Trends in Adtech and Martech Markets

What kind of software are CMOs going to spend more money on in 2025? New data shows clear trends, and confirms the hype: "We're prioritizing AI in all our future purchases as well as renewals - vendors have to show us their roadmap for AI" I used Wynter to survey 100 CMOs ($50M+ companies) about their investment into marketing tech. 4 major themes emerged from our research: 1. AI & Automation (65%) Marketing teams are going for AI-driven efficiency. They wanna use AI agents for predictive analytics, campaign orchestration, and customer journey mapping. But there's skepticism about AI-generated content. "AI and ML are the big buzzwords today and for a reason. A lot of old marketing problems - from creative bandwidth to analysis, segmentation, targeting, ad optimization, are all being addressed by emerging AI tools." "Tools that drive efficiency and 'employee-multiples'. Having led marketing teams in the past with 20+ people for a scale-up, that will not happen again. I expect we can get 80% of the same effort with a team of 5-7 people." 2. Data-driven insights (21%) Static dashboards are dead. Teams demand real-time insights that connect marketing efforts to revenue. They want tools that prescribe actions, not just report numbers. "Show me marketing's contribution to revenue, not vanity metrics. A vendor couldn't give me real-time ad results. I fired them." "Data visualization is increasingly key and often lacking. Software often struggles to answer the ‘so what’ unless we do a whole load of digging and connecting of data from system to system". 3. Integration & interoperability (23%) The era of bloated martech stacks is over. CMOs want lightweight, modular tools that plug into existing systems. No one's rebuilding their stack in 2025. "I want to consolidate to fewer platforms that are well integrated with one another." 4. Personalization at scale (12%) Account-based marketing is shifting from niche to mainstream. The focus is on combining intent data with AI to deliver hyper-targeted campaigns that feel 1:1, even at scale. "Combining intent data with AI, that's the magic. ABM isn't a strategy—it's what happens when AI meets intent data." "Upcoming tool purchases all HAVE to enable an AI-driven GTM motion" For CMOs, 2025 is about efficiency (AI), clarity (data), flexibility (integration), and relevance (ABM).

It's released! The new Martech for 2025 report by Frans Riemersma and myself has shipped. It’s 108 pages of our latest research and analysis of what’s actually happening with marketing technology in the maelstrom of AI madness. No heaps of hype. Just hard data and a hopefully helpful framing of the facts. You can pick up a free copy here: https://lnkd.in/eTqKv3WM The centerpiece of our report is one of the most in-depth studies of gen AI use cases in marketing today. It’s changing quickly, but this is a snapshot of over 50 marketing use cases, with data on which are being used frequently or infrequently — and for which use cases are marketers leveraging embedded AI in existing platforms or turning to new AI tools. Yet there’s more AI happenings beyond commercial SaaS products in the martech landscape. There’s the new model of “service-as-a-software” — a clever play on the SaaS acronym. Instead of paying for seats or compute/storage use, where it’s up to the buyer to wield those tools successfully to achieve the outcomes they’re seeking, a new generation of AI agents are being offered on a cost-per-outcome basis. But the even bigger change we see is the explosion of custom apps being created with explicit — or more revolutionary implicit — software development with AI co-pilots and agents. This is the AI-ification of low-code/no-code capabilities that have been empowering IT, marketing operations professionals, and “citizen developer” power users to build their own specialized apps and automations. And then there's AI agents that will build software programs at the behest of users — without those users even realizing it! The report also includes fascinating interviews with expert leaders from the five sponsors who supported our research over these past five months: Chris O'Neill, CEO of GrowthLoop "End-to-End Marketing on Your Data Cloud with AI" Tejas Manohar, CEO of Hightouch "Why the Next Wave Beyond CDPs is AI Decisioning" Greg Brunk, Head of Product at MetaRouter "A CDP's Best Friend: 'Shifting Left' Data Quality" Sara Faatz, Director, Technology Community Relations at Progress "Lessons of Composability for Marketing Operations" Jonathan (Jon) Moran, Head of Martech Solutions Marketing at SAS "Filling the Gaps in Governance for Generative AI" A few good hours of martech reading awaits you. As does an amazing 2025 ahead! #martech

Publicis Groupe's latest earnings are a fascinating case study in the current state of advertising. They've practically written the playbook on the ad tech-driven model, and their +5.9% Q2 organic growth proves it. Their "Connected Media" engine, powered by Epsilon, is a powerhouse in the market. No question, they are a dominant force at the top of the funnel. But the report also reveals the industry’s next massive challenge. Their tech consulting arm, Publicis Sapient, is stumbling, with leadership bracing for a negative performance for the full year. Why? Because the monolithic, one-size-fits-all IT project is dying, feeling the pressure from delayed client capex spend. It’s being replaced by something faster, smarter, and more agile. The future isn't another giant, all in one platform. It's composable marketing technology. Brands are now hand picking best in class tools for every job—like Braze for engagement, Databricks for data, OfferFit for decisioning, etc.—and "stitching" them together. This demands a new breed of partner, one that complements the ad tech prowess. This is the entire thesis behind Stitch. We believe the next wave of value creation lies in being hyper specialized experts who can maximize the ROI of this new composable world. While the giants own the ad tech that acquires the customer, the real, sustainable growth comes from the martech/CRM that retains and monetizes that customer. The playbook for the next decade in professional services will be built on: - Hyper specialization in the critical, revenue driving nodes of the new martech stack. - Deep expertise in making these disparate, best in class tools work in concert to create a seamless customer journey. The last decade was about optimizing ad spend. The next multi billion dollar prize will go to those who can make the composable martech stack sing. That’s the future we're building.

Must Read! The MKT1 B2B Marketing Tools Survey https://lnkd.in/gA6xp_f9 Emily Kramer's latest MKT1 B2B Marketing Tools Survey just dropped, and the results tell a fascinating story about the current state of martech adoption. Here's the most telling insight: There's almost no overlap between what marketers consider "critical" to their business versus what they're "obsessed" with right now. The "Critical" tools (what we know and trust): - HubSpot dominates with 71+ responses - ChatGPT, Canva, Salesforce, and Figma round out the essentials - These tools have risen to dominance over many years and are not likely to be unseated, but rather augmented by other AI solutions The “Excited to Try” tools (what has our attention, and maybe a bit of fear): - Clay leads the excitement with massive mindshare, followed by Loveable and Tofu - Clay and Loveable both have a steep learning curve, which could explain why so many people have not yet tried them (but they’re excited to!) - With lower barriers to entry, new companies are popping up every month. TBD what the longevity of some of these will be What this gap tells us: • We're in the early adoption phase of AI marketing tools. We're excited about the new possibilities but still running our businesses on the old infrastructure. • The tools we’re excited about aren't necessarily the ones we depend on...and we may need to hedge our bets as the landscape shifts and evolves Some other observations by Emily:  🧟♂️ Legacy tools are falling behind. What once felt modern now feels clunky, especially in CRMs and website builders. 🤖 Workflow and AI-driven creation tools are capturing marketers' imagination  🔗 There's a new middle layer emerging between CRM data and content - powered by AI and automation  🎯 We're all becoming more "creative," "technical," and "analytical" as these tools democratize capabilities, and organizations demand “AI-first” approaches to every business need What’s your take? What AI tools have made it onto your “Critical” list? What tools are you evaluating with the goal of incorporating into business-critical workflows? What products have you cooled on/moved past? Huge shout out to Emily Kramer and the MKT1 team, plus partners Typeform, 42 Agency and Caspian Studios for this incredibly valuable research. #MarTech #B2BMarketing #AITools #MarketingStack #MKT1 Emily Kramer

Have you downloaded Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma’s Martech for 2025 report yet? The research and insights they’ve compiled paint a compelling picture of the current and future state of #marketing and #AI. Here are three of my biggest takeaways from the report: 1️⃣ Marketers are largely using AI to find and consume data more easily. The report found that 5 of the top 12 AI use cases for marketers were related to finding and leveraging information. This validates the importance of getting data into marketers’ hands. That’s where the data cloud and a composable solution come into play — they give marketers and AI models access to a single source of truth for customer data. Rather than relying on the data team and manual everything , marketers need to be able to create and iterate at lightspeed. 2️⃣ Half of organizations have policies in place for GenAI usage; half don’t. Well-defined policies and governance will make or break your AI success. We have a responsibility to protect our customers’ data (and our proprietary information). Freedom in a framework will unleash creativity. Policy guardrails don't have to restrict our AI efforts. It adds critical protection for the company, establishes how you'll use these tools, and sets teams free to maximize experimentation within those policies. The goal should be to make it easy for your employees to use AI tools in a protected way. The data also revealed that those without policy were more likely to say they stopped using GenAI because it didn’t save them time. Those who did have a policy seemed to be more thoughtful about AI’s expense. In other words, governance guides better results, including time and cost savings. 3️⃣ Just 13% of businesses are only using AI that’s embedded in their existing tools rather than adopting new AI tools. At the same time, six out of 10 marketers say they’re using *both* new genAI tools and embedded AI in existing tools. This points to the massive disruption in the market right now. Buyers can choose from a wide range of options, and most are sourcing new AI tools even if they already have access to AI in their existing tech stack.  Going forward, AI for AI’s sake won't be good enough. Vendors can't just use “AI features” as a standalone value prop; they need to point to tangible business results, especially top-line growth. Software vendors must articulate the value AI brings through their product and express a clear point of view. AI is everywhere… but the brands that show real business value will last. As you browse the report, which findings are shaping your thinking heading into the new year? You can access the Martech for 2025 report here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gNU5Dwai

There’s an Ocean of Marketing AI Tools—Now What?👇 The recent report from Chief MarTec on the AI MarTech landscape is a good resource for companies looking to advance their AI journey. It offers a detailed analysis for senior leaders, as well as practical frameworks to help businesses plan strategically for AI use cases. 🤖 After diving into the report, Sohil Parekh and I reflected on three key takeaways 🤔 that can help businesses make sense of this evolving space. Here’s what stood out: 1️⃣ The Evolving AI Ecosystem: Mega-Tech Meets Independents The report highlights the rapid evolution of AI in MarTech, driven by a mix of mega-tech companies like Adobe and Salesforce alongside smaller, independent players creating innovative applications. 💡 Action Step: For your AI roadmap, consider balancing exploration between these giants and niche solutions to maximize learning. 2️⃣ Content Development Is Leading—But at What Cost? Content development dominates AI use cases in marketing, which makes sense given its direct, measurable impact. But there’s a tradeoff: more complex areas like customer data integration or sophisticated analytics often require deeper investments in internal data integrity and custom tools. 💡 Action Step: Are you prioritizing the easy wins or laying the groundwork for high-value, long-term AI opportunities? 3️⃣ The Role of Advanced Marketing Teams in AI Roadmapping The most forward-thinking marketing teams are mapping the landscape holistically, evaluating multiple use cases, and aligning them with their strategic goals. This isn’t just about deploying tools—it’s about defining where AI can deliver the most meaningful business value. 💡 Action Step: Are you thinking beyond tools and asking how AI can transform your broader marketing strategy? I’ll post the report in the comments. —--------- Reach out to discuss 📧 ☕ Follow & Subscribe for more   🚀 Growth Amplifier 🚀  Insights on Business and Personal Growth Subscribe: https://lnkd.in/gqT5iKXb

Putting this down for posterity. The next 20 years of martech investing won't look anything like the last 20. The last 20 have been... meh. People point to Canva and Figma and Frame, but those are very horizontal products that capture a ton of people. There have not been many martech decacorns. Because mkartech, and especially Creative Tech have always run up against a problem: people. At a certain point, every company wants strategy, intelligence and hands-on-keyboard custom to them. That's why we have agencies, and why marketing departments can sprawl into the thousands of people. But we're exiting the API era and entering the AI era. Think computer use technologies like Operator from OpenAI. AI can think through strategy with you. Across platforms. It has intelligence - more than most media buyers learning Facebook today on your account. It can execute hands-on-keyboard execution. Optimization. Testing. Except it can do it 24/7. Marketing technology in the AI era will still be guided by humans. Creatives. Media strategists. Executives. But the half-trillon dollar agency space will be completely upended by agents and software. And by making it so much easier to create creative and buy media and test platforms, the market will expand 20X. Just like SaaS didn't just fill the market for on-prem, it expanded it 20X. Restaurants didn't have on-prem servers. But now they all use cloud products. Restaurants don't use Ogilvy and Mather today, but they will get all the same service in 2035. It's been fun talking with investors who see the world the same way we do. But most don't. It's a crazy switch to imagine going from a 95% people vertical to a 95% AI one. When the whole definition of the space has been around people. And the folks who most don't want to believe it is going to happen, are the ones currently in the space. But there is no doubt in mind it is coming. And I'm excited to build it!

In 2025, the RevTech noise is deafening. Everyone’s pushing new tools and AI promises. But the real question for MOps pros isn’t what’s new—it’s what’s working? A few trends we’re watching closely: Integration is now table stakes. It’s not “can it connect?” anymore—it’s how seamlessly. If your tools need spreadsheets to bridge the gaps, that’s a liability, not a solution. AI is only as smart as your systems. Early wins are coming from AI-powered enrichment, deduplication, and lead routing—but they only work when your data is clean and structured. No amount of AI fixes a broken foundation. Ownership is shifting back to MOps. More teams are pulling RevTech admin responsibilities out of IT and sales ops and returning them to where they belong—inside the go-to-market motion. Metrics are finally evolving. Pipeline impact has replaced MQLs. Teams are tracking time-to-pipeline, stack ROI, and attribution confidence. If your stack can’t support these, it might be time to rethink the setup. These shifts aren’t about chasing trends. They’re about tightening alignment and building for scale. Let’s talk about it. Join the conversation inside the Marketing Ops Community. #RevOps #MarketingOps #Martech #GTM #RevenueTech #MOPro #TechStackStrategy

The pressure is increasing on channel marketing to deliver at a new level of scale, complexity, and personalization, and to figure out the people, processes, programs and underlying technology that will drive competitive advantage in the AI era. Gone are the days where you could kick out some MDF dollars, co-sponsor a few customer events, slap your partner's logo on a brochure, and call it a day. With the emergence of a new digital-first (or digital-only) buyer, a platform economy which favors numerous (concurrent) partnerships surrounding this buyer, the end of the cookie resulting in less powerful martech/adtech tools, and a marketing journey that doesn't end at the SQL hand-off, we are at a major inflection point. The responsibility of recognizing early buyer intent signals is moving from growth hackers in the marketing department to channel marketers. Without access to third-party data, companies must now ramp up their second- and first-party data strategies which includes: 1. Having more partners, especially co-selling and co-marketing partners (affiliates, affinity, advocates, ambassadors, influencers), executing their social, search, email, and syndicated content strategies on a vendor-owned platform. Through-channel marketing (TCMA) is having its moment in the sun as the need for buyer intent data can be shared among partners, vendors, distributors, and digital marketplaces - and doesn't require purchasing from Google or Facebook. 2. More emphasis on data sharing throughout the customer journey. Mapping tools (think Crossbeam or PartnerTap) are the next layer of the stack that will create partnering moments when two (or more) companies are sharing important customer moments from their CRM and marketing automation platforms. Attribution tools (think impact.com or Partnerize) also layer in here as the clicks, likes, and other engagement tell an important story about the 28 moments on average a customer spends in their considered purchase. Attribution is quickly moving from B2C to B2B as buying behaviors merge between consumer and business. 3. Rethinking program elements such as deal registration, opportunity management, and lead passing. These resell-oriented processes (which require human workflows) will become more powerful as AI copilots and agents autonomously leverage these tools to the benefit of the partner (protection in deals, visibility, and profitability coming from extra margins or points). 4. Leveraging ecosystem orchestration tools (such as WorkSpan, PartnerStack, or TIDWIT) to map the 7 partners surrounding a deal and the 7 layers of the tech stack that will drive the customer outcome. Also leverage orchestration players such as traditional distribution, cloud distribution, telco TSDs, managed services platforms, and perhaps most importantly, digital marketplaces to get visibility to second-party data. Channel marketers can't underestimate the power of AI in this new era.