What’s your IQ? Your MartechIQ

A lesser-known fact: the number of digital marketing applications has exploded over the past decade — from roughly 150 in 2011 to more than 15,000 today (Statista, 2025). Marketers once delighted in poring over the annual martech landscape infographic. Now? It’s largely performative. At that scale, the map is no longer navigable.

One might assume that Martech — supercharged by AI — would be the silver bullet. The reality is more nuanced.

I chair The Mosaic Project, a martech thinktank sponsored by Clevertouch Consulting — a frontrunner in the agnostic martech consulting and thought-leadership space. Very little surprises me these days, but the scale of friction Martech introduces into organisations is genuinely striking. We have more technology than ever. Yet many teams quietly admit they are deploying it sub-optimally.

Put differently: their MartechIQ is not yet at Mensa level. 

If only there were a tool that assessed this particular form of intelligence — identified the fault lines — and produced a practical roadmap for remedy.

You’ve guessed it. That product now exists. And it has the potential to be a genuine strategic inflection point.

Before going further, full disclosure: I’m not entirely neutral. MartechIQ was developed collaboratively with Clevertouch Consulting and was the brain-baby of CEO, Adam Sharp. I like to think I helped birth and nurse that baby, and now Chris Fowler, Director of Research and Enablement is raising the child.

Most of us have taken a general IQ test at some point. In a lab setting, I could administer a battery of cognitive assessments and benchmark your intelligence precisely against a population norm. Highly accurate. Highly inconvenient.

So instead, we accept well-designed self-administered instruments. Slightly less precise. More scalable. Some bias? Of course. But repeated and calibrated, they give us a reliable signal of where someone sits on a continuum.

MartechIQ® works in much the same way.

Yes, consultants can conduct a full Martech audit — more accurate, but also more invasive and resource-intensive. Alternatively, within around twenty minutes, organisations can self-assess and receive a weighted score (out of 100), a structured diagnosis, and a set of prioritised recommendations. The algorithm applies a proprietary weighting model — a “secret recipe” — to surface strengths, weaknesses, and strategic gaps.

For the serious marketer, that’s powerful.

If you’ve taken my marketing effectiveness course, read my MIT Sloan piece on the importance of good metrics (click), or simply worked with measurement frameworks before, you’ll know one thing is certain: marketers become what they measure.

Think about NPS. It took time to gain traction, but now it sits comfortably in C-Suite level dashboards. I believe MartechIQ has similar potential — a cross-functional metric bridging marketing and IT. And as the underlying model continues to calibrate against hard performance outcomes — revenue growth, efficiency gains, even CEO satisfaction — its strategic relevance only increases.

The best part? Right now, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a low score — provided you act on it. Unlike general intelligence, MartechIQ is designed to improve. That is what the future of Martech looks like.

Find out more about MartechIQ® here:
https://clever-touch.com/products/martechiq