AI Can Break Down Advertising Silos, If Marketers will Let It: StackAdapt’s Kim Marchan Says
The advertising industry assembled an impressive collection of platforms, dashboards and data silos. Now artificial intelligence is promising to make them work together. Imagine that.
For marketers drowning in disconnected systems, AI offers more than another shiny piece of technology to explain at the next industry conference. It could free them from the tedious business of gathering data and give them more time to figure out what actually makes advertising effective.
“It’s really not just about speed. It’s not just about making things faster,” Kim Marchan, head of agency development for the Americas at StackAdapt, told Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV, in an interview.
The bigger opportunity, Marchan explained, is to help advertisers become more strategic. AI can consolidate performance data, support audience creation and bring campaign intelligence into a single platform. That means less time hunting for information and more time deciding how to use it.
Omnichannel isn’t a scavenger hunt
As connected television, social media and commerce advertising converge, marketers face a familiar temptation: Put everything into the media plan and call it an omnichannel strategy.
Marchan isn’t buying it.
“It’s not about the channels themselves,” she said. “It’s about understanding the customer journey.”
Simply adding more channels doesn’t make a campaign smarter. Advertisers need to understand who their customers are, which media they consume and how different touchpoints contribute to business objectives.
“You can’t just put all of those different channels within a media plan for no reason,” Marchan said.
The proliferation of consumer signals, combined with advances in AI, makes it increasingly possible to coordinate campaigns around audiences rather than individual channels.
The goal is to reach consumers wherever they happen to be, without treating every new advertising channel like another box that must be checked to justify the marketing budget.
AI agents get the busywork, humans get the strategy
Agentic AI could also change the relationship between advertising agencies and technology providers. Much of the repetitive work that once consumed agency resources can increasingly be delegated to AI agents.
That doesn’t mean agencies become obsolete. It means they might finally have more time to do the strategic work clients thought they were paying for in the first place.
Marchan sees agencies and technology companies becoming closer strategic allies. Agencies bring knowledge of brand positioning and business objectives. Technology partners provide the platforms and intelligence needed to turn that knowledge into effective campaigns.
One promising development is the ability to integrate advertising technology directly into agency systems using Model Context Protocol servers.
Marchan said StackAdapt can use an MCP server to make its technology accessible within an agency’s existing ecosystem. That could allow agencies to combine their own capabilities with StackAdapt’s tools rather than forcing employees to bounce between yet another collection of interfaces.
It’s a potentially significant shift for an industry that has never met a software subscription it couldn’t turn into a workflow problem.
Advertising silos have overstayed their welcome
Asked what marketers are overlooking in programmatic advertising, Marchan pointed to the persistence of disconnected technology systems.
“I think it’s really not addressing channels as independent silos anymore,” she said.
Despite the availability of tools that can connect data and workflows, many marketers still lack integrated technology stacks.
“There’s still such a high percentage of marketers that don’t have a connected tech stack, and I think that that’s amiss in today’s age,” Marchan said.
AI agents could help close those gaps by combining information from previously separate channels and enabling advertisers to evaluate performance against common business objectives.
Instead of optimizing each channel independently, marketers could increasingly coordinate their investments around outcomes that matter to the business.
In other words, the industry may finally be ready to acknowledge that a collection of impressive dashboards is not necessarily an advertising strategy.
Annual media plan meets reality
Marchan also sees AI challenging another advertising tradition: the annual media plan. Historically, agencies and marketers have mapped out budgets at the beginning of the year, allocating spending across channels based on forecasts and assumptions.
The trouble with that approach is that consumers have a habit of behaving differently from what the spreadsheet predicted in January.
AI-powered technology could make continuous optimization more practical. By analyzing campaign performance in real time, technology partners can help advertisers shift budgets toward channels delivering stronger results.
“We’re getting to the point now where we can optimize along the way continuously,” Marchan said.
That could transform media planning from a largely periodic exercise into an ongoing process of adjustment, with spending decisions responding to actual performance rather than an increasingly obsolete set of assumptions.
For Marchan, the promise of AI isn’t simply automating more advertising tasks. It’s making the entire process more responsive, connected and focused on business results.
And if the technology can finally persuade the advertising industry’s many platforms to communicate with one another, that alone might qualify as artificial intelligence performing a miracle.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage of Advertising Week New York 2026. For more videos from this event, please visit this page.
The advertising industry assembled an impressive collection of platforms, dashboards and data silos. Now artificial intelligence is promising to make them work together. Imagine that.
For marketers drowning in disconnected systems, AI offers more than another shiny piece of technology to explain at the next industry conference. It could free them from the tedious business of gathering data and give them more time to figure out what actually makes advertising effective.
“It’s really not just about speed. It’s not just about making things faster,” Kim Marchan, head of agency development for the Americas at StackAdapt, told Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV, in an interview.
The bigger opportunity, Marchan explained, is to help advertisers become more strategic. AI can consolidate performance data, support audience creation and bring campaign intelligence into a single platform. That means less time hunting for information and more time deciding how to use it.
Omnichannel isn’t a scavenger hunt
As connected television, social media and commerce advertising converge, marketers face a familiar temptation: Put everything into the media plan and call it an omnichannel strategy.
Marchan isn’t buying it.
“It’s not about the channels themselves,” she said. “It’s about understanding the customer journey.”
Simply adding more channels doesn’t make a campaign smarter. Advertisers need to understand who their customers are, which media they consume and how different touchpoints contribute to business objectives.
“You can’t just put all of those different channels within a media plan for no reason,” Marchan said.
The proliferation of consumer signals, combined with advances in AI, makes it increasingly possible to coordinate campaigns around audiences rather than individual channels.
The goal is to reach consumers wherever they happen to be, without treating every new advertising channel like another box that must be checked to justify the marketing budget.
AI agents get the busywork, humans get the strategy
Agentic AI could also change the relationship between advertising agencies and technology providers. Much of the repetitive work that once consumed agency resources can increasingly be delegated to AI agents.
That doesn’t mean agencies become obsolete. It means they might finally have more time to do the strategic work clients thought they were paying for in the first place.
Marchan sees agencies and technology companies becoming closer strategic allies. Agencies bring knowledge of brand positioning and business objectives. Technology partners provide the platforms and intelligence needed to turn that knowledge into effective campaigns.
One promising development is the ability to integrate advertising technology directly into agency systems using Model Context Protocol servers.
Marchan said StackAdapt can use an MCP server to make its technology accessible within an agency’s existing ecosystem. That could allow agencies to combine their own capabilities with StackAdapt’s tools rather than forcing employees to bounce between yet another collection of interfaces.
It’s a potentially significant shift for an industry that has never met a software subscription it couldn’t turn into a workflow problem.
Advertising silos have overstayed their welcome
Asked what marketers are overlooking in programmatic advertising, Marchan pointed to the persistence of disconnected technology systems.
“I think it’s really not addressing channels as independent silos anymore,” she said.
Despite the availability of tools that can connect data and workflows, many marketers still lack integrated technology stacks.
“There’s still such a high percentage of marketers that don’t have a connected tech stack, and I think that that’s amiss in today’s age,” Marchan said.
AI agents could help close those gaps by combining information from previously separate channels and enabling advertisers to evaluate performance against common business objectives.
Instead of optimizing each channel independently, marketers could increasingly coordinate their investments around outcomes that matter to the business.
In other words, the industry may finally be ready to acknowledge that a collection of impressive dashboards is not necessarily an advertising strategy.
Annual media plan meets reality
Marchan also sees AI challenging another advertising tradition: the annual media plan. Historically, agencies and marketers have mapped out budgets at the beginning of the year, allocating spending across channels based on forecasts and assumptions.
The trouble with that approach is that consumers have a habit of behaving differently from what the spreadsheet predicted in January.
AI-powered technology could make continuous optimization more practical. By analyzing campaign performance in real time, technology partners can help advertisers shift budgets toward channels delivering stronger results.
“We’re getting to the point now where we can optimize along the way continuously,” Marchan said.
That could transform media planning from a largely periodic exercise into an ongoing process of adjustment, with spending decisions responding to actual performance rather than an increasingly obsolete set of assumptions.
For Marchan, the promise of AI isn’t simply automating more advertising tasks. It’s making the entire process more responsive, connected and focused on business results.
And if the technology can finally persuade the advertising industry’s many platforms to communicate with one another, that alone might qualify as artificial intelligence performing a miracle.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage of Advertising Week New York 2026. For more videos from this event, please visit this page.
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