For years,adtech and martech have operated in parallel. Both disciplines have been focused on understanding and engaging the same consumer, yet often through different teams, platforms and approach to data.
According to Matt Pilgrim, EMEA Partner Development Lead, Adtech and Martech at Snowflake, that separation is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. As organisations seek greater control of their data, more accurate measurement and more effective use of AI, the boundaries between adtech and martech are continuing to blur.
The end of operating in silos
Pilgrim believes the biggest change taking place across the industry is not necessarily the emergence of new technologies, but the growing convergence of existing ones.
While adtech and martech have historically faced similar challenges, they have often tackled them independently. Today, many of the forces shaping both sectors are the same, including privacy requirements, AI adoption and the growing importance of first-party data.
“I’d almost argue that over the last 10 to 15 years we’ve seen similar trends in adtech and martech, but they’ve been tackling them in isolation,” says Pilgrim. “Now it’s getting much blurrier.”
The result is a market in which advertising and marketing platforms are increasingly overlapping in functionality. Customer data platforms are moving further into advertising, while adtech vendors are developing capabilities traditionally associated with marketing technology.
For Pilgrim, this convergence reflects a broader shift in how brands want to operate.
One customer, one data foundation
At the centre of this transformation is data.
Many organisations still maintain separate datasets for advertising and marketing activities, creating fragmented customer profiles and disconnected experiences.
Consumers frequently encounter the consequences. A brand may send personalised emails while simultaneously serving irrelevant advertising, despite both interactions being based on the same data about the same individual.
According to Pilgrim, the problem stems from data silos.
“We’re not moving on from where we’ve been for a long time, which is data silos. That’s the issue.”
Different systems often contain slightly different versions of the same customer profile. The speed and accuracy with which those systems synchronise determine whether customers receive a joined-up experience or a fragmented one.
Snowflake’s approach is centred on providing a unified data platform that enables advertising, marketing, measurement and decision-making to operate from the same governed dataset.
“If they’re all working from the same data, then it’s going to be a much cleaner orchestrated journey.”
What’s interesting is that Snowflake sits underneath many of these trends. Whether a company uses Braze, Adobe, Salesforce, Hightouch, LiveRamp, Imagino, Audiences, Criteo or a retail media platform, they increasingly want a common data foundation.
As adtech and martech converge, the winning architecture is becoming less about moving data between dozens of systems and more about bringing applications, AI and collaboration capabilities to a governed data layer. That’s exactly the direction the market is moving.
Why brands are demanding change
A key driver behind the shift is growing customer demand.
Pilgrim says many large brands are increasingly unwilling to allow their data to move between multiple vendor environments. Instead, they want technology providers to work where the data already resides.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised about seeing big brands start to really mandate that they do not want their data leaving.”
This trend reflects concerns around privacy, governance and operational efficiency. It also aligns with the broader concept of data gravity, where applications and services are increasingly expected to operate around centralised datasets rather than requiring information to be copied and transferred.
As a result, vendors are being asked to adapt their products and business models to support this new reality.
If they cannot demonstrate a path towards operating within customers’ preferred data environments, they risk losing business to competitors that can.
The measurement opportunity
One of the most significant benefits of convergence may be improved measurement.
Pilgrim points to the resurgence of marketing mix modelling as an example of capabilities that become more effective when organisations can access a consolidated view of customer and campaign data.
Historically, fragmented datasets made it difficult to build accurate measurement frameworks. Today, more platforms are capable of returning event-level and log-level data to central repositories, creating a more complete picture of marketing performance.
This allows organisations to build more sophisticated attribution models and gain deeper insight into the effectiveness of their campaigns.
“Suddenly it becomes really easy to do multi-touch attribution where that was becoming quite a challenge.”
Improved measurement also creates opportunities for better budget allocation, more effective optimisation and stronger business outcomes.
AI accelerates the trend
Artificial intelligence is further reinforcing the convergence between adtech and martech.
Pilgrim said that AI is evolving differently across the two sectors, but is ultimately driving similar outcomes.
Within advertising, AI is moving beyond bidding and targeting towards campaign operations, decision-making and workflow automation. In marketing, the focus is shifting from simple copilots towards agentic workflows capable of generating content, optimising customer journeys and automating execution.
These developments rely on access to consistent, high-quality data.
As organisations bring their advertising and marketing datasets together, AI systems gain a more complete understanding of customer behaviour and can respond more effectively in real time.
“The ability to do AI-driven decisioning, hyper-personalisation and real-time personalisation can now genuinely happen.”
Towards a composable future
Looking ahead, Pilgrim expects organisations to gain greater flexibility in how they structure their technology ecosystems.
Rather than being forced into rigid technology stacks, businesses will increasingly be able to choose the tools that best meet their requirements while maintaining a common data foundation.
He describes this as a move towards composability, where organisations can combine technologies in ways that suit their operating models and business objectives.
Ultimately, Pilgrim believes the future of marketing and advertising will be built around shared foundations, including first-party data, identity, AI and measurement.
“They need the same first-party data, the same identity layer, the same AI layer and more and more they need the same measurement spine.”
As those foundations become common across both disciplines, the distinction between adtech and martech may matter far less than it does today.
