Martech in 2025: How AI, Privacy and Data Gravity Will Reshape the Stack
This comprehensive analysis of the modern martech landscape examines what forces are reshaping marketing stacks and empowering brands to deliver more effective, personalized customer experiences while navigating complex privacy requirements. From the resurgence of marketing mix modeling to the rise of commerce media, the report explores how leading organizations are adapting their strategies and technology investments to thrive in this new environment.
By Garret Reich, Senior Project Manager at The Financial Brand
The report: The Modern Marketing Data Stack 2025
Source: Snowflake
Why we picked it: Fewer than half of bank customers are certain they’ll stay with their current institution in the next year, with one in seven actively looking to switch. For banking leaders grappling with this retention crisis while facing intense competition from digital-first fintechs, the report outlines how to modernize marketing operations — with actionable insights into how. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates how leading organizations are reducing customer acquisition costs by 15 to 20% through improved data integration and targeting — critical knowledge for retail banks working to retain existing customers and attract new ones in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Executive Summary
The challenge for marketers isn’t finding or onboarding technology anymore – it’s orchestrating it all effectively. With over 14,000 martech vendors competing for attention, the real test lies in building a strategic, cohesive marketing technology stack that delivers results. The modern marketing landscape has evolved far beyond simple tool selection into a complex ecosystem where success depends on seamless integration, intelligent automation and strategic deployment of resources.
The marketing landscape has reached an inflection point, driven by three fundamental shifts that are permanently reshaping how brands connect with their audiences. Generative AI is revolutionizing how marketers understand and engage customers, privacy concerns are demanding new approaches to data management and the gravitational pull of unified data platforms is transforming how marketing tools interact with information.
Key Takeaways
- Generative AI represents more than just a trend – it’s a foundational shift that will redefine marketing workflows, enabling natural language interaction with data and automated campaign optimization
- Privacy has evolved from a compliance checkbox to a core strategic consideration, requiring marketers to meticulously manage consumer preferences while still delivering personalized experiences
- Data gravity is pulling marketing applications toward unified data platforms, eliminating silos and enabling more sophisticated analysis and activation
- First-party data has become increasingly valuable as third-party signals grow less reliable, driving the rise of commerce media and retail media networks
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.
What’s On the Horizon?
The marketing technology landscape is evolving toward more sophisticated, data-connected applications. These new platforms are either native to an organization’s data environment or connect directly to it, eliminating the need to copy and move large datasets between systems. This shift is particularly evident in Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), which are adapting to work more seamlessly with unified data platforms rather than maintaining their own separate data stores. The focus is shifting from data storage and integration to activation and insight generation.
While Snowflake provides breakouts for various industries, here is what particularly stands out for financial service marketing:
- Emphasizing personalized digital experiences while maintaining strict privacy controls
- Leveraging AI for customer service and engagement
- Building stronger relational connections in a digital-first world
- Addressing the challenge that fewer than half of retail bank customers are certain they’ll stay with their current institution
The future of marketing technology isn’t about having the most tools – it’s about orchestrating them effectively to create seamless, personalized customer experiences while respecting privacy and maintaining trust. As Brinker puts it, "Our discussions about the power of AI today are mostly on the seller side, about empowering marketers. At some point, buyers will have their own AI agents. What happens in a world where the interaction isn’t just with human buyers but with AI buyers, too?"
Editor’s note: This article was prepared with AI language software and edited for clarity and accuracy by The Financial Brand editorial team.