When your Marketing Operations span multiple business units, consistency and visibility can make or break performance. At Lincoln Financial, that complexity had grown quietly over time, until reporting felt fragmented, deliverability checks were reactive, and simple absences could throw campaign schedules off balance.

Sojourn Solutions spends its days in the messiest rooms of modern Marketing. We see teams with solid strategies, ambitious leadership, and stacks of tech that cost a fortune. Yet, time and again, Marketing Operations is expected to be the brain of the organisation while being treated like the underpaid assistant...

Oracle’s closing out the year with a release that quietly packs a punch. Eloqua 25D isn’t full of flashy headlines, but it does deliver real impact, smarter AI tools, stronger governance options, and some integration changes you really shouldn’t ignore.

Let’s start with a harsh truth: If your enterprise marketing team is still blasting generic emails, hoping for clicks, and “throwing stuff at the wall” to see what sticks, you’re doing it wrong. The old way of marketing - spray and pray - is basically a luxury you can’t afford anymore. Every wasted impression, every mis-targeted ad... well that's money slipping out the door. And worse, it’s annoying the very people you’re trying to woo.

HubSpot’s version of all-in-one is a different animal. It’s not about cramming every possible feature under one roof. It’s about forcing collaboration. It’s the architectural equivalent of locking your feuding sales and marketing teams in the same room until they figure it out. And guess what? That’s exactly what most organisations need.

A CDP can unify fragmented data, orchestrate personalised experiences, and generate actionable insights. But like a tightrope act without a safety net, it only works when the right foundation is in place, the people, processes, and data that make the whole show run smoothly.

Migrating marketing automation platforms can feel like stepping straight into a horror film. There will be scares, there will be stress, and there may even be a few jump-out-of-your-chair moments when a campaign suddenly vanishes into thin air. But with the right preparation, pacing, people and consultancy, you don’t have to be the character who gets picked off early. You can be the survivor... the one who makes it out stronger, smarter, and ready for whatever comes next.

Marketing Automation amplifies whatever you already have. If your processes and data are solid, automation will scale them beautifully. If they’re broken, automation will just make the cracks appear faster, louder, and more expensively.

B2B likes to imagine it’s somehow immune from the privacy storm. After all, we’re not selling sneakers or retargeting people’s TikTok habits. But here’s the reality: A “business lead” is still a human being. If your database contains names, emails, job titles, behavioural signals... regulators consider that personal data.

Every few years, Marketing Ops gets handed a shiny new “game-changer” that promises to solve all our problems. This time, it’s AI.

Marketing Ops is broken. You broke it. But we can fix it. If we’re honest enough to start now.

All this AI in in Marketing Operations speak... but what if YOU were are an AI inMarketing Operations...

Marketing Operations isn’t being upgraded. It’s being rewritten. Teams that cling to comfort, dashboards, and incremental automation are setting themselves up for redundancy. Those who embrace strategy, oversight, and the human judgment AI cannot replicate... they will thrive.

Remember when we published our “Marketing Operations in 2025: Top Trends & Predictions” article back in January? We had big ideas, bold predictions, and a touch of wishful thinking. Fast forward to now: Mid-year. Time to see what actually stuck, what faceplanted, and what new forces are reshaping the game.

If you haven’t run a MarTech audit in over a year, you’re haemorrhaging money. You’re handing over 25% of your entire marketing budget to stuff that’s mostly idle.

AI is transforming Marketing Ops, but it is not a silver bullet. Humans remain the linchpin of effective operations, providing context, trust, problem-solving, and scalable process oversight.

AI is impressive. Until it isn’t. It can write a subject line in 0.2 seconds. Generate a campaign build. Auto-QA an entire email program....

If your MOps function is overloaded, constantly reactive, and struggling to scale - this is your signal. The answer isn’t more headcount. It’s more leverage. And leverage comes from systems that execute with intelligence and consistency, freeing your team to finally operate at their full potential.

If you want AI to work with your marketing systems, not around or against them, you need something most vendors won’t talk about: Guardrails.

Burnout in Marketing Operations isn’t a side effect. It’s the system working exactly as designed. And it’s time to redesign it.