The companies making the most money per employee use less programmatic technology than the ones losing to them.
Every industry studied. No exceptions.
Frans Riemersma of Martech Tribe analyzed 988 real-world tech stacks across 49 martech categories. He compared the top 30% of companies by revenue per employee with everyone else.
Programmatic produced the most consistent pattern of any category. What did he learn?
Outperformers used fewer programmatic features and ran less mature stacks. Seven industries. Seven for seven. Retail had the highest adoption at 74%. Retail outperformers still carried a narrower feature set than their weaker peers.
Riemersma’s explanation is the line worth stealing: sophistication gets confused with over-investment.
He is careful: this is correlation. Established brands may need less acquisition machinery. He says so plainly, which is why I trust the rest of the report.
And here is why it matters…
Nobody in your building is arguing you have too much technology. Every partner who benefits from a bigger stack has a reason to tell you the answer to a bad quarter is another capability.
Almost nobody is paid to tell you to turn something off.
Andy Lark said it years ago and it still lands: “The solution to problems with SaaS always seems to be more SaaS.”
Riemersma found that instinct in the data. Weaker performers try to buy their way out of problems. Outperformers are more selective, because they learned hard lessons.
Les Binet has made the effectiveness version of this argument for years. Narrow targeting improves efficiency a little and cuts effectiveness a lot. Sales fall, budgets get cut, the spiral tightens.
This study is the Martech procurement version. Same disease, different symptom.
Two things I’d do with it.
First, run a Martech overlap audit. Not a cut exercise, an inventory. Which capabilities are you paying for directly, and which are already inside what your agency or platform partner delivers? Duplication is a common finding. It is rarely deliberate. It accumulates.
Second, ask what each capability produced. Not whether it is enabled. What decision it changed, and what that was worth. If nobody can answer, you are not running a sophisticated stack. You are running an expensive one.
In media, the fee you see does not describe what you paid. In AI-produced work, the deliverable does not describe how it was made. And in Martech, the size of the stack does not describe the quality of the operation.
The remedy is the same. Not smaller budgets. Better questions.
Pick one programmatic capability in your stack. Can you name the last decision it changed?
PS A hearty “thank you” once again for Mi3 Australia’s Andrew Birmingham for covering this story:
https://www.mi-3.com.au/28-08-2026/revenue-outperformers-use-less-programmatic-tech-across-all-seven-industries-studied
PPS You can preorder Riemersma’s Premium Martech Report – Programmatic Ads report here:
https://martechtribe.com/preorder-your-premium-martech-report?landscape_category=Programmatic%20Ads
Steve Boehler, founder, and partner at Mercer Island Group has led consulting teams on behalf of clients as diverse as Ulta Beauty, Microsoft, UScellular, Nintendo, Kaiser Permanente, Holland America Line, Stop & Shop, Qualcomm, Brooks Running, and numerous others. He founded MIG after serving as a division president in a Fortune 100 when he was only 32. Earlier in his career, Steve Boehler cut his teeth with a decade in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, leading brands like Tide, Pringles, and Jif.
Mercer Island Group helps marketers and agencies succeed. Company leadership is as much at home with marketers and their C-Suites as in an agency’s boardroom. With marketers, Mercer Island Group is a top 5 agency search consultancy covering all types of agency relationships (creative, media, web, PR, experiential) and assists marketers with marketing organization structure, workflow and critical skill development (briefing, creative evaluation & feedback, etc.). The company also supports leading and aspiring agencies with positioning, pitch and strategy training and pitch support.