Seven in 10 marketing leaders say they struggle to connect with audiences because of a complex network of martech solutions and persistent identity challenges, according to new TransUnion research released this week.

The finding puts a hard number on a problem practitioners already feel daily: the average enterprise stack has grown into a tangle of point solutions, and identity resolution — the ability to recognize the same person across channels, devices and identifiers — remains the weak link. TransUnion, which sells identity and marketing solutions itself, surveyed marketing leaders to quantify how stack complexity translates into lost connection with customers.

What does the research actually say?

The headline statistic is blunt. Roughly 70% of marketing leaders report difficulty reaching and connecting with their audiences. They attribute that struggle to two intertwined causes:

• A complex network of martech solutions that does not integrate cleanly
• Identity challenges that prevent a unified view of the customer

For teams operating email platforms, CDPs, ad tools and analytics suites side by side, the diagnosis will sound familiar. Each tool may hold a fragment of the customer record, and without reliable identity resolution, those fragments never merge into one actionable profile.

Why does identity remain the bottleneck?

Identity problems compound every downstream capability. Audience segmentation, personalization, measurement and frequency capping all depend on knowing who is who across touchpoints.

Signal loss has intensified the issue in recent years. Cookie deprecation, privacy regulation and platform-level restrictions on mobile identifiers have shrunk the pool of durable identifiers. Marketers who once leaned on third-party cookies now need alternative approaches — first-party data strategies, authenticated experiences and identity graphs — to maintain addressability.

TransUnion's research suggests many organizations have not yet closed that gap. The stack grew faster than the identity layer underneath it.

What should practitioners take away?

For martech operators, the research frames a prioritization question. Adding another point tool may widen the very complexity the surveyed leaders cite. The alternative path:

• Audit the current stack for overlapping capabilities and integration gaps
• Invest in identity resolution that spans channels and identifiers
• Consolidate customer data so segmentation and activation draw from one profile
• Treat first-party data capture as an addressability strategy, not just a compliance one

Vendors in the identity space — TransUnion among them — are positioning identity graphs as the connective tissue that makes existing martech investments pay off. The research implicitly supports that pitch: the problem is not a shortage of tools, but the inability to link them to a single customer view.

The bigger picture

The 70% figure signals that martech consolidation and identity infrastructure have moved from nice-to-have to table stakes. Marketing leaders who cannot resolve identity across their stacks will keep paying for media, personalization engines and analytics that underperform because they operate on fragmented data.

TransUnion's study joins a growing body of vendor research pointing the same direction: the constraint on marketing effectiveness has shifted from media access to data identity. Teams that fix the identity layer first position every other tool in the stack to work as intended.