By Dominic Tillson, founder of the DST Consultancy
Dominic Tillson is a strategic marketing and commercial leader with more than 20 years of experience across the global advertising and media ecosystem. His career spans ad sales, audience and effectiveness research, marketing leadership and industry advocacy
The advertising technology industry is currently experiencing extraordinary innovation, with new platforms, identity solutions, measurement frameworks, and AI-driven optimisation tools emerging at a rapid pace. Yet despite this progress, many ad tech companies continue to struggle to clearly articulate their value to the market. For buyers, the result is an ecosystem where vendors often appear interchangeable, messaging becomes increasingly complex, and differentiation is difficult to identify. The industry’s challenge, therefore, is not a lack of technology innovation but a lack of strategic marketing clarity.
Ad tech does not suffer from a lack of innovation. The real challenge is translating complex technology into clear commercial narratives that resonate with agencies, advertisers, and internal sales teams. In many cases, technology capability has evolved faster than the marketing frameworks used to explain it. Ad tech doesn’t have a technology problem; it has a marketing problem.
One of the most persistent issues is complexity without clarity. The Lumascape has become too complex to explain. Everyone claims to do everything, leading to hundreds of vendors operating across overlapping categories, making it increasingly difficult and overwhelming for buyers to understand where companies fit and how they differentiate. Marketing must provide the clarity and differentiation that helps buyers navigate this complexity efficiently.
Furthermore, we see too many solutions in search of problems. Many ad tech platforms launch new capabilities before clearly articulating the problem they solve. The most effective marketing organisations start from a different place: they diagnose the problem first. They articulate who experiences that problem, why it matters commercially, and how success should be measured. Only then do they explain how their technology contributes to solving it.
There is also a palpable lack of empathy across the ecosystem. Ad tech messaging is often developed without sufficient understanding of the operational realities faced by agencies and sales teams. As someone fortunate to have sold advertising for 15 years, I see that marketers often don’t truly understand what salespeople and planner/buyers must contend with.
Then there is the industry’s obsession with the “next big thing”. The “Death of this” and the “Rise of that” narratives, while important and what make this industry tick, constantly chasing new trends can prevent companies from building consistent long-term positioning. Companies rush to align with the latest trend while abandoning the consistency that builds long-term recognition. In a fragmented market, memorability matters. The companies that succeed are often the ones that repeat a clear story over time rather than chasing every headline. Consistency may not be as exciting as disruption, but it is often far more effective.
The ‘Events Paradox’ is also worth discussing: often high spend, sometimes low strategic value. Large industry conferences provide useful visibility and the opportunity to associate with established industry brands. Depending on where a company is in its corporate lifecycle, these can be great to shout about a launch, establish credibility, and build momentum. But done badly, these are pay-to-play sales pitches preaching to an echo chamber of competitors. More focused formats such as curated breakfasts, workshops, and targeted roundtables often generate deeper engagement and stronger relationships and demonstrate genuine expertise.
Finally, cutting through the noise requires discipline. The fragmentation of the ad tech ecosystem means buyers are exposed to a constant stream of messaging. The art of good marketing is often choosing what not to say. Do fewer things better. We often preach about the value of the long and short of it, but in the current economic climate, very few abide by their own rules. Leaders want a short-term firework, not the longer-term bonfire, and the reality is that you need both to grow your business.
As the ad tech ecosystem continues to evolve, the companies that succeed will be those that recognise marketing as a strategic capability rather than simply an executional function. Technology creates the tools, but marketing creates the understanding that allows those tools to succeed. And in an industry defined by complexity, that understanding has never been more valuable.
