More features don’t separate winners from the rest, research across 988 martech stacks suggests

October 14, 2026

Companies that lead their industries on revenue per employee tend to use fewer programmatic advertising features and run them at lower maturity than their peers. That is the finding of Apex Martech research, produced by MartechTribe with the CMO Council and described in a CMSWire column by MartechTribe founder Frans Riemersma.

The study analyzed 988 real-world technology stacks across seven industries: retail, banking and financial services, consumer goods, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing and professional services. It examined more than 1,300 features in 49 martech categories. Within each industry, researchers compared the top 30% of companies by revenue per employee against the rest.

The pattern held in every industry. Riemersma calls the consistency unusual, since most martech categories show different patterns from one industry to the next. The gap in feature use was far wider than the gap in maturity. It persisted even in retail, where 74% of companies use programmatic tools, and in professional services, where adoption is only 43%.

Why leaders may need less

Riemersma offers several possible explanations. Top performers may simply be more selective, deploying programmatic for a few well-defined audiences and channels. Weaker performers, by contrast, may respond to poor ad results by adding more targeting, buying and measurement tools, which raises complexity without fixing the underlying problem.

He also argues that programmatic advertising works as a “kickstarter rather than a moat.” Brands still building awareness or entering new markets rely heavily on paid reach. Established leaders with strong brand recognition, direct traffic and repeat customers can shift toward owned, earned and shared channels and need less of it.

Outsourcing to agencies, he says, cannot explain the feature gap, because ad technologies deployed on a company’s digital properties are visible regardless of who operates them.

Caution on interpretation

Riemersma stresses that the research shows association, not causation. Cutting tools will not raise revenue, he writes, and using fewer features does not make a company an outperformer.

What he recommends

Leaders should start any stack audit with the audience, then require each capability to show measurable value. They should own capabilities that rely on proprietary data, outsource where partners are more efficient, and remove duplicated or weakly used tools. The goal, he says, is the most deliberate stack, not the smallest one.

Note: The study measures performance only by revenue per employee, and the author’s firm sells martech research and consulting.