By Erfan Djazmi, NDA columnist and former Chief Digital Officer, Mediahubww
In the 80s, the London Stock Exchange scrapped a century-old rule of brokers acting for clients and jobbers buying and selling shares on their own account. The City called the change The Big Bang. Firms could now combine both roles and trading moved from the crowded noisy floor to electronic screens.
Marketing has had its own wall for twenty years. On one side, adtech answered a simple question: how do we reach more of the right people efficiently? It bought audiences through auctions, bid streams and impressions by the billions. On the other, martech answered a different question: how do we build a relationship with people we already know? It managed CRM records, email journeys and loyalty.
This all resulted in different teams, different data and different KPIs.
What convergence looks like
The transformations I have seen work treat a CDP and identity journey as four layers.
1. Foundation is first-party data, unified into a single customer view and deduplicated, so Susan Smith, who has moved house three times in ten years and remarried, shows up once rather than five times.
2. Enrichment adds third-party depth and anonymised panels, handled in privacy-safe ways, so each record is built for a person. The client’s database becomes a people spine that can express who someone is, what they do, what they believe and how they behave in the category.
3. Collaboration opens clean rooms (slowly emerging as table stakes), where, for example, a brand can prove it can drive incremental sales for a retailer and earn a share of the verified lift.
4. Intelligence turns the stack into better decisions and predictions. Propensity scores and next-best-action are wired into outcomes and executed across paid media and CRM, powered by agentic tooling.
A small cast of platforms powers this architecture. Adobe’s Journey Optimizer, Target and Campaign manage lifecycle messaging and personalisation; walled-garden DSPs buy media; and LiveRamp or InfoSum provide clean rooms without exposing raw records. Salesforce, Adobe and Tealium can become the control centres linking CRM, paid media and cross-channel frequency caps.
That is the architecture in theory. In practice, these platforms rarely operate as one system. eMarketer finds 22.5% of marketers call their ad and marketing tech fully unified. Adobe, Salesforce and Braze sell the retention stack, The Trade Desk, DV360, Meta and Amazon sell performance, and integration stops at audience sharing.
So, it’s less of a big bang and more like a series of sparks going off, from the few who have run both sides.
The rare breeds
Laura Moore is the rare operator. She was European Head of Customer Strategy and Innovation at Samsung and led three Centres of Excellence, CRM, Loyalty and First-Party Data Media.
The walled gardens, as she sees it, have every incentive to integrate on their own terms, pulling first-party data into their platforms for targeting, and far less incentive to support the kind of integration that would give a brand an independent, cross-channel view of what is actually working.
That, to her, is the real reason the two disciplines stay apart. It is not that the adtech platforms are against martech. Closing the gap is simply not in their interest.
Her results came from strategy, tech and operations moving together. Sharing first-party audiences across CRM, .com and paid media lifted conversion rates, average order value, incremental revenue and cost efficiency. Having run both CRM and paid media teams gave her the strategic and operational insight to connect the two worlds, and she is clear that the CDP was the enabler for that audience sharing, not the starting point.
Laura starts with the objective and the KPI. Then she starts small, a couple of markets or use cases, proves it, and scales. There is always a need for channel-level specialists, but a growing need for the harder-to-find cross-channel specialist too.
She went deep in the intelligence layer with her team running more than 20 AI-driven propensity models – powered by 100m+ opt-in data points – that sat alongside rules-based suppression and segments, firing across multi-martech + adtech channels in real time.
Ana Carolina Dias, Media & Innovation Director, at The Bicester Collection is a slam-dunk example of this hybrid breed – one whose work links directly back to measurable sales outcomes. She bridged Data Protection, CRM and Media to build an identity roadmap that places guest profiles and Salesforce at the heart of the business, wired directly into media platforms and measured through Mediahub’s MMM.
Data, identity and the fusion of martech and adtech became one system directly measurable against shopping village sales outcomes.
There are more, but they remain a precious few.
The Unlearning
For agencies, this evolved view of the world can feel different to traditional FTE team sheets. Client leadership means taking the client by the hand to the promised land of identity transformation with a 2-3 year roadmap rather than the next quarter’s media plan.
On the martech side, the sales and solutioning specialists are extending into adtech, and they have started prospecting the agencies as one converged solution.
The City’s Big Bang created winners and losers. The winners were the firms that saw the screen not as a threat to the trading floor, but as its replacement. Marketing’s version has divided and will continue to divide the field in much the same way. After all, the wall existed only because the org chart said so.
