Yuliya Moldavska is a B2B marketing and communications professional with over seven years of in-house experience, including roles in AdTech companies such as Teads, TheViewPoint (Tatari) and Lumen Research.
MarketingWeek’s ‘2025 State of B2B Marketing Survey’ highlighted that 44% of B2B marketers say their sales team believes they could do marketing better than the actual marketing team.
If you add to this the fact that AdTech sells to marketers, you get a sector that may have the highest number of people per square metre who have professional opinions about marketing.
Despite a strong focus on the marketers we target, AdTech businesses can sometimes lose sight of the role that internal marketing plays in their long-term growth.
That’s exactly when substantial data, language and strategy gaps start to appear.
Data gap
Marketing in AdTech is a balancing act.
On the one hand, your buyer persona very often shares your job title, which comes with obvious benefits. On the other hand, this role familiarity can also be deceptive and create false assumptions around your audience’s needs.
That’s why, no matter how many last-minute requests for World Cup-related one-pagers you get this summer, they should convert into opportunities or sales qualified leads. Otherwise, they can’t be considered business driven.
The same is true of those event sponsorships, which have no clear KPIs.
Events can take up a huge part of the marketing budget spent on reinventing booths and ‘wowing’ clients, who already own all the versions of your branded notebooks, with new creative merch.
Data helps to minimise the impact of conflicting priorities and personal preferences within the company.
Paradoxically, the industry that evolves its targeting and measurement capabilities to help brands and advertisers make better media investment decisions every day, still often makes its own marketing decisions not backed up by data.
Language gap
AdTech marketers normally market to other businesses. As B2B professionals, they translate complex tech concepts into actionable solutions for clients.
To address clients’ concerns and pass each other data signals, marketers have to speak the AdTech language fluently.
At the same time, with every new term or abbreviation created, the gap between AdTech and those who actually experience advertising seems to grow wider.
Take for instance CTV, a term that means nothing to people watching ‘I’m a Celebrity…’ on the big screen and everything to those who know how popular BVOD is in the UK.
On top of industry terminology, some companies add their own ontologies to the mix to make sure their analytics and tech are interoperable and communicate with each other.
This often leaves AdTech marketers choosing between falling into the jargon trap to sound knowledgeable and risking credibility to remain relatable.
As a result, we have a language gap where AdTech marketers act as interpreters, first translating people’s ad experiences into client solutions and then into the technology that can improve these solutions.
Strategy gap
Many AdTech businesses shape their marketing approach based on what competitors are doing rather than on what their business objectives are.
This is how we end up at busy industry events walking through rows of beautifully designed roll-up banners essentially saying the same thing.
Of course, competitor analysis is a key part of the marketing strategy but it’s there to identify gaps rather than help us deal with the FOMO.
Strategy is a marketing non-negotiable. It is your ‘no’ to a reactive investment in the panel with not enough target audience in the room.
It is your ‘yes’ to the research paper your company has never produced, but which is actually 100% aligned with the business goals, core solutions and messaging.
Without strategy, marketing risks losing its focus and being on the receiving end of random tasks. Given current company resource constraints, these can range from sales lead qualification to taking headshots of new spokespeople.
Ultimately, AdTech companies should treat their marketing strategy the same as their clients’, grounding it in measurable results and not internal assumptions.
The irony is that in an industry built to enhance marketing effectiveness, we don’t hold our own marketing to the same standard. Instead, it is still often treated as a measure of industry participation rather than a driver of business growth, which marketing has the power to be.
