Advertising Has Enough Technology. Now It Needs to Work Together.

By Oz Etzioni, CEO and Co-Founder, Clinch

Advertising has gotten very good at adding technology. Every new development brings another set of tools promising to make campaigns faster, smarter or more personalized. AI has accelerated that pace, and the industry is understandably eager to see what it can do. But I wonder how much value we're actually getting from the technology we've already invested in.

At Advertising Week New York, I joined a panel discussing how CPG brands are adapting their operations to deliver personalization across channels, devices and partners. One of the points I raised was that I don't necessarily see fragmentation in advertising as a bad thing. Brands should have multiple technology partners, each bringing expertise to different parts of the process.

The problem is that people have become the Human APIs between all these platforms. They're responsible for moving information between systems, coordinating updates and making sure everything stays connected. That's a tremendous amount of manual work, and it becomes increasingly difficult to manage as campaigns grow more complex.

Creative is still missing from too many performance conversations

Advertisers invest tremendous time and resources in understanding who to target, when to reach them and where to place their ads. Yet creative data remains one of the most underutilized sources of intelligence in advertising. We often measure which ad performed better without understanding why, which specific creative elements, messages, products or attributes actually impacted performance. That represents one of the industry's biggest untapped opportunities.

For CPG brands, this means going beyond campaign-level performance to understand how different audiences respond to specific products, messages, creative elements and purchase occasions. A beverage brand, for example, might discover that one audience responds better to messaging around social occasions, while another engages more with creative highlighting a particular flavor or product benefit.

But the real opportunity goes beyond improving the next creative asset. Creative intelligence should inform media strategy just as media intelligence informs creative strategy. When brands understand which messages resonate with which audiences, those insights should influence not only what they produce next, but also how they plan, target, allocate budgets and optimize future campaigns. This creates a continuous feedback loop between creative and media, where every campaign generates intelligence that makes the next one more effective.

The value of connecting creative and media starts before a campaign runs

The benefits of connecting creative and media data begin well before a campaign goes live, particularly when advertisers are deciding what creative to produce. Today, we have technology capable of producing thousands of creative variations. But just because we can produce thousands doesn't mean we need to. If we understand which audiences we're trying to reach and which messages are most relevant to them, we can make better production decisions before the work even begins. That can reduce unnecessary variations, lower production costs and make campaigns easier to manage across different markets.

Connecting creative and media data also makes it easier to automate parts of the process, reducing the time teams spend coordinating production and campaign execution.

For large advertisers, those efficiencies can be substantial. Campaign performance is important, but the time and resources required to produce creative, manage updates and keep campaigns running should also factor into how we evaluate our technology investments.

AI agents will only be as useful as the systems they connect

There's a lot of excitement around AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables AI applications to connect and interact with external systems. I share that excitement because I believe AI agents have the potential to fundamentally change how advertising teams plan, execute and manage campaigns, while MCP could transform how advertising technologies connect and work together, and how people interact with these technologies.

My concern is that our industry has a habit of adopting new technology before we've fully integrated what we already have. We're quick to introduce new capabilities, but that doesn't necessarily mean we've changed how the work gets done.

As advertisers begin introducing AI agents across their technology stacks, they risk creating hundreds of additional connections and interactions between platforms. Without a clear framework for how these systems communicate and work together, that creates another layer of complexity rather than reducing it. It also raises important questions about visibility, governance and control as more decisions and activities become automated.

That's why the existing infrastructure matters so much. Creative, media, data and activation platforms need to exchange information reliably and operate within a connected framework before agents can effectively coordinate work across them. Otherwise, we're asking AI to operate within the same disconnected systems that people have been managing manually for years.

When those connections are in place, agents can take on more of the manual coordination between platforms. Teams can spend less time transferring information and managing updates, leaving more room for strategy, creative decisions and understanding what's driving performance.

Advertisers have spent years building sophisticated technology stacks, and there's tremendous value in those investments. The opportunity isn't necessarily to replace them, but to make them work better together. As AI takes on more responsibility for campaign execution, I expect we'll see far fewer people spending their days manually operating separate advertising platforms, and more people focused on directing, optimizing and improving the outcomes those platforms deliver.