Imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle where each piece is from a different set. That's how it feels to be an advertiser today.
As we've transitioned from static media buying of yesteryear to the dynamic digital ecosystem of today, a brand's adtech stack has come to feel like a sort of labyrinth; an amalgamation of different technologies that all do something different but are still, somehow, interconnected.
While each piece of the adtech stack plays a vital role, it's a breeding ground for fragmentation. And fragmentation, as most marketers know, creates chaos and hinders performance—and all around makes your job harder.
Keep reading to learn just how complicated the media buying process can get and how advertisers can solve for this complexity by unifying and connecting their adtech stack.
Ad buying isn't as simple as it once was. The digital advertising ecosystem comprises several key technologies and platforms—each playing a role in how ads are bought, sold and delivered.
At a fundamental level there are four key components to understand how the process works:
Oftentimes, each of these pieces are different entities, which makes the process incredibly complicated simply coordinating between all these different partners. Add on the fact that marketers need to actually identify their customers in real-time to ensure their messages are reaching the right people, then measure the impact and insights of their campaigns, and it feels almost impossible.
Unsurprisingly, this process contributes to significant pain points for marketers:
Let's look at specific problem areas within a fragmented tech stack and explore how advertisers can navigate these issues:
The problem: Most platforms in an advertiser's stack likely rely on cookies or probabilistic signals for identity resolution instead of persistent identifiers that can recognize and reach customers across channels.
Let's say your DSP is looking for people based on a cookie, while the ad network identifies them based on a different identifier (and your DMP and SSP know them through their own cookies as well). This creates multiple disconnects when simply trying to deliver an ad to an individual. If your DSP is looking for one person, but the ad network doesn't recognize them in the same way, then they'll never match and you'll never reach that person. This leads to wasted ad impressions, duplicative messaging and limited personalization capabilities to name a few.
Identity resolution is the backbone of good campaign performance—without it, you risk missing your best customers.
The solution: To navigate these issues, marketers need an , meaning it does not rely on cookies. Think about it—what happens when those cookies crumble? You lose that connection with your best customers. The devil’s in the details. You need to ask your partners how they match to a person—and if you hear a lot of identifier terms like "email" and "devices," or they talk about using multiple identity graphs versus a person with offline and online signals, you’re probably dealing with identifiers (like a cookie) and not a true connected identity.
The problem: Another hurdle that comes with multiple pieces of technology and, in turn, multiple vendors is the misalignment between business goals and campaign execution. Anybody can buy media—not everyone can execute on an end-to-end customer strategy. Many platforms default to what's easily trackable rather than what's meaningful, like sales or loyalty.
The solution: Advertisers need to work with partners who actually understand what they're trying to achieve. Ensuring that campaign setups are clearly mapped to business goals and are planned against real behaviors—rather than proxies—can mitigate these missteps.
The problem: Lots of people and players can work together, but do they actually all live in the same ecosystem? For example, strategy, media and analytics functions often operate separately across teams or platforms. This separation causes delays in optimizations, missed insights and reactive planning instead of proactive strategies.
The solution: To break down these silos, advertisers should work to establish unified ownership across the campaign lifecycle. Real-time collaboration between the data, strategy and delivery teams, along with establishing a single source of truth for insights and performance data, ensures a seamless campaign execution.
The problem: Marketers are often settling for "good enough" measurement. Inflated or inconsistent attribution models can obscure performance, misallocate budgets, weaken forecasting, and erode cross-functional trust. But think about it—do you accept “good enough” in any other part of your business? Not in product innovation. Not in customer experience. Not in growth. So why settle for it in measurement?
The solution: You want to make sure you have holistic closed-loop measurement that connects media exposure to both online and offline conversions at the individual level. When you know exactly what's working—and what's not—you make smarter decisions and drive better outcomes.
Some key questions to ask your measurement partner are:
What to do based on the answers above:
If the answers are strong, double down. Ensure your teams are using this data to inform creative, targeting, and spend decisions. Push foreven more granularity (e.g., by channel, cohort, or geography)and consider layering in incrementality testing and lifetime value tracking.
If the answers are weak or unclear, you're likely leaving performance—and budget—on the table. Explore partners who offer deterministic, people-based measurement. Push for transparency, validation, and real-time feedback loops to power smarter marketing and start small by piloting closed-loop measurement on a campaign and compare results.
So, the adtech stack is getting a little complicated—that doesn't mean it has to derail your campaign execution and performance. At the end of the day, the one thing that will truly solve for these challenges is a connected adtech stack, meaning one platform conducts the ad buying and serving process.
Connectivity reduces the number of handoffs between partners and platforms, ensuring seamless data integration throughout campaign stages. This connectivity allows your adtech platform to grow with you, preventing the need for constant patching and piecemeal solutions.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve—as we know it will—marketers need to invest in technologies that simplify their adtech stack rather than complicate it.
Epsilon Digital's end-to-end solution handles every step of the process for you, from onboarding to activation to measurement. It's is the only programmatic ad solution with full visibility into all consumer interactions and purchases across the open web, so you can learn and optimize on the fly.
