Zeta’s Athena Turns Marketers From Cessna Pilots Into Stealth Bomber Crews
CANNES, France — Most enterprise software sits largely unused. The average user taps into just 5% to 10% of the features in any platform they buy, according to David Steinberg – and that waste, he argues, is the real problem AI needs to solve in marketing.
That is the pitch behind Athena by Zeta, the agentic AI layer that Zeta Global has built on top of its marketing cloud. Rather than requiring users to find and configure the right features themselves, Athena accepts a business objective – say, two million new customers at 7% lower acquisition cost – and reconfigures the platform’s interface around that goal, then asks whether to activate. It is less a chatbot than a co-pilot for a plane most marketers didn’t know they were flying.
“We’ve turned out a stealth bomber and our clients know how to fly Cessnas,” said David Steinberg, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Zeta Global, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026.
Speed as a competitive weapon
Steinberg pointed to decision velocity as the core differentiator underpinning Zeta’s claimed returns. A Forrester study, he said, found that for every dollar spent through Zeta’s platform, clients see more than 600% return on marketing spend – a figure he attributed directly to the platform’s ability to make targeting decisions in a millisecond, compared to seven to 10 seconds for competing systems.
In programmatic advertising, where inventory is auctioned in fractions of a second, that latency gap is the difference between winning and losing the bid. Steinberg’s argument is that speed compounds: faster decisions mean better targeting, which means tighter feedback loops, which makes the algorithms smarter over time.
“Our attribution looks across every single component of the journey of that customer,” Steinberg said, “and we’re able to track them and create a true return on investment. Because we always have a feedback loop from our clients who became an end user or a customer, the algorithms are consistently getting smarter on who to target and where.”
From 600% to 1,000%
The 600%-plus return on marketing spend figure, Steinberg was careful to note, predates Athena’s rollout. Early adopters of the new agentic layer are already seeing returns “substantially higher” than that baseline, he said – pointing toward what he described as a publicly stated long-term goal of 1,000% return on marketing spend.
Whether those early numbers hold at scale remains to be seen, but Steinberg cited Zeta’s first-quarter 2026 results as evidence the trajectory is real: 50% year-over-year revenue growth, at what he described as a “pretty scaled business.” Zeta Global, which went public in 2021, has been building toward this moment for years, and the Athena expansion to agencies – announced ahead of Cannes Lions – signals an intent to push the technology beyond direct brand relationships.
“That’s coming because of that return on marketing spend,” Steinberg said of the growth figure.
CANNES, France — Most enterprise software sits largely unused. The average user taps into just 5% to 10% of the features in any platform they buy, according to David Steinberg – and that waste, he argues, is the real problem AI needs to solve in marketing.
That is the pitch behind Athena by Zeta, the agentic AI layer that Zeta Global has built on top of its marketing cloud. Rather than requiring users to find and configure the right features themselves, Athena accepts a business objective – say, two million new customers at 7% lower acquisition cost – and reconfigures the platform’s interface around that goal, then asks whether to activate. It is less a chatbot than a co-pilot for a plane most marketers didn’t know they were flying.
“We’ve turned out a stealth bomber and our clients know how to fly Cessnas,” said David Steinberg, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Zeta Global, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026.
Speed as a competitive weapon
Steinberg pointed to decision velocity as the core differentiator underpinning Zeta’s claimed returns. A Forrester study, he said, found that for every dollar spent through Zeta’s platform, clients see more than 600% return on marketing spend – a figure he attributed directly to the platform’s ability to make targeting decisions in a millisecond, compared to seven to 10 seconds for competing systems.
In programmatic advertising, where inventory is auctioned in fractions of a second, that latency gap is the difference between winning and losing the bid. Steinberg’s argument is that speed compounds: faster decisions mean better targeting, which means tighter feedback loops, which makes the algorithms smarter over time.
“Our attribution looks across every single component of the journey of that customer,” Steinberg said, “and we’re able to track them and create a true return on investment. Because we always have a feedback loop from our clients who became an end user or a customer, the algorithms are consistently getting smarter on who to target and where.”
From 600% to 1,000%
The 600%-plus return on marketing spend figure, Steinberg was careful to note, predates Athena’s rollout. Early adopters of the new agentic layer are already seeing returns “substantially higher” than that baseline, he said – pointing toward what he described as a publicly stated long-term goal of 1,000% return on marketing spend.
Whether those early numbers hold at scale remains to be seen, but Steinberg cited Zeta’s first-quarter 2026 results as evidence the trajectory is real: 50% year-over-year revenue growth, at what he described as a “pretty scaled business.” Zeta Global, which went public in 2021, has been building toward this moment for years, and the Athena expansion to agencies – announced ahead of Cannes Lions – signals an intent to push the technology beyond direct brand relationships.
“That’s coming because of that return on marketing spend,” Steinberg said of the growth figure.
