The real change is in the tools themselves, evolving faster, smarter, and more powerful than ever.
At New+Improved, our mission is to help build the marketing tech stack of the future and, in doing so, lift the impact and influence of marketing within companies. We’re a venture studio: we form companies deliberately, from zero to one, by finding real commercial pain, validating it hard, then pairing the right idea with exceptional founders who can scale it.
We build for marketers. For the last decade, they’ve had to fight for their seat at the table. In too many companies marketers get brought in late, asked to make things look nice, and measured on outputs rather than outcomes. Marketing has been treated like the “colouring in department”.
We think that era is ending.
It’s not about louder voices or fatter budgets. The real change is in the tools themselves, evolving faster, smarter, and more powerful than ever. And with that comes a new horizon for marketing: the ability to own, prove, and drive impact in ways that were once impossible. We see this directly in the impact the businesses we’ve helped build; Tracksuit, Ideally, Aether and Drumbeat are having. It is reinforced by the broader success of our friends like Springboards, Cuttable, Mutinex and Lumos. This technology-led perspective matters, because we believe the best way to predict the future is to create it. The “future of marketing” isn’t something that happens to marketing teams. It’s something marketing leaders choose by what they adopt, what they measure, what they automate, and what they decide to own.
Here’s the picture we see emerging, framed through four pillars. And yes, we’re deliberately using AND because the future won’t be one extreme replacing another, it will be a series of powerful combinations.
Human AND machine
As a venture studio creating technology products, it would be easy for us to paint an AI-led future where machines do the work and people “manage the prompts.” That’s not the world we’re building toward. We believe marketing’s bright future is human AND machine: A beautiful combination where technology automates the low‑value tasks and protects time and energy for the high-value ones.
Low‑fi tasks are everywhere in marketing. None of these are the work, they’re the tax around the work:
• Pulling performance data into reporting templates
• Manually resizing and versioning creative
• Chasing approvals and reconciling feedback
• Rebuilding the same decks, briefs, and business cases
• Copying insights from one tool to another
Hi‑fi tasks are what actually create growth:
• Seeing the real problem behind the symptoms
• Making trade-offs under uncertainty
• Creating meaning, not just content
• Building a point of view that customers recognise
• Connecting brand to product, pricing, and distribution
The opportunity is to remove friction so marketers can do more of what only humans can do: judgment, taste, empathy, creativity, leadership. In practice, that means marketing teams become operators of an integrated system, with machines handling repetition and humans steering the direction.
Demand AND conversion
Over the last 10 years, marketing has become heavily focused on converting current demand. That’s understandable. Social and digital channels provide fast feedback loops, dashboards, and attribution models that make conversion feel measurable and therefore defensible. But an uncomfortable truth sits underneath it. You can’t optimise your way to growth if you’re only competing for the same pool of existing demand. Eventually, you hit diminishing returns. The auctions get more expensive. The channels saturate. The incremental gains shrink. The next decade is marketing reclaiming its broader job; not just capturing demand, but creating it. We believe emerging technology will increasingly support the scientific building of demand, not by turning brand into a spreadsheet, but by making demand-building more observable, more explainable, and easier to connect to commercial outcomes.
A demand-led future changes the posture of the marketing team:
• From “performance vs brand” arguments to one connected growth system
• From quarterly campaign spikes to compounding effects over time
• From channel-by-channel optimisation to portfolio thinking across the funnel
• From “what converted” to “what created preference, memory, and momentum”
Conversion matters. It always will. But the marketing teams with the most influence will be the ones who can build demand intentionally and then convert it efficiently, without treating those as competing philosophies.
Evidence AND instinct
Marketing has long been labelled the most creative and least evidence-based part of the business. In some companies, that stereotype becomes an excuse to keep marketing out of strategic decisions. In others, it pushes marketing into over-correcting, attempting to justify every decision with a dashboard, even when the data is noisy or incomplete.
We think the future is evidence AND instinct. Instinct and creativity aren’t the opposite of evidence. They’re often our brains’ way of processing millions of data points in the form of signals from customers, culture, category history, prior campaigns, and competitive context, many of which aren’t captured neatly in a report.
The problem isn’t instinct. The problem is unaccountable instinct in the form of taste without feedback, creativity without learning loops, opinions without commercial connection. The opportunity ahead is for marketing to become dramatically better at showing evidence of effectiveness to the rest of the business, not just in terms of clicks, but in terms of outcomes executives actually care about: revenue quality, pricing power, retention, sales efficiency, and category position.This isn’t about turning marketers into analysts. It’s about giving marketing credible proof so it can make bigger bets, earlier, and be trusted when it does.
When marketing can combine instinct with evidence, it stops being a service function and becomes a strategic one. The team that can both sense what the market is doing and prove what works.
Experience AND advertising
A modern marketing team is typically tasked with promotional activity: Campaigns, content, comms, “the ad stuff.”
Meanwhile, the other three Ps of the traditional four Ps often get stripped away:
• Product sits with product teams
• Pricing sits with finance or commercial teams
• Place (distribution) sits with sales, partnerships, or operations
And customer experience, one of the biggest drivers of growth, frequently ends up owned by operational teams whose incentives are stability and efficiency, not differentiation. We believe marketing’s future involves experience AND advertising: Reclaiming influence over the full growth platform, and reconnecting what customers experience to what customers are promised. Because in the real world, growth doesn’t come from advertising alone. It comes from alignment:
• The product delivers what the story implies
• The onboarding matches the expectations set by acquisition
• The pricing model reinforces the positioning
• The service experience protects the brand promise
• The distribution channel supports the desired perception
Marketing is uniquely positioned to connect those dots because marketing sits at the intersection of customer perception and company reality. In the future we’re working toward, marketing leaders aren’t just campaign owners. They’re experience shapers, people who help orchestrate how value is created, communicated, delivered, and remembered.
So what does all of this mean?
Put the pillars together and you get a picture of a very different marketing function:
• Marketing as human judgment AND machine-scale execution
• Marketing as demand creation AND demand capture
•Marketing as instinct guided by evidence AND evidence strengthened by instinct
• Marketing as the owner of experience AND the amplifier through advertising
That shift doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the tools enable this change. Tracksuit, Ideally, Aether and Drumbeat, and all of our friends emerging out of New Zealand and Australia are shaping the marketing technology stack of the future. This is helping shape marketing teams that earn trust with evidence-based decisions, efficiently invest in creating and harvesting demand, and effectively drive business growth.
This is why New+Improved exists. Because marketing’s bright future isn’t “more ads.” It’s more influence, built on better tools, better evidence, and better outcomes.
