Martech in 2025: How AI, Privacy and Data Gravity Will Reshape the Stack

The New Marketing Normal Entails Three Core Shifts

Gen AI: The true power of generative AI for marketers lies not in what it produces, but in how it transforms interaction with data and tools. Being able to query marketing data in natural language and receive instant, actionable insights eliminates technical bottlenecks and empowers marketers to iterate rapidly.

Real-world implementations are already showing impressive results. For example, Allergan lowered cost per acquisition by 41% with machine learning models, while Zillow has managed to save 40 hours per month on data analysis and aggregation through AI-powered automation. These aren’t just efficiency gains — they represent a fundamental shift in how marketing teams operate.

"The premise 10 or 15 years ago was that with sophisticated enough one-to-one tech that had data on enough addressable consumer profiles, you had a cheat code to instant advertising performance," says Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. "But in reality, advertising and marketing needs more than one-to-one techniques to be successful."

AI is already being integrated throughout the marketing stack, with nearly every major vendor adding generative capabilities. This shift will fundamentally change how marketers work, requiring less technical expertise but greater strategic vision to guide AI systems toward meaningful business outcomes.

Privacy: Privacy has evolved from a regulatory requirement to a fundamental aspect of marketing strategy. Brands must now balance the demand for personalized experiences with increasingly stringent privacy expectations and regulations. This isn’t just about compliance – it’s about building and maintaining customer trust through transparent data practices.

The statistics tell a compelling story: The number of customers using consent management tools increased by 53% in the past year alone, highlighting the growing importance of privacy-first approaches. Companies are investing heavily in technologies that enable privacy-safe data collaboration, with data clean rooms emerging as a crucial solution for secure data sharing.

The challenge lies in delivering relevant, personalized messaging while respecting privacy boundaries. Success requires careful orchestration of consent management, data governance, and customer preferences. Marketing organizations are investing heavily in technologies that enable privacy-safe data collaboration, such as data clean rooms, which allow multiple parties to analyze combined datasets without exposing sensitive information.

Data gravity: The concept of data gravity – the tendency for data and applications to be pulled toward centralized platforms – is reshaping how marketing technology operates. Rather than maintaining multiple data silos across various marketing tools, organizations are consolidating their data into unified platforms and requiring applications to work with data where it resides.

This shift is driven by several factors:

• The high cost and complexity of moving and storing data across multiple systems
• The need for consistent governance and privacy controls
• The potential for AI to derive deeper insights from comprehensive datasets
• The efficiency gains of having a single source of truth

Evidence of this shift can be seen in the rapid adoption of native and connected applications. Nearly one-third of providers highlighted (30%) now have native apps available for marketers to use, with multiple others in advanced development stages.

Scott Brinker, editor of chiefmartec.com, describes the best marketers as "perfect question-generating machines" who can now unleash their curiosity thanks to AI-powered tools that make data exploration more accessible.

This evolution means marketers will spend less time wrestling with technical implementations and more time focusing on strategy and creative thinking. The role becomes less about operating individual tools and more about orchestrating AI-powered systems to achieve business goals.

There’s a New Measurement Revolution

The marketing industry is seeing a renaissance in measurement approaches, combining new and traditional methods. Take marketing mix modeling (MMM) as a key example, which is experiencing a resurgence in the industry as privacy changes make individual-level tracking more challenging, MMM provides a broader, statistical approach to understanding marketing effectiveness across channels, offering valuable insights even without granular user-level data.

This shift represents a return to fundamentals rather than a step backward. MMM’s ability to analyze multiple data sources and provide a comprehensive view of marketing performance makes it particularly valuable in today’s complex, multi-channel environment.

Data clean rooms are emerging as a crucial tool for privacy-compliant data sharing between advertisers and publishers. These secure environments allow organizations to combine and analyze datasets while maintaining strict privacy controls, enabling more sophisticated targeting and measurement without compromising user privacy.

The growth in this area is significant, with stable edges (representing ongoing data relationships) growing by 63.9% among organizations in the modern marketing data stack over the past 12 months.