than buy them against a feature list, and in a consumption-priced world the choice of platform is a line in the financial model, not just in the marketing plan. Daniel's training in Information Systems and his years inside agencies and seed-stage startups in London, Singapore and Sydney are the reason this is a framework stage in his practice and not an afterthought.