Navigating the Adtech and Martech Landscape: A 2023 Guide

Propelled by the dominance of digital channels, global ad spending is projected to hit $1 trillion by 2025. Simultaneously, over 8,000 martech solutions promise to amplify brand reach and loyalty. With technology now powering everything from media buying to customer analytics, seamlessly integrating adtech and martech is imperative. This guide covers the must-know solutions in each ecosystem and how aligning efforts creates superior consumer journeys driving business success.

Decoding Adtech and Martech

Adtech refers to the array of solutions that enable and optimize digital advertising across channels like search, social, display, video and connected TV. Key adtech capabilities help you:

• Manage and activate first and third-party customer data to power targeting
• Automate media buying across publishers to lower CPMs and improve campaign performance
• Provide transparency into campaign delivery for better optimization

Martech on the other hand focuses on technology for engaging and understanding brand audiences throughout their customer lifecycle. Martech solutions like:

• Marketing automation platforms that coordinate cross-channel campaigns through triggers and personalized content at scale
• Web and marketing analytics providing attribution modeling and a quantified view of the customer journey
• Search engine optimization and social media management software that amplify brand visibility and traffic

With in-housing of digital capabilities accelerating, brands now often oversee their adtech and martech stacks directly. This strategic shift enables connecting data across departments to create integrated consumer journeys not possible in siloed agency-client relationships.

Before exploring top solutions in both these worlds, let‘s analyse the trajectories of adtech and martech spend showing their rising strategic importance.

The Adtech & Martech Landscape by the Numbers

Gartner predicts global adtech spend to grow 15.6% YoY in 2024, hitting $57 billion. Contributing drivers include ongoing digitization across media, brands optimizing towards business outcome-based metrics, and preparing for disruptive changes like the deprecation of third-party cookies.

The martech landscape sees similar meteoric growth. B2B analyst firm ChiefMartec‘s famed martech supergraphic now lists over 9,000 solutions across 50+ marketing categories. Gartner estimates place current annual martech budgets for enterprises over $100 million at $3.4 million on average, set to increase to $6.4 million by 2025.

With exponential expansion across both domains, having specialized expertise in adtech and martech is now mandatory. For seamless data connectivity, brands often align their tech stacks under executive roles like the Chief Marketing Technology Officer that straddle both domains. Still, even smaller teams can benefit from understanding the adtech vs martech landscape.

Let‘s analyze the key solutions marketers should focus on under both areas:

Top Adtech Capabilities to Have On Your Stack

As digital undertakes the lion‘s share of media budgets, specialized adtech has stepped up to power data-led buying and optimized delivery at scale. Key adtech solutions to know:

Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)

DSPs enable automatic and high frequency buying of digital advertising inventory across publishers, exchanges and networks. Rather than RFPing individual partners, DSPs algorithmically find the optimal combination of placements, formats and pricing across over 8 trillion daily bid opportunities to meet campaign goals.

DSPs integrate directly with all major programmatic advertising channels and leverage enormous volumes of historical data to optimize future delivery. Performance metrics allow granular analysis of partnerships and tactics for future optimization.

And with users across search, social, ecommerce and consume over 6 hours of digital media per day on average, DSPs ability to combine hundreds of data signals to reach customers in their journey is invaluable.

Data Management Platforms (DMPs)

A key piece of unlocking advertising ROI is having unified and actionable data underlying targeting. DMPs help create a persistent database of first, second, and third party audience data tied to CRM and past campaign performance signals.

DMPs structure data into targetable segments that can be activated across programmatic media buys. This powers precision targeting while respecting consumer privacy through pipelines enabling insight generation without sharing underlying raw personal data.

With CMOs struggling to connect findings across disjointed analytics data silos, DMPs provide the connective tissue for advertising efforts. They enable marketers to harness insights from past campaigns using tools like multi-touch attribution rather than starting from scratch.

Connected TV (CTV) Ad Platforms

Once considered a nice-to-have extension of linear TV, CTV viewership has exploded in the last 3 years. 52% of US households are now estimated to have at least one CTV device. Specialized CTV ad platforms help buyers harness this at scale:

Instead of having to negotiate placements within individual streaming apps and channels, these platforms enable easy activation of CTV ad campaigns using existing programmatic workflows.

With unrivaled targeting ability thanks to streaming viewers logging in through provider accounts, CTV holds tremendous promise for DR-led customer conversion efforts across DTC brands.

Ad Measurement & Verification

Lastly, understanding campaign impact beyond vanity metrics is vital for optimizing investments. Ad measurement tools like those offered by analytics leaders Nielsen, Comscore and similar specialists equip marketers to gauge real outcomes and continuously improve delivery.

Capabilities like multi-touch attribution quantify impact across the entirety of a customer journey rather than last-click models. Viewability metrics ensure advertisements have genuine opportunity to influence audiences amidst endless scrolling on social feeds and websites. Frequency capping avoids over-exposure from saturating potential customers.

These insights help allocate budgets most effectively across channels and fine-tune targeting. But with domain fraud and brand safety persistent threats, third-party verification remains crucial for confidence that traffic isn‘t machine-generated and contexts brand-appropriate.

Must-Have Martech Capabilities

While thousands of point solutions exist, these martech pillars equip brands to understand and nurture customers throughout their journeys:

Marketing Analytics Foundation

Orchestrating seamless consumer journeys requires an analytics foundation providing unambiguous view of performance. Best-of-breed marketing analytics like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics track granular data across channels and touchpoints.

Custom attribution models accurately credit impact across owned, earned and paid media. Exploring traffc sources, engagement metrics and conversion events by filters like campaign, creative style, referrer and more equips data-backed optimization. Integrated ad cost data and ROI reporting steer budgets maximally.

Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP)

MAPs like those above streamlines multi-channel campaign execution, leveraging triggers to deliver contextual messages aligned to individuals‘ journeys. Website interactions, CRM data, purchase history and more personalize nurture campaigns across email, paid media, SMS and more.

Sophisticated MAPs feature A/B testing for email subject lines, content and landing pages baked in to continually lift performance. Sales teams access the same centralized database to know prospect engagement for smarter follow-ups, aligning efforts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Software

SEO can feels opaque with Google‘s ranking factors constantly evolving. Yet solutions like Moz, SEMrush and Ahrefs equip brands via:

• Technical audits spotting issues impairing organic visibility
• Keyword research for uncovering high-potential targets
• Rank tracking assessing category competitiveness
• Link building workflows to steadily improve domain authority

While an organic presence takes patience to cultivate, this high-equity channel drives over 50% of website traffic across most industries. With users conditioned to trust top results, page #1 Google domination makes sales cycles seamless.

Social Media Management (SMM) Tools

For direct brand-to-consumer connection, social media is unmatched. SMM platforms like Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Sprinklr help coordinate engaging at scale across leading networks via:

• Centralized content scheduling optimized for algorithmic visibility
• Competitor benchmarking with performance reports
• Monitoring brand mentions and community engagement
• CRM integration attaching social profiles to customer records

With 4.5 billion global social media users in 2022, thoughtful participation is mandatory – rather than viewing channels as ancillary. Best practices evolution and ever-changing formats make SMM systems essential.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

Finally, connecting data across solutions discussed enabling unified views of individuals that persist across sessions. CDPs centralize first, second and third party data from analytics, web, CRM, POS and more. These fuel activation across targeting and personalization use cases like:

• Building rich customer lifetime value models combining behavioral and transactional data
• Micro-segmentation for contextual cross-channel campaigns
• Predicting purchase risk based on engagement patterns

As data privacy legislation rightfully prioritizes consumer trust – CDPs grant control over data retention rules and access. With boundaries estimatd to shift again upon third-party cookie deprecation, centralized and ethical data infrastructure is key.

The Power of Integrated Adtech & Martech Strategies

With an overload of disparate solutions, driving superior ROI necessitates connecting martech and adtech. Joint ownership of metrics tied to pipeline velocity and customer LTV foster replacing isolated efforts with cross-functional orchestration.

Enabled by bi-directional data connectivity thanks to batched or streaming pipelines, insights uncovered in post-campaign analysis automatically inform media buying targeting and creatives. Algorithms crunch signals from on-site searches, browse abandonment and past purchases to reach consumers where they are most receptive.

In the other direction, ad exposures, form fills and app installs append CRM records, with engagement scoring automatically triggering tailored re-targeting. Ensuing sales get attributed back to the combination of channels that influenced individuals.

This closed loop empowers incrementally improving efforts based on what resonates, without losing sight of the big picture. For both new customer acquisition and retentation use cases, data and activity flow across departments. Eliminating organizational friction through technology is imperative to keep pace with ever-fragmenting consumer attention spans.

Brands like retail giant Target, Sephora and more have become emblematic for how utilizing technology for tailored audience experiences drives measurable business advantage. But integrated orchastration doesn‘t require an enterprise scale – internals teams across any size of organization can benefit.

Privacy-Aware Data Strategies to Future-Proof Martech & Adtech

With data underpinning personalization, privacy changes blocking cookies necessitate strategy evolution. Google‘s Privacy Sandbox and regulations like GDPR, CCPA and upcoming Federal-level legislation require respecting consumer trust through consent requirements and responsible data governance.

Brands are responding on multiple fronts:

Prioritizing first-party data collection via loyalty programs and subscription services even for D2C companies. Requesting opt-ins through contextual value exchanges, whether exclusive promotions or content previews equity is shared.

Embracing contextual methods beyond individual tracking for ad targeting and content recommendations. Leveraging signals like reading patterns on article pages have shown early promise to preserve utility even as past user-level targeting gets blocked.

Implementing data clean rooms enabling securely combining first-party data across brands to uncover insights collectively that aren‘t possible isolated. Facilitated by neutral tech providers, these allow collaboration without sharing competitively-sensitive data.

Considering emerging identity solutions from technology partners leveraging on-device ML and statistical methods to provide continuity in tracking and targeting where previously cookies enabled. With caveats around personalization fidelity and scale, testing is advised.

With evolution speeding up rather than slowing down, agility regarding new data sources and integration approaches separates leading brands when it comes to customer intelligence. Maintaining trust while delivering delightful experiences is simultaneously possible with the right foundations.

Key Emerging Adtech and Martech Capabilities

Staying ahead of the curve with marketing technology requires keeping tabs on bleeding edge solutions before they hit mainstream:

The open data movement – Providing benchmarks and baselines for campaign performance comparison, marketplaces like Lotame Panorama enable advertisers to understand typical CPMs for audience segments. This brings help previously only accessible by large brands to small teams.

Driver-based planning – Shifting budget decisions to business outcomes, GePath‘s Cross Channel Measurement solutions uses incrementality studies and predictive models for superior transparency into marketing‘s financial influence.

Entertainment analytics – With video-on-demand pivotal for customer acquisition and brand building, solutions like TV Squared enable connecting device-ID level viewership analytics to site engagement and sales. This closes measurement gaps as OTT consumption has skyrocketed.

Conversational marketing – Platforms leveraging AI like Clubhouse, Telegram, WhatsApp Business and more enable brands to engage audiences through interactive audio, text or multimedia. With communication norms changing amongst Gen Z and Millennial cohorts, marketers must explore next-gen social spaces.

Brands that embrace technology innovation navigating rising data regulations and ownership shifts across adtech and martech will sustain competitive advantage. With exponentially expanding choice but also organizational bandwidth pressure, focusing on high-impact integrated technology that moves business metrics is key. Reach out to discuss how forming an optimal adtech-martech roadmap specifically tailored to your growth objectives.