Why Marketers Need to Bridge the Gap Between Martech & Adtech
The boundaries between Martech and Adtech are dissipating, prompting a necessary reevaluation of how technology supports marketing objectives. Many brands have invested in connecting their marketing systems, but there’s still a disconnect.
Let’s explore how leading brands create competitive advantage by integrating Martech and Adtech.
A Quick History Lesson
Martech and Adtech evolved on separate tracks. For years, Martech focused on owned media channels (email, websites, mobile apps) while Adtech covered paid media (display, search, social). Different purposes. Different tools. Different data. Naturally, they were built in silos.
This separation made sense 15 years ago, but today, forward-thinking organizations recognize the value in bringing these systems together. Brands that connect their Martech and Adtech see significant improvements in marketing performance, customer retention, and ROI.
Why These Silos Are So Stubborn
Why does the gap between Martech and Adtech still persist for so many brands?
Data fragmentation is the obvious culprit. Customer information is spread throughout your stack, making it impossible to see the complete picture of who your customers are and how they interact with your brand.
Organizational structure creates additional barriers. Paid media teams rarely speak to email teams. Digital acquisition groups may never collaborate with retention specialists. Each group has different metrics and goals, creating a natural divide that technology alone cannot fix.
Tech stack bloat compounds the problem. Marketing departments have become digital hoarders, accumulating dozens of point solutions that solve specific problems but rarely interconnect.
Connecting the Dots
When you tear down walls between Martech and Adtech, the benefits are immediate. You get a clear view of each customer. Instead of guessing, you can see the whole path to purchase from ad impression to engagement to conversion, resulting in improved intelligence and better attribution. You can move beyond misleading last click models to understand how all touchpoints influence conversions.
The result is a connected journey where customers experience your brand consistently across channels. But the real power comes from creating a continuous data flywheel:
- Early engagement signals from prospects become leading indicators that inform future acquisition strategies.
- What you learn about successful customer acquisition directly shapes how you cross-sell and up-sell.
- When customers convert, those events reveal similar signals to find your next best prospects.
Each part of the cycle strengthens the others, creating an ever-improving intelligence system that works across both marketing and advertising channels.
The Tech That Ties It Together
A CDP provides the critical connection between systems and serves as your central intelligence hub. It collects and cleans data from across your tech stack, then applies deterministic identity resolution to create unified customer profiles that power both marketing and advertising tools.
With proper identity resolution, you can control ad frequency across channels and reduce wasted spend by recognizing that multiple digital identifiers represent one person. CDPs help identify and reach less visible online audiences, convert partial data into usable profiles for omnichannel engagement, and differentiate anonymous visitors from known customers.
Read next! Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Explained
Behind the scenes, AI agents work to automatically map data and build universally accessible taxonomies across your organization. These agents are able to orchestrate complex workflows through integrated API ecosystems and turn raw customer data from every corner of your stack into actionable intelligence. The complexity stays hidden while marketers get a unified platform that acts as their central command center.
Read next! Reduce the Distance Between Data and Action with AI Agents
Examples From the Field
Adtech to Martech: Driving QSR Growth
A popular QSR brand wanted to acquire new loyalty program members, but their aggregated customer data presented a challenge. Their data lived in one place, but because it wasn’t resolved at the identity level, they couldn’t tie engagement events to real people.
We connected the dots between their datasets and analyzed their existing loyalty members to inform new audiences. We studied signals like competitive brand interactions, engagement with relevant product categories, and characteristics shared by their most valuable members.
Then we used the data to build custom strategies for customer acquisition along with recommendations for local competitive positioning, targeted multicultural outreach, and relevant product suggestions based on regional preferences.
As the brand started generating more prospect conversions, it was clear that their existing CRM strategies felt disconnected because they weren’t informed by upstream Adtech data. By leveraging data from our acquisition efforts, like why customers converted, we could inform post-conversion engagement workflows in their CRM.
This enabled relevant, individualized welcome messages that reflected the customer journey and a connected end-to-end experience.
Martech to Adtech: Finding New Furniture Buyers
We worked with a furniture retailer looking for new ways to expand their reach. They had massive amounts of data in their ESP and CDP and were curious how they could leverage their 1st party data to inform acquisition strategies.
Looking at their existing customers’ data through CustomerPulse, we discovered a strong signal around mattress purchases. This was interesting because although the furniture brand carried mattresses, they weren’t a focal point. The data revealed that their existing customers were in need of mattresses but were purchasing them elsewhere since the brand had underinvested in marketing the mattresses they already carried.
By seeing this need state in their CustomerPulse data, we identified an opportunity to unlock new acquisition strategies while also driving growth from existing customers by highlighting this underutilized product line.
We then developed targeted campaigns focused on mattress marketing and tracked results across touchpoints. This enabled them to connect communications and attribute which ads led to actual sales, unlocking an entirely new revenue stream from inventory they already had.
The insight came directly from analyzing existing customer behavior in their Martech systems and then applying it to create more effective Adtech strategies that promoted their overlooked mattress category.
How Marketers Benefit from Adtech and Martech Integration
Marketers who bring Martech and Adtech together give their customers a more connected experience powered by intelligence that goes far beyond basic first-party data. Imagine a customer browsing winter jackets on their lunch break but abandoning their cart:
- That afternoon, they see your social ad featuring the jacket—but your system knows they live in Texas with a ski trip planned, so the ad shows mountain weather styling.
- Your platform recognizes they have a family of four, so that evening they receive an email with gear recommendations for the whole family.
- Your system detects they visited your competitor’s store, so the email includes a competitive price match offer.
- After purchasing, location data triggers a mobile notification about complementary accessories perfect for their upcoming trip.
Everything feels planned and thoughtful with the consumer at the center, powered by insights that simple first-party data alone couldn’t provide. You’ll stop paying to show ads to people who have already bought your product or aren’t in-market to purchase and you’ll control how often you reach people across channels. No more accidentally over-saturating customers with the same message or trying to acquire them after they’ve already converted.
With one system handling everything from first contact to loyal repeat buyers, you can see exactly what works. Full journey measurement shows how early brand awareness drives final sales.
How Agencies Benefit
Agencies can develop new revenue streams by leveraging platforms like Zeta to sell CDP, ESP, and DSP services in a single package, enabling them to build and control their own technology stack for independence and differentiation.
Agencies also solve data privacy challenges by providing clients direct access to onboard their first-party data. The agency doesn’t incur PII liabilities but can still deliver valuable intelligence. Plus, you can apply your branding to the platform for a consistent client experience and offer something truly valuable in a crowded market.
Break Down the Walls, Brick by Brick
Your customers don’t see your marketing and ads as separate things. They just see your brand. It’s time your systems aligned. When you bring Adtech and Martech together, you create experiences that make sense to the people you’re trying to reach.
Start with small steps if needed.
- Audit and map out where your data lives.
- Uncover gaps and inefficiencies in your systems.
- Create a collaborative environment where each team can see true value in a connected ecosystem.
- Look for one connection point where intelligence from one system could support another.
The brands who embrace and champion this mindset will pull ahead of competitors.
Your customers already expect you to know who they are and what they want. Now you can meet and exceed those expectations and create true client delight.
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