For years, marketers have evaluated their martech stacks using hard metrics like lead generation, behavioral tracking and operational efficiency. Dashboards tell us whether the machine is running smoothly. But a more human question is emerging — does all this technology help us create better, more creative work or does it simply help us produce more noise?
While martech has clearly improved content velocity and cross-team collaboration, it has also introduced a risk many leaders overlook. We rarely measure whether our tools support the messy, non-linear process of creativity or merely prioritize volume over value. It’s time to evaluate marketing technology not just by what it produces, but by how it affects the people doing the work.
When martech optimizes away creativity
The last decade of marketing technology was shaped by a race for integration and speed. By standard operational metrics, the industry has won. Teams can produce more assets, personalize at scale and measure performance with remarkable granularity. Yet the landscape has ballooned to more than 15,000 specialized tools — and the cracks are starting to show.
Companies continue to invest heavily in these tools, yet nearly 44% of the martech purchased goes unused, per Harvard Business Review. That gap points to a troubling reality. While the pipes of the marketing machine are cleaner than ever, the system is clogged with shelfware that adds complexity without adding value.
Data friction breaks creative momentum
The most significant toll martech takes on creativity comes from cognitive load. Great creative work depends on flow — sustained focus that allows the brain to form unexpected connections. Martech stacks, however, are built for interruption, forcing creators to navigate login screens, tagging rules and fragmented dashboards.
Up to 95% of marketers struggle to find or target their audiences effectively — not because they lack tools, but because data is disconnected, according to Hightouch. Additionally, 75% of martech pain points can be attributed to data accessibility issues rather than tool features.
For creative teams, this data disconnect is a significant hindrance to creativity. Every time a writer or designer switches contexts to hunt for a file or reconcile data across platforms, they pay a cognitive penalty. We need to measure operational friction — the time spent managing tools versus time spent creating. When a tool turns creators into administrators, it undermines the talent it was meant to support.
Dig deeper: Creative misalignment is the silent killer of marketing ROI
The trap of ‘average’ excellence
A hidden risk sits inside the optimization loops built into ad platforms. Tools that automatically optimize creative assets are inherently backward-looking because they rely on what has worked in the past. Over time, this creates a feedback loop that penalizes originality. When brands rely entirely on data-driven iteration, they tend to settle for the best version of a mediocre idea instead of taking the risks necessary for a breakthrough.
This is where the blandification effect takes hold. When competitors rely on the same listening tools to surface the same trends and the same AI prompts to draft copy, algorithmic sameness sets in. Reliance on generic AI models without human strategic oversight accelerates regression toward the mean. The resulting content is safe and polished, but it lacks the jagged edges that make brands memorable. Distinctiveness is survival. If a stack is tuned entirely for safety and optimization, it will filter out outliers — even though those outliers are often the ideas that build lasting brand equity.
Dig deeper: Is martech driving the blandification of marketing?
Measuring the creative return
To address this, we need to change what we measure. Traditional KPIs like click-through rates tell us little about the health of the creative process. What’s missing are metrics that capture the creative return of our technology investments.
One practical approach is to compare time-to-first-draft with time-to-final-asset. Ideally, technology should accelerate the first phase. Tools like generative AI can serve as productive sparring partners, helping teams expand their pool of ideas and quickly assemble rough concepts. That’s healthy velocity. The refinement phase — where humans add nuance, emotion and wit — should not be rushed. When a new tool compresses the entire timeline equally, it often signals that the human element was skipped.
Another useful lens is creative decay rate — how quickly an asset’s performance drops after launch. Stacks optimized purely for volume tend to create a hamster wheel, producing disposable content audiences tire of almost immediately. By contrast, stacks that support deeper creativity produce assets with longer half-lives, delivering value well beyond the initial publish date.
These examples aren’t meant to prescribe new metrics. They’re meant to show how current measurements have become overly focused on efficiency while nearly abandoning creativity.
Dig deeper: Closing the gap between creative and marketing performance
The human variable
The promise of martech was never just to make marketing faster — it was to make it better. If speed comes at the cost of creative growth or originality, that promise has failed. In the rush toward automation, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the most powerful variable in marketing success remains creative resonance.
As more advanced AI enters workflows in 2026 and beyond, the risk of creative atrophy is real. By looking beyond the stack and measuring how tools affect people, not just output, technology can serve its intended role — a lever for human imagination that amplifies connection rather than filtering out the humanity we’re trying to express.
Dig deeper: How CreativeOps keeps AI-driven content from stalling
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Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.