By Lydia Oakes, COO and Co-Founder of The Bluestripe Group and AdVantage
We’re all aware that adtech is one of the most crowded, jargon-heavy sectors in B2B technology. Every week brings a new “AI-powered” platform, a new privacy-first identity solution, or a new supply-path optimisation tool promising to fix programmatic’s oldest problems. In a market this saturated, the companies that break through are rarely the ones with the loudest launch. They’re the ones who did the unglamorous prep work before they ever spoke to a journalist, investor or potential client
Too many adtech founders treat PR as a switch to flip once the product is built: a press release here, a LinkedIn post there, a hopeful pitch to a trade title the week before a funding announcement. This approach almost always fails, not because the product isn’t good, but because the market was never given a reason to care. ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression is an overused phrase, but it really applies here. Preparation isn’t a bureaucratic delay before the “real” work of PR begins. It is the real work.
The core message has to survive contact with the market
Every successful PR campaign starts with a hypothesis: this is who we are, this is the problem we solve, and this is why it matters now. The mistake many adtech companies make is treating that hypothesis as a finished message rather than a draft to be stress-tested. A positioning statement that sounds sharp in a boardroom can collapse the moment it meets a sceptical trade journalist, a rival’s counter-narrative, or a buyer who has heard five nearly identical pitches that month.
Testing messages in the market, through analyst briefings, customer conversations, trade press conversations on background, and even paid social experiments, reveals whether a message actually lands before it’s committed to a press release with your CEO’s name attached. It also surfaces the objections you’ll face later, when the stakes are higher: at a live launch, in a competitive RFP, or in front of investors during due diligence. Adtech buyers are unusually fluent in scepticism; they’ve been burned by inflated claims about viewability, brand safety, and “AI” that turned out to be a spreadsheet. A message that hasn’t been tested against that scepticism is a message built to fail in public.
The LinkedIn founder-post trap
There’s a pattern that repeats across adtech launches: a founder writes a long, earnest LinkedIn post announcing their new platform, it gets a respectable flurry of likes from their existing network, and then nothing happens. No inbound. No press pickup. No shift in market perception. This isn’t because LinkedIn doesn’t work: it’s because a single post was mistaken for a strategy.
A founder’s personal network, however engaged, is not a market. It’s an echo chamber of people who already know and like you. Genuinely breaking into a crowded adtech category requires reaching the buyers, analysts, and journalists who have never heard of you and have no reason to trust you yet. That requires sustained, structured outreach: relationships built with trade press over months, not days; proof points and data that give journalists something concrete to write about; and a narrative built to withstand comparison with the ten other companies pitching the same publication that week. One post is not a campaign. It’s a moment, and moments fade fast in a news cycle that moves as quickly as adtech’s does.
This is why PR planning and narrative development need to sit inside go-to-market strategy from day one, not bolted on once a product is ready to ship. A well-built narrative does more than generate coverage; it gives sales teams language that resonates in pitches, gives customers a reason to advocate publicly, and gives investors a coherent story about market position. It shapes how analysts categorise you, which in turn shapes how buyers search for and shortlist vendors. In adtech specifically, where trust has been eroded by years of transparency scandals and where differentiation is genuinely hard to communicate, a tested, credible narrative is often the deciding factor between two technically similar platforms.
Building that narrative takes time: workshopping positioning with customers, pressure-testing claims with journalists off the record, aligning messaging with product roadmap so the story doesn’t need rewriting in six months, and mapping a realistic calendar of moments (funding, product launches, partnerships, data reports) that keep the narrative alive rather than relying on a single big-bang announcement.
The lesson for adtech leaders is simple, if unwelcome: PR success is decided long before the press release goes out. It’s decided in the weeks of testing, refining, and preparing that most companies skip because they’re eager to launch. Skip that work, and even the best product in the category can launch to silence.
Bluestripe ( the publishers of New Digital Age) and The Advisory Collective have partnered to form AdVantage, a GTM and market realignment consultancy purely for the adtech market. To find out more, please email Lisa@the advisorycollective.co.uk
