Connectivity Reimagined: Key Takeaways From Beet Retreat San Juan

Martech fragmentation poses challenges — but also opportunities

One of the hottest topics at Beet Retreat this year was martech fragmentation. It’s a well-accepted fact the marketing ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex as media consumption patterns change and new martech platforms emerge to capitalize on those shifts in behavior.

However, all that complexity can very quickly turn into chaos if marketers aren’t careful how they curate their tech stacks. Having more platforms doesn’t always equate to achieving greater success. According to research TransUnion commissioned from Forrester, 66% of marketers are using 16 or more martech platforms today, yet 70% said they’re finding it more challenging than ever to identify audiences across multiple touchpoints.

In essence, marketers have access to more signals than ever before — but are largely struggling to connect them. And with that struggle, marketers are missing holistic pictures of their customers, often presenting the latter with irrelevant messages at best — and alienating them at worst.

In an interview with Beet.TV’s David Kaplan during the retreat, TransUnion SVP of Media & Entertainment Julie Clark put it like this: “As new channels emerge, whether [they are] retail media or commerce media, it’s incredibly important to us that we’re not just understanding consumer behavior but reaching them in the right way.”

So, how can marketers connect all their disparate martech platforms and avoid creating an unwieldly Frankenstack? The answer is connected identity.

By turning to identity resolution, marketers can turn complexity into competitive advantage by stitching together signals from various touchpoints to create a single, actionable view of their audiences. The numbers back this up: According to the aforementioned Forrester research, marketing leaders that employ identity resolution to connect data across their tech stacks are overwhelmingly on track to meet their customer experience (93%), consumer insights (88%) and data-driven, decision-making goals (79%).

This in turn helps marketers realize the true promise of marketing in today’s omnichannel ecosystem: the ability to deliver the right message to the right audience in the right channel at the right time.

CTV is entering its outcomes era

San Juan was abuzz with discussions around streaming video — and for good reason. CTV is continuing along its explosive growth trajectory in 2025, both in terms of media consumption and advertiser investment. According to eMarketer, almost 70% of Americans will be CTV watchers in 2026, spending an average of 2:37 hours a day [CY1] in front of their connected TVs (nearly double their time spent in 2020), and nine major CTV platforms are expected to pass the $1B revenue threshold in that same year (up from just two platforms at the beginning of the decade).

All this is to say, CTV is only getting bigger. But all this progress isn’t happening without some growing pains — foremost among them, the lack of standardized measurement. As the number of CTV platforms grows, media consumption is becoming less centralized. With more time being spent across more platforms, marketers are having to rely on a patchwork of one-off and ad hoc measurement solutions, making it all but impossible for them to compare performance across platforms in an apples-to-apples way.

This brings the importance of advanced, cross-platform measurement and analytics solutions into sharp relief. In the absence of a new currency of record in CTV, marketers can still get the insights they need to make smart investment and optimization decisions by working with a trusted analytics partner than can provide a full suite of measurement tools and methodologies — from MMM and MTA to closed-loop attribution.

Quite plainly, the numbers show CTV isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. To make the most of this growing channel, marketers should ensure they’re laser-focused on the fundamentals: engaging creative content, actionable insights, and perhaps most importantly, measurement that matters.

ROI isn’t telling the whole story

CTV isn’t the only channel where marketers are increasingly focusing on outcomes. Today’s age of peak media, where time spent with media is expected to decline through the back half of the 2020s, means it’s more important than ever for marketers to ensure each and every one of their impressions is impactful.

While return on ad spend has been (and will continue to be) a strong indicator of overall marketing performance, it isn’t the only thing marketers should be looking at. Marketers can often end up with a case of “funnel vision,” meaning they’re only focused on the relatively immediate, monetary returns from their investments. While this makes sense for an industry that has been almost exclusively focused on return for the better part of two decades, this mindset can leave much of the long-term benefits of reach and brand building unappreciated and unrecognized.

This is especially true in the realm of commerce media — whose rapid growth (with spending expected to surpass $100B by 2028, according to eMarketer) is due in part to the strong, closed-loop measurement capabilities it offers. But while this tie of impression-to-performance has helped commerce media rocket to prominence, it doesn’t account for its branding strengths. Commerce media can be an ideal environment for brand building, marrying precise targeting with broad visibility on some of the most visited media platforms worldwide. That’s a real, tangible benefit. And while it may be more challenging to quantify, ignoring it entirely potentially means making decisions with incomplete data — and for Beet Retreat attendees, that’s far from a winning strategy.

Wrapping up

The message coming out of Beet Retreat San Juan is clear: The marketing industry is at an inflection point where players across the ecosystem — agencies, publishers, brands and data providers alike — are having to reevaluate their legacy tech stacks, measurement strategies and key KPIs.

But while the industry is undoubtedly facing disruption, those same seismic changes are also creating new ways for marketers to rethink how they’re reaching their customers, reimagine their integrations and reassess what performance media really entails.