A fact that most professionals from the sphere of marketing and advertising generally don’t admit is the existing confusion that surrounds ‘adtechOpens a new window ‘ and ‘marketing tech’. One basic difference between the two is their respective target audiences. While the target segments of marketing tech are known (existing) customers, ad tech looks to reach anonymous audiences. But when you try to delve into the depths of the two, differentiating them is not easy.
Defining ad tech and marketing tech precisely is a difficult task and there are some important differences between the two. What these two technologies offer is where the importance lies and not on the minor differences that exist.
Marketing technology
All the tools used to manage marketing processes, customer analytics, digital content, and workflows can be considered to be a part of the ecosystem of marketing tech. Marketing technology can also be defined as an advanced CRM. The idea is to focus on existing and prospective customers through a database. Using this, a marketing team can have a record of customer behavior history. This in turn helps in carrying out customized communications with the customers.
It is fair to state that marketing tech forms the entire gamut of marketing, which also includes SEO, design, creative, CRM platforms, and even ad tech to a certain extent. Marketing tech is all about understanding a customer and optimization of the available data regarding the same.
Advertising technology
Ad tech can be generally defined as the technologies that aid in the programmatic selling and buying of advertisements. The dense database of all digital identities (also known as demand-side platforms) and the data management platforms are covered by ad tech. Ad tech also covers the ad exchangesOpens a new window and ad networks that are used by publishers to sell their digital ad spaces.
Ad tech is used by organizations to concentrate their focus on specific customers or buyer groups. The base of ad tech is not as strong because of the problems that it can lead to. But many prefer ad tech over robots buying media. The reason for this preference is the growing frauds in the ad space which are caused by breaking the rules of the logic which the related software runs on as the robots run on that software itself. With direct-response marketing, ad tech can actually reduce substantial amounts of spending on ads.
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Combining ‘marketing and ad stack’ can lead to confusion
Leading marketing cloud vendors like Oracle and Adobe have acquired ad tech companies and incorporated the features into their own products and services. This is generally termed as ‘full marketing advertising stack’, and in future, this trend is expected to prosper further.
Therefore, one can say that marketing tech and ad tech are somewhat similar to each other. There are many common things between the both of them. However, the cloud over their differences is mainly because advertising is perhaps the most visible kind of marketing. Both ad tech and marketing tech are broader explanations of a variety of data sources and technologies. The fundamental idea behind both the techs is to reach the right audience, at the right place and time, and with the right message.
Where both marketing tech and ad tech overlap is how they use the customer, or a prospect customer, and the data related to long-term strategy against the data for single interactions. The debate over how these data can be used and regarding its ownership is what creates a blur over marketing and ad tech. If data is equal to power, the principle question is the ownership of this data among the primary stakeholders like CMOs, CIOs, and CTOs. Till a solid answer is found for this question, determining the efficiency and the total value of marketing and ad tech will remain a problem.
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