Marketers produce continuous streams of campaign, click and customer touchpoint data, but value emerges only when systems activate that data through ingestion, analysis, orchestration and action. Data often remains siloed, fragmented or trapped in disconnected tools, creating noise rather than clarity. Data integration and activation are top martech challenges, with 66% of marketing leaders citing integration issues and survey reports identifying persistent silos. Data volume has increased dramatically while time to analyze it has not; many organizations lack data governance, producing dirty data that undermines insights. Effective stacks must enable coordinated, intelligent action across analytics, campaign orchestration and customer experience.
Marketers today aren't just swimming in data - they're besieged by it. Every campaign, click and customer touchpoint continuously generates insight. But this data only matters when it's activated. That requires systems to ingest, analyze, orchestrate and act on it successfully. Far too often, data remains siloed, fragmented or trapped in disconnected tools, leaving businesses with noise instead of clarity.
Data integration and activation remain critical roadblocks. In a recent analysis of three major surveys, 66% of surveyed marketing leaders cited data integration as their top martech challenge, highlighting systemic breakdowns across operational and strategic levels. Similarly, data integration and data silos were cited as significant challenges for marketing professionals in the 2025 State of Your Stack Survey report. This fragmentation is compounded by volume. Supermetrics found that marketers now use 230% more data than before, yet 56% lack the time to analyze it properly.
But activation is about more than data hygiene. It's about orchestration and impact. A modern marketing stack should do more than store data; it must turn it into coordinated, intelligent action across analytics, campaign orchestration and customer experience optimization. At the upcoming MarTech Conference, which is free and online on Sept. 17, 2025, we'll explore AI and data activation in one of six live panel discussions around our theme: Data and AI.
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