By Amol Waishampayan, Co-Founder and CPO, fullthrottle.ai®
For years, the AdTech ecosystem has been built to serve the needs of massive enterprises—organizations with dedicated in-house teams, multimillion-dollar budgets, and months to plan a single campaign. But for the mid-market brands and the agencies that support them, the system that was never really built for them is showing serious cracks.
The Cracks Are Widening
Across verticals like retail, auto, and home services where mid-market brands prevail, marketers are under increasing pressure to drive measurable outcomes—but the tools at their disposal are too fragmented, too opaque, and too slow. What’s broken?
1. Fragmented Tools and Siloed Workflows
Identity resolution, media activation, and measurement are must-haves for marketers today, but they often live in separate systems and silos. Integrating them is complex, costly, and time-intensive—a luxury mid-market companies can’t afford.
Agencies supporting mid-market clients are often forced to juggle up to ten tools per campaign, slowing execution and increasing error rates.
2. Opaque Reporting and “Vanity” Metrics
Most platforms still prioritize reach and clicks over real business outcomes like revenue and ROI. But today’s marketers are being held accountable for sales, not impressions.
Proving ROI feels increasingly difficult–and often nearly impossible–as platforms measure impressions and clicks v. sales and transactions.
3. Slow Time to Launch
From RFP to trafficking to optimization and reporting, the average campaign takes weeks to launch. In high-velocity sectors like automotive, this delay can mean missed revenue windows.
4. Signal Loss and Lack of First-Party Data
While signal loss continues, most platforms still struggle to meaningfully integrate and scale first-party data. First-party data activation is minimal. Match rates are low. And the result is diminished performance with higher cost.
While cookie-based targeting remains, match rates hover at 35–45%, leaving more than half of audiences out of reach.
Agencies Are Paying the Price
Agencies of all sizes are being asked to do more with less: smaller teams, tighter margins, and increasing client demands. But the AdTech ecosystem hasn’t kept up.
- Black-box DSPs still dominate buying strategies, limiting visibility and control.
- Manual processes slow everything from trafficking to reporting and automation lags.
- Siloed systems make ROI nearly impossible to prove.
- Burnout is rising as teams struggle to bridge the gaps.
87% of marketers use automation, but only 25% leverage it extensively. The rest are stuck in a grind of repetitive manual work.
AdTech Was Built for Enterprise. We Need Something New.
The current AdTech model assumes marketers have a large internal team and the time to manually stitch together a campaign. That model doesn’t work for mid-market brands and their agency partners.
What they needed is a unified, performance-focused platform that:
- Connects identity, activation, and measurement in one place
- Surfaces real business outcomes, not just media metrics
- Reduces manual work through automation and AI
- Maximizes first-party data and minimizes reliance on cookies
- Accelerates time to launch, turning weeks into days
According to recent research from Epitomise, up to 60% of budgets are wasted due to misalignment and inefficiencies and fragmented systems. That’s a solvable problem.
Fixing What’s Broken: Purpose-Built AdTech for the Mid-Market
We’re entering a new era—one where simplicity, speed, and measurable results matter more than scale alone. And with today’s tools, they’re achievable. The winners in this next chapter won’t be those who have the most impressions. It will be those who deliver sales, conversions, and customer value—efficiently and transparently.
Mid-market brands and agencies deserve technology that’s built for their needs:
- Less fragmentation. More efficiency.
- Less complexity. More access.
- Less uncertainty. More results.
Let’s fix what’s broken—and build something that works for everyone.