Adtech and martech are still worlds apart, and that’s a big problem

Marketing technology and advertising technology remain fractured, siloed, and completely at odds with each other.

That’s what Peter Hamilton, CEO at TUNE, told me in an interview today at AdWeek New York.

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“The adtech teams are measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns, while the martech teams are managing their stack,” Hamilton said. “The data is being passed over from the ad team to the marketing department in the form of reports and spreadsheets, but there is no real connection and little effort being made to integrate the two.”

That’s a problem, particularly since the two worlds have become more intertwined than ever.

“At TUNE, we see a big increase in mobile web activity over app usage, especially in retail,” Hamilton said.

In fact, 25 percent of the traffic being measured by TUNE is coming from the mobile web, which is significant, although not surprising.

In a recent study of retail app customer satisfaction, the majority of retail apps performed terribly. It is a similar story in restaurant apps. Consumers are increasingly using the brand’s website instead of downloading the app — sometimes because it is a better user experience and often to avoid installing dozens of retail or restaurant apps.

So what are brands doing to ensure that consumers have the choice they deserve?

“We’re seeing a whole new breed of retail clients that are not thinking so much about mobile-only, or mobile-first, but they’re trying to be ‘mobile-best’,” Hamilton said. “Having a great mobile experience that works regardless of how the customer wants to interact with your brand is key, and that is going to require a smarter connection between advertising and marketing.”

Adtech and martech have yet to pull their collective socks up and start working more closely together, but that’s not the only issue at hand. VB Insight discovered in a recent study that mobile marketing suffers from being siloed as a channel and is often not connected to the overall marketing strategy, despite significant budgets being allocated to mobile opportunities.

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At AdWeek in New York today, these problems were tackled by a panel chaired by Hamilton and featuring CMOs from StubHub, Simple, and Booking.com.

One thing is clear — for most brands, there’s still much to do before mobile-best becomes a reality.