Ask any ad tech expert about the best available tools, and they will freeze with a blank face for five seconds. They will think on the dozens of products they’ve tried so far.

In the current state of the industry, marketers are spending a lot of money on integrating multiple products, or building their own solution, with the hope that they can make a generic holy-grail LTV optimization tool.

If you use Salesforce, Hootsuite, MailChimp, Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, Unbounce that is 7 APIs already, and a dozen dashboards. It is great to see how your clicks are going up, but you can do that with an Excel sheet. We are in the big data/machine learning world, we have the power to learn from each customer, and give them what they want in a more effective and personalized way.

Technology is already ahead than us, so we need to go back to our business problems, and think what are the gaps that we need to cover, and build teams of marketers and engineers working on your own business-specific problems.

We have the ad platforms, the tools, the infrastructure, and the machine power. Now is the time to coordinate efforts, solving one specific business problem, with a specific set of data, with specific algorithms. Going outside this approach is re-inventing the wheel.

If you are building a martech or ad tech solution, remember that is not for the market, it is not for the outside world, it is for your company, for your specific challenges. Focus on that. The rest is already covered by hundreds of vendors.

Leo Celis