At eTail Palm Springs: ‘Too many tools and not enough results’

Just across the hall from an exhibition floor packed with vendors peddling new technology solutions at eTail Palm Springs, Richard Jones, chief revenue officer at performance marketing platform Wunderkind, made the case that many retailers feel as though there are “too many tools and not enough results.”

“We've been sold a dream that more technology equals better performance,” Jones said in a keynote. “But here we are drowning in tools, drowning in logins and dashboards.”

He pointed to a data point from business research firm Gartner: Companies only utilized 33% of their marketing tech stack in 2024, down from 58% in 2020. “That’s a massive amount of wasted investment that isn’t helping drive profitable growth,” he said.

In such a “cluttered landscape,” Jones noted that “60% of marketers are shifting investments towards services over software, recognizing that managing multiple solutions is no longer sustainable.”

This is part of a broader shift toward “adaptability, optimization, and consolidation,” he added, which will be crucial to growth in 2025. “The focus is no longer on adding more tools,” he said. “It’s on selecting and making the right ones work better together.”

As Retail Brew reported from NRF’s Big Show earlier this year, technology investment is top of mind for retailers, but companies aren’t adopting new solutions willy-nilly; and some are reprioritizing “business outcomes.”

“We have 5,000 different platforms that all promise some form of simplification,” Jones said. “The only thing is we don’t have any real ways…to explain to our CFO why our tech stack costs more than our revenue.”