So one of our big headlines is that technology spend has fallen year over year from 29% to 26% of the total marketing budget. But don't panic when you hear that headline. Many marketers think we spent years developing technological fluency, it's become a second language for us. Now you're telling us this is not a thing, It's definitely still a thing. 26% is still a huge chunk of the marketers budget, and this is definitely still an area where we need to focus and an area where we see a lot of opportunity for improvement.
Marketers still have work to do in terms of developing road maps, in terms of strategically rationalizing their stack and in terms of implementation. If you think about how marketing technology investment typically works; marketers identify a capability gap and source a specific piece of technology, often a point solution; often if you're familiar with our pace layering research, a system of innovation to fill that gap. What that means is that marketing teams need to start to become like IT teams, where periodically they reassess that stack and really rationalize and look at overlaps and opportunities to streamline their investment and to streamline internal processes.
Another place where we see a lot of opportunity for growth in marketing departments is building out teams to support technology implementation. It's not enough just to source the best technology out there to solve your problem. You need an internal team who can implement that technology, who can champion that technology and who can train others on that technology. And when we ask marketers about their internal capabilities and skills, we know this is still a huge gap.
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