As advertisers everywhere plan for 2025 and beyond, we’re highlighting trends that will shape the digital advertising landscape. This article, focused on the shift from niche AdTech tools to comprehensive solutions, is the second in this three-part series.
You can find the other trends in this series here:
Part 1: Why AdOps teams need more speed to drive strategic growth
Ad agencies face an increasingly complex and fragmented digital landscape. Advertising operations are bogged down with inefficiencies, operational bottlenecks, and siloed tools that hinder strategy and growth. The culprit? Increasingly, it’s a bloated technology stack comprised of niche tools and legacy systems.
Managing multiple niche “AdTech” tools has been widely accepted in advertising for years. Bringing in third-party solutions is a must for agencies to deliver sophisticated advertising strategies. (This is especially true for agencies, who manage multiple customer accounts, budgets, and strategies under one roof.)
However, AdTech is ultimately supposed to be about driving efficiency and performance. And, in many cases, teams that seek to be tech-enabled are actually experiencing “Frankentech”: a hodgepodge of specialized tech tools that result in swivel-chairing between disparate systems that aren’t interoperable or scalable. The Franken-tech challenge, combined with rapid technological advances, is prompting organizations to reevaluate their overall operations for efficiency improvement opportunities.
Adopting a unified system with seamless interoperability can help you overcome Frankentech challenges, manage fewer tools directly, improve cross-channel campaign management, and utilize data from different sources within one ecosystem.
Here’s why shifting away from niche AdTech tools to more comprehensive solutions will give your team the efficiency and performance you need to stay ahead in 2025 and beyond.
1. Seamlessly integrate first- and third-party data for exponential impact
Integrating first-party data (e.g. data from CRMs, inventory systems, and past consumer behavior) into ad campaigns is a growing necessity. Utilizing this data in multi-channel campaigns improves targeting and messaging efforts that can improve performance.
However, working on a channel-by-channel basis hinders your team’s ability to build holistic, cross-channel strategies that give viewers a frictionless ad experience. Relying on channel-specific tools (including individual publishing platforms) means your teams can’t synchronize data at the level they need in order to execute cohesive and effective multi-channel campaigns.
Why is this? Bringing first-party data seamlessly into campaigns is impossible without the right technology. Identifying improvement opportunities manually, by using spreadsheets and publisher data pulls, takes forever. Your data will be outdated or irrelevant before you can put your findings to use. There’s also a high likelihood that your teams can’t perform the necessary analyses, at least without AI or advanced analytics.
Integrated operational systems, like a Digital Advertising Operating System, play a crucial role in data normalization and integration. A DAOS can synthesize first-party data with third-party data, giving you a holistic view of your target audience and their behavior across channels.
What might this look like? Here are some examples of the types of strategic ad campaigns you can run by syncing first- and third-party data into one advertising system:
- Promotional campaigns based on real-time inventory feeds: Got excess stock of a specific product? Run a quick promotional campaign featuring that SKU name and image. Even better: set the campaign to automatically turn off when real-time inventory drops below a set threshold.
- Swap out messaging and creative based on local weather: When the weather turns cold and rainy near one of your cafes, a DAOS can swap your “iced coffee” creative for “hot vanilla latte” creative. How? Sync live weather APIs from each store location with different campaign elements, then set automation triggers that swap in the right content based on current weather conditions.
- Retarget abandoned cart users with personalized messaging: Linking your CRM data into the same system where you build and launch multi-channel campaigns means you can remind visitors about all the cool products they left in their cart—regardless of where they are served ads.
By combining first-party and publisher data, advertisers can go beyond channel-specific strategies and unlock cross-channel success.
The benefits of using a DAOS extend beyond just the services you can provide for your customers, though. Your AdOps teams also gain operational capacity by working within a single, comprehensive system.
Let’s look at how offloading individual AdTech tools in favor of a DAOS can expedite operational workflows.
2. Manage campaigns faster with AI-assisted automation
Managing campaigns shouldn’t feel like a constant race that never ends. Too many tools add operational bloat to your campaign management workflows, slowing teams down when they’re trying to get ahead.
Campaign management magic happens when you bring AI and automation together. Suddenly, those endless, manual tasks that consume your day become sleek, efficient workflows. It’s not just about saving time (though who doesn’t want that?); it’s about freeing your team to focus on the work that actually moves the needle.
According to Gartner, hyperautomation “is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate” multiple processes within an organization. It requires the “orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms,” including (but not limited to) advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with traditional business processes.
It’s true: “hyperautomation” sounds like a conglomerate of all the tech buzzwords floating around over the last few years. However, the benefits of hyperautomation justify its place on the list of must-have digital advertising tools.
For example, integrating advanced AI for digital advertising operations with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) via hyperautomation amplifies your teams’ capabilities. Hyperautomation can greatly enhance digital advertising efforts by automating tedious and time-consuming tasks, freeing up valuable time for advertisers to focus on strategy and creativity.
By syncing AI-identified recommendations with automation rules and workflows, you can drastically reduce the time spent on a variety of AdOps workflows.
Examples of hyperautomation in digital advertising
- Real-time optimization: Automatically activate AI-identified optimization opportunities as they arise, even when your team is offline. This ensures you achieve optimal performance for key goals, even after hours.
- Cross-channel budget reallocation: AI can identify when an ad set, campaign, or channel is underperforming, even compared to other ads or campaigns running on different channels. Automation can instantly reallocate budgets from one asset or campaign to another (even across publishers!), ensuring maximum spend across your entire portfolio—without overspending.
- Instant customer report generation: When all data sources live in one system, you can create customer reports with the click of a button. These reports pull in valuable AI insights and utilize automation to seamlessly incorporate brand identity assets and other vital components.
- Resolve anomalies with live notifications: Logging into different platforms to check on each account wastes time. Automation pulls everything into one place so AI can flag key risks (e.g. zero spend campaigns, linked account errors, budget alignment alerts) and automation can instantly implement any recommended steps for resolution.
- Refined performance-based or audience lookalike targeting: Working together, AI and automation can track real-time user behavior patterns and automatically refine targeting settings based on audience preferences. This also includes identifying new audience segments and building corresponding ad sets for approval.
The result? Smarter campaign management, quicker optimizations, and more time for teams to focus on high-value strategic work.
3. Meet customer demands for multi-channel, always-on strategies
Today’s savvy buyers expect seamless experiences across platforms, from search engines to social media to connected TV (CTV). These cohesive, multi-channel campaigns deliver friction-free experiences that drive better results.
Unfortunately, they’re also a huge pain for your team to manage with isolated tools. It’s impossible to manage multi-channel campaigns with siloed tools and processes. There is simply too much complexity to do it effectively.
Our data revealed that 80% of ad strategists are responsible for managing more than three platforms. Building out a single campaign on a single channel already takes a ton of time and requires immense focus to pull it off with minimal errors.
This short video illustrates exactly what goes into executing a campaign on just one channel:
And that’s just one campaign on one channel for one customer!
Now, imagine doing that same amount of work for every channel your customers want to advertise on. Your team must repeat these steps separately on each channel for every campaign launch.
In short, creating a “seamless” ad experience requires teams to execute campaigns in a highly disjointed way. They’re doing triple the work (at least) every time they need to launch a new campaign. Managing multi-channel campaigns like this drains your time, energy, and profits.
In order to manage multi-channel campaigns effectively, you must adopt a system that enables your team to manage, edit, refresh, and analyze campaigns across all channels simultaneously.
With the right tools, your agency can execute strategic multi-channel campaigns quickly and impactfully, without hiring more AdOps staff or driving up labor costs.
Multi-channel campaign management is easier with a DAOS. Your teams can coordinate creatives across multiple platforms while maintaining a consistent brand message. They can also utilize automation rules to update ads and content across channels en masse, drastically reducing the time and effort needed for manual updates.
Additionally, a DAOS can provide valuable insights on cross-channel campaign performance by synthesizing metrics such as clicks, conversions, and return on investment (ROI) from every publisher into one system. This data can be used to make informed decisions on future campaigns. Paired with AI-identified opportunities, teams can also use this data to optimize multi-channel strategies for maximum performance results.
Unlocking operational efficiency with a DAOS
By reducing the need for disparate tools and better integrating your existing technology stack, your agency can allocate resources effectively and focus on delivering greater value to customers.
This is why Fluency’s DAOS was designed to solve operational and interoperable bottlenecks across the entire digital advertising spectrum from the very beginning. It is the first and only Digital Advertising Operation System (DAOS) purpose-built for digital advertising management and execution.
Rather than chasing problems on specific channels, our solutions were built to address the fact that ad publishing platforms couldn’t “talk” to one another. We knew if we could solve the “language barrier” between channels, advertisers could build stronger, more effective campaigns, regardless of where they were running ads. That’s exactly what we set out to do with Fluency.
TL; DR: A DAOS addresses the challenges that channel-specific tools or native publishing platforms have failed to overcome, particularly when operating at scale. It does this by harnessing multi-channel hyperautomation capabilities in one system.
The financial and operational ROI of using a DAOS
After using a DAOS, our clients regularly report spending 90% less time on key advertising processes, such as campaign launching, budget pacing, and performance tracking.
Perhaps even more remarkable than these drastic time savings is that these teams also improve overall campaign performance. Essentially, they’re spending less time executing tasks but driving better results. Some of these results include:
- 35% lower cost per conversion
- 85% conversion rate improvement
- 49% reduction in cost per acquisition
- 11%+ increase in CTR
Centralized tools, simplified processes, and better outcomes in 2025
The shift to a streamlined AdTech stack is more than just a trend. It’s necessary to stay competitive far beyond 2025.
If your operational tools are siloed, your teams won’t be able to deliver at both the scale and depth required to compete in today’s fast-paced multi-channel advertising ecosystem. Transitioning your operational workflows into one system centralizes campaign management, budget automation, and reporting. Doing so reduces operational redundancies and ensures that you have full visibility and control over your advertising efforts.
Reducing operational bottlenecks helps your agency build stronger, more effective campaigns and unlock the full potential of first-party data. Forgoing inefficient workflows, tools, and processes in favor of interoperable solutions that utilize hyperautomation will position your agency for long-term success in an ever-changing industry.
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