New research from Forrester and TruAudience puts the blame on the martech stack for problems with connecting audiences.
Seventy percent of marketers say identifying audiences across multiple touchpoints is harder than ever. Sixty-six percent say they are using 16 or more marketing solutions. The conclusions are based on a Forrester survey of 325 marketers in Q4 2024 supported by TruAudience from TransUnion.
It’s the complexity of the stack, Forrester concludes, that is throwing up increasing barriers to delivering personalization, scaling marketing efforts, onboarding AI and making marketing spend efficient. Conversely, utilizing identity resolution tools to connect fragmented data in the stack seems to be helpful with 93% of those marketers saying they are reaching their customer experience and understanding goals.
A snapshot of the research can be downloaded here (no registration required).
Why we care. Let’s be clear, TruAudience’s proffer is connecting your customer data across your marketing platform with one identity graph. That doesn’t mean the challenge isn’t real and that one or other ID resolution tool might help resolve the problem.
One thing to realize is this is a problem that is only likely to get harder to solve. Not only is the number of marketing channels continuing to grow (see retail media networks and CTV), but the number of outlets within those types is continuing to grow too (see Threads). We may see consolidation in martech stacks due to budget constraints, but don’t bet your budget on it. The Marketing Technology Supergraphic recorded a 27.8% growth in the number of martech applications available YoY. Somebody is using them.
Disparate data obscures single view of consumer. Said TransUnion:
While new touchpoints and technologies present fresh and exciting opportunities, they also introduce challenges in connecting all that disparate data. This can create an incomplete picture of consumer behavior…
No matter what business TransUnion’s TruAudience is in, that statement is surely accurate.
The post Martech stack complexity fragments audience data appeared first on MarTech.
About the author
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.
Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
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