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"Unifying martech and ad tech gives marketers an edge"

Traditional silos for marketing technology (martech) and advertising technology (ad tech) are converging, driven by advances in AI and automation, rising privacy expectations, and the pressure for greater efficiency.

While this integrated approach is becoming the new standard, adoption of this framework is still in early stages. Marketers who have championed the convergence are seeing better business and campaign results, while many other marketers are merging their stacks, knowing the benefits will come.

This report explores this trend. It is based on original research including an EMARKETER and Zeta Global survey of 138 marketers who use ad tech and/or martech tools.

KEY TRENDS:

1. Most marketers are early in their convergence journey. Just 22.5% have fully unified martech and ad tech stacks, while 52.9% report partial integration, the survey found. Still, optimism is high— 78.2% expect full convergence within three years.
2. AI and privacy are accelerating the push to unify. Over half of marketers (52.9%) see AI as the top driver of martech– ad tech convergence. Privacy shifts and cookie loss are also major factors, with 50.7% citing a unified customer view as a main driver and 55.1% saying first-party data is far more important than it was two years ago.
3. Unified stacks deliver measurable business impact. Some 47.1% of marketers cite better attribution and measurement, 45.7% report stronger targeting and personalization, and 37.0% see faster campaign execution.
4. Technology is both the enabler and the obstacle. Customer data platforms lead, with 52.2% of marketers citing them as critical to integration, followed by APIs and middleware (50.0%). But barriers remain: 52.2% flag technology constraints, 44.9% cite data incompatibility, and 34.1% struggle with legacy systems.

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