Why would Gartner evaluate media-buying platforms (MediaMath and Turn), marketing clouds (Adobe and Oracle) and data management platforms (Krux and Nielsen/eXelate) with the same criteria? Usually those categories are complementary, not competitive.

So what do these vendors have in common? It comes down to the definition of a hub – and the way it differs from an ad tech stack or marketing cloud.

Officially for Gartner, a hub must “provide marketers and applications with standardized access to audience profile data, content, workflow elements, messaging and common analytic functions for orchestrating and optimizing multichannel campaigns, conversations, experiences and data collection across online and offline channels, both manually and programmatically.”

So within Gartner’s criteria, companies that did well enabled integration with other vendor tools and empowered marketers to onboard data to drive more functions. Across the board, any time Gartner criticized a vendor in its report it related to some sort of integration challenge – usually a delay or an overly complicated process in connecting different tool sets.

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