Particular Audience’s James Taylor believes the long-discussed convergence of adtech and martech is finally becoming unavoidable. Especially through the lens of retail media.
Speaking to New Digital Age, Taylor argued that retailers can no longer afford fragmented customer experiences, disconnected systems and duplicated targeting.
Taylor, whose company sits across retail media, personalisation and search, says the industry is reaching a tipping point where commercial pressures, AI and organisational change are forcing retailers to rethink how customer experiences are managed.
To me, adtech and martech are like mirror images. Does this strike you as true?
It feels like an American and a Brit trying to have a conversation. They are often talking about the same things, but using different language and different commercial models.
Martech tends to operate more like SaaS, with clearer pricing structures and operational logic. Adtech has historically been more opaque, with margins layered throughout the supply chain.
The strange thing is that the underlying goals are increasingly similar. Both industries are trying to use data to improve customer outcomes, personalise experiences and drive commercial performance. But they have evolved separately.
Retail media exposes that disconnect very clearly because retailers have hired a lot of agency and media people who understand advertising, but not necessarily retail technology.
Is that where the biggest misunderstanding sits?
One of them, definitely. In martech, personalisation genuinely means one-to-one prediction. It means understanding what a customer is likely to want next and dynamically adapting experiences.
That is the same logic powering Netflix recommendations or Spotify Discover playlists. Retail websites already use collaborative filtering algorithms and sophisticated recommendation engines.
In adtech, personalisation has traditionally been much broader. It is often still audience or segment based, using weaker signals to predict intent. So you have two industries using the same language, but describing very different levels of sophistication.
That creates strange situations where adtech companies come into retail environments trying to build audience targeting systems on websites that already have advanced one to one recommendation capabilities built in.
You argued that retail media companies are rebuilding technology that already exists inside retailers. Why?
A lot of retail media businesses are rebuilding solved problems. Or they are trying to solve problems that martech has spent twenty years attempting to crack, like omnichannel orchestration.
Retailers already have systems managing email, SMS, loyalty, search, recommendations and customer journeys. Then a separate retail media team arrives and installs another ad server on top.
That is why consumers often see duplicate experiences, like a sponsored product appearing directly above the exact same organic product in search results.
It is one customer experience, but it is being managed by disconnected systems.
If the logic is so obvious, why has convergence taken so long?
Mostly organisational structure and inertia. Different teams own different budgets, technologies and KPIs.
In some retailers, martech sits under the CMO. In others, it sits under the CTO or CIO. Customer acquisition might sit in one department while loyalty and conversion sit somewhere else entirely.
A lot of reporting lines are historical rather than intentional. Businesses evolved in certain ways and those structures stayed in place.
The result is fragmentation. Retail media teams often operate like startups inside large retailers, but they cannot move at startup speed because every integration requires long procurement cycles and technical approvals.
What will actually force retailers to change?
AI could become the biggest forcing mechanism because AI systems are fundamentally intolerant of irrelevant experiences.
If you have duplicate products because one is sponsored and one is organic, AI systems will simply discard poor experiences. Relevance becomes everything.
That means retailers need unified ranking systems that combine sponsored products, organic recommendations, merchandising priorities and customer intent within one environment.
Amazon, Walmart and Mercado Libre understand this already because their retail media systems are deeply integrated into search and discovery infrastructure.
Other retailers often still bolt ad servers onto existing websites rather than integrating monetisation into the customer experience itself.
Who inside organisations is most likely to drive this transformation?
I think this ultimately becomes a CTO or CIO conversation rather than a pure CMO conversation.
CMOs naturally think channel by channel, whereas CTOs can look across the entire technology ecosystem and understand how systems should connect together.
When we pitch transformation strategies, technical audiences understand immediately why disconnected systems create bad customer experiences. Non-technical audiences often struggle because search, recommendation systems and machine learning still feel intimidating to many media executives.
The whole market needs to upskill around AI, machine learning and systems thinking.
What does the industry look like in five years if this convergence happens properly?
Everything should orientate around creating a consistent customer experience, not a disjointed one.
If a customer receives one personalised message organically and another identical message through sponsored media, that should really be treated as one communication system.
Retailers will gradually move away from disconnected media and marketing infrastructures towards unified systems built around customer relevance.
The businesses that understand that fastest will probably build the strongest customer relationships and the most sustainable retail media businesses over the next few year
