The news: Budget pressure and new AI coding capabilities are challenging tool and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, resulting in media buyers slashing their ad tech vendor lists, per Ad Age. The primary target—middleware vendors that lack deep specialization. 

Lou Paskalis, founder and CEO of AJL Advisory, told Ad Age, “If a marketer has 1,000 ad tech providers that they’re working with, I would imagine that number will be closer to 200 in just a couple of years.”

Zooming out: AI has made it easier for media teams to build tools internally, using interfaces like Claude Code to recreate capabilities they once bought from multiple vendors.

Cost savings are the obvious draw, but data quality is the bigger benefit. Every vendor in the chain can add governance headaches and degrade data with each handoff, per Ad Age. A leaner stack preserves the strategic intelligence that advertising generates.

The shift is already visible across the industry.

• Acadia: The independent media agency built creative testing tools that deliver faster insights than external platforms, with tighter focus on client KPIs and statistical methodologies.
• MissionOne Media: BarkleyOKRP’s agency created a testing tool that analyzes ad elements driving performance and a dashboard that combines paid and organic search to identify when clients should invest in website content.
• Liquid Death: Its in-house team built dashboards in Claude to analyze connected TV (CTV) campaigns more often, providing faster signals on audience and publisher performance. 
• Stagwell: It launched an AI platform that pulls ad inventory from publishers and partners into its own media platform, per Digiday. 

“Where I need to make decisions fast, I just need signals, I don’t need perfection,” Benoit Vatere, chief media and digital commerce officer at Liquid Death, told Ad Age. 

Yet ad tech overconsolidation carries risk. Internally built tools could fail at scale—for example, dashboards managing thousands in spend now may buckle under millions later.

Implications for advertisers: Brands should treat vendor consolidation as an opportunity to reclaim data and cut redundant costs—it’s not a mandate to build everything internally. 

A balanced approach pairs internal tools for well-understood, high-volume tasks (creative testing, reporting dashboards) with specialized vendors for anything mission-critical, security-sensitive, or prone to edge cases at scale.

This content is part of EMARKETER’s subscription Briefings, where we pair daily updates with data and analysis from forecasts and research reports. Our Briefings prepare you to start your day informed, to provide critical insights in an important meeting, and to understand the context of what’s happening in your industry. Non-clients can click here to get a demo of our full platform and coverage.