SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

Optimizely has published research showing that 74% of UK marketers believe the industry is stuck in “survival mode”.

The findings are based on a survey of 100 UK marketers.

The research suggests marketing teams spend much of their time responding to immediate demands rather than building longer-term plans. It found that 64% of respondents spend most of their time reacting to short-term requests, while 54% move from one campaign to the next without enough time to assess results properly.

That pressure appears to extend beyond team structures to individual workloads. Nearly three quarters, or 72%, said they personally spend too much time in survival mode, while 51% feel locked into constant execution without a comprehensive strategy.

Rising admin

The data also suggests routine operational work has increased. Almost six in 10 marketers, or 59%, said the amount of administration they handle has grown over the past three years, with 31% saying it has risen dramatically.

The findings add to a wider debate in the marketing industry over whether new technology is reducing workloads or simply shifting them. Although artificial intelligence tools have been adopted across many parts of marketing, the survey indicates that many practitioners still feel constrained by fragmented processes and day-to-day operational demands.

Tara Corey, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Optimizely, said the problem was not a lack of creative ambition within teams, but a lack of time and working conditions that would allow that ambition to be realised.

“Operating in survival mode might get a campaign over the line, but it’s not how great marketing gets made,” said Tara Corey, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Optimizely. “What this research shows is that the ambition is still there, and so is the creativity. But too often, teams are stuck in ways of working that leave very little room for either. Businesses need to build the conditions for their marketing teams to thrive, not just survive.”

Search for fixes

Despite the pressures described in the report, respondents also pointed to areas where operations could improve. A large majority, 85%, said a unified platform for content, personalisation and experimentation would dramatically improve productivity.

Another 43% said better integration of AI with marketing tools represented the biggest opportunity to improve efficiency. The results suggest marketers are not rejecting automation or AI, but looking for systems that fit more closely into everyday workflows.

Many businesses appear to be taking steps in that direction. The survey found that 46% of marketers said their organisation had invested in all-in-one marketing and workflow platforms over the past year, while 44% said more automation had been introduced to reduce manual work.

Those figures point to an industry trying to close the gap between the promise of new tools and the reality of how teams operate. Marketers are under pressure to produce campaigns quickly, report on performance and manage growing volumes of administrative work, often at the expense of planning, testing and reflection.

The report also suggests the problem is not limited to isolated teams or specific sectors. With nearly three quarters of respondents saying the industry as a whole is in survival mode, the research presents the issue as a broad structural concern rather than a temporary period of strain.

For employers, the data may raise questions about team design, workflow management and the effectiveness of current marketing technology estates. If marketers continue to spend much of their week responding to short-term requests, businesses may struggle to create the conditions needed for more deliberate brand and campaign development.

At the same time, the survey points to a workforce that still sees practical routes to change. Strong support for more integrated platforms and better-connected AI tools suggests many marketers believe the answer lies less in adding more software and more in reducing operational friction between the tools they already use.

SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

Unit4 has launched Data Hub for its ERPx platform, a service designed to simplify access to ERP data for analytics tools.

Data Hub acts as an extraction layer within Unit4 ERPx, removing the need for customers to build and maintain their own connections between ERP systems and business intelligence platforms. It delivers finance, project and HR data directly to tools including Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake and BigQuery, as well as platforms that support the Delta Sharing protocol.

The launch targets a familiar problem for finance and analytics teams that rely on ERP data for reporting and planning. In many organisations, staff still export data manually, reformat it, and load it into reporting tools, a process that can introduce errors and break when underlying data structures change.

Another common route is to use application programming interfaces, but that can create other constraints. API-based extraction can be limited by rate caps, pagination rules and payload restrictions, making it harder to move larger or more complex datasets reliably.

Integration issues

One area Unit4 highlighted is the effect of software updates on reporting pipelines. Data Hub is maintained alongside each ERPx release so data connections stay intact through platform changes, reducing the need for customers to rework integrations after updates.

The service also operates on a separate data layer from the core transaction-processing environment, allowing analytical workloads to run without affecting operational users in the ERP system.

For customers, the pitch is less about creating new dashboards than reducing the work needed to keep existing reporting environments current. Automated refreshes can be set on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, depending on subscription, and the service uses incremental loading so only changed records are transferred.

That structure could appeal to multi-entity finance teams that need regular access to general ledger and budget data for management reporting. The service can also support broader enterprise analytics and data science work that depends on bulk access to historical ERP data.

Jennifer Sherman, Chief Product Officer at Unit4, framed the product as part of a wider shift in how organisations use internal data.

“In the automation era, an organisation’s data is its competitive advantage,” said Jennifer Sherman, Chief Product Officer at Unit4. “Unit4 is proud to be in a position to help our clients take advantage of their wealth of knowledge and insights. Data Hub makes the extraction and management of data connectivity Unit4’s challenge, not yours, so you can devote time to what really matters to your organisation.”

Customer use

Unit4 included a customer example from Butlins, where the service has been used to feed reporting models without manual spreadsheet work. The example points to a practical use case for the product: replacing Excel-based processes that sit between ERP systems and reporting tools.

“Data Hub was easy to set up and provided us with the tools to feed the data into our reporting models,” said Chris Dixon, Finance Systems Manager at Butlins. “This improved our productivity as we no longer had to download data from the system into Excel to feed manually into our reporting models. All the reporting objects we need to report against are available in the tool.”

The emphasis on open data-sharing standards is also notable. By using Delta Sharing, customers can move between analytics vendors without rebuilding the underlying connection to ERP data, which may matter to organisations trying to avoid dependence on a single reporting stack.

The product arrives as software suppliers seek to make operational data easier to analyse across finance, HR and project functions. For ERP vendors, that increasingly means not just storing transactional data, but ensuring it can move cleanly into external analytics environments without large internal integration projects.

Unit4’s approach suggests it sees data access and maintenance as a barrier to wider use of ERP information, particularly in organisations where reporting teams depend on IT support or fragile export routines. By shifting that maintenance burden into the ERP platform itself, Unit4 aims to make reporting pipelines more stable and less labour-intensive for customers.

If it works as intended, the service addresses one of the less visible but more persistent problems in business software: getting the right data out of core systems consistently enough for teams to trust the numbers they use every day.

Tracksuit has acquired Sydney startup Hall, adding AI visibility measurement to its brand tracking product.

The deal brings Hall’s technology and team into Tracksuit, including founder Kai Forsyth, who has joined as principal product manager and will lead product direction for AI visibility. Customers will be able to track how their brands appear across AI platforms, compare that visibility with rivals, and monitor changes over time.

The move reflects a wider shift in marketing as AI tools become another way consumers discover and assess brands. Companies have long tracked awareness and perception among people, but the rise of AI search and recommendation systems has created a new challenge: understanding whether brands are being surfaced at all, and whether that portrayal is accurate.

Tracksuit frames the acquisition as an extension of its existing measurement work. Its platform is used by more than 1,000 consumer brands across 25 markets, including the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

AI tracking

Hall focused on measuring how brands appear inside AI platforms. Integrated into Tracksuit’s broader product, that capability is intended to give marketers a view across both human perception and machine-generated visibility.

Tracksuit argues these now represent two separate audiences that can shape brand health. One is made up of consumers responding directly to advertising, products and reputation. The other consists of AI systems that summarise, recommend and rank brands in ways that may influence buying decisions before a consumer reaches a company’s own channels.

Forsyth said Hall’s work suggested short-term fixes mattered less than broader brand investment.

“Building Hall showed us that short-term tactics can spike a brand’s AI visibility, but what actually moves the needle is the brand-building work that makes people already know and trust you,” said Kai Forsyth, founder of Hall and principal product manager at Tracksuit.

“Doing that inside a platform that already has human data on tens of thousands of brands gives marketers a more accurate read on where their brand actually stands and where it’s headed,” Forsyth said.

Connor Archbold, Tracksuit’s chief executive officer and co-founder, said the company sees AI as a new setting in which brand perception develops.

“Brand has always lived in people’s minds. Increasingly, it also lives inside AI,” Archbold said. “The way great brands are built hasn’t changed, but the places they’re experienced have. Our job is to help marketers understand both. Acquiring Hall allows us to combine human perception with AI visibility, giving marketers a more complete understanding of their brand. Together with our new executive leadership team, we’re building the company that is defining the next generation of brand tracking.”

Leadership team

Alongside the acquisition, Tracksuit has completed its executive leadership team as it expands internationally. Over the past six months, the company has added senior leaders through a mix of external hires and internal promotions.

The team now includes Tom Mansfield as chief marketing officer, Dan Fleming as chief operating officer, Anne Dröge as chief product officer, Cara Fonseca-Ensor as chief technology officer, Hamish Mathieson as chief revenue officer and Samantha Gadd as chief people officer, alongside Archbold as chief executive officer.

The appointments suggest Tracksuit is preparing for broader expansion as it widens the scope of its products. For the company, the acquisition of Hall sits alongside the management build-out as part of the same push to grow beyond traditional brand tracking.

Mansfield linked that strategy to the growing importance of brand in a market shaped by AI tools.

“In an AI-enabled world, brand has become one of the last remaining defensible assets for marketers. Tracksuit’s north star is to bring brand data into every boardroom with the world’s most accessible and marketer-friendly brand tracker,” said Tom Mansfield, chief marketing officer at Tracksuit. “I’m excited to help take that story to more marketers around the world, strengthen our category leadership, and build the global brand that matches the ambition of the business.”

Founded in 2021, Tracksuit provides ongoing brand health measurement designed to show not only how a brand is perceived at a given moment, but how that perception changes as channels for discovery and evaluation evolve.

The addition of Hall signals a bet that AI platforms will become a standard part of that picture, requiring the same kind of continuous measurement marketers already expect for consumer awareness and sentiment.