With 8000 martech tools in 2020 (up from 150 in 2011) in Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape infographic, marketers are facing tool fatigue from under-utilized solutions for which marketers are not effectively trained to use. This contributes to the data from Gartner showing that only 33% of organizations feel that their martech stack effectively meets their business needs.

Despite the trends contributing to the consolidation in martech, we feel that the changes that have occurred over the last few years warrant a return of some of the technology solutions that have been eliminated by consolidation.

1. Automation:  the reason that marketers work with a DSP is because it enables them to manage their ad buys across platforms in real-time using automation. DSPs were one of the technologies that were consolidated over the last few years, but until recently, DPSs did not have nearly as many automated tasks in their product offering.

Therefore, it is the advancement of automation in marketing technology that is making DSPs more valuable and necessary today than they were even three years ago.

2. Better campaign management:  For marketers, DSPs provide solutions that enable them to more efficiently and effectively manage their campaigns across a broad range of traffic sources and publishers with greater ease. They also make it possible to save time by addressing the bid placement and management and facilitate increasing ad spend on better-performing campaigns while reducing spend on under-performing ones.

3. Greater transparency:  I know that "transparency’"is an overused term in digital marketing, but enabling marketers to see the traffic source where every one of their ads runs provides transparency in a digital advertising world with too much fraud and malware. This sense of transparency has been missing over the last few years as the industry has over-consolidated.

4. Increase media reach and audience: Another value that marketers gain from working with a DSP is that they enable increasing reach to more publishers and apps in their efforts to reach more users.

Through a DSP, marketers can build their audiences using their first-party data, which facilitates managing the stricter data legislation like GDPR and CCPA governing data acquisition.

5. Create a mobile marketing stack: With the rollout of new marketing technologies over the last decade, marketers put together and integrated best-in-class solutions to create their marketing stack.

By integrating a range of leading technologies, from email marketing and video to social media management and analytics, marketers were able to benefit from the best solutions for the range of marketing technologies working together to address the challenges they face.

With mobile gaining an increasingly larger share of most marketers' budgets, it's time for marketers to create mobile marketing stacks, and a DSP is a needed addition to such a technology stack.

6. Due to the martech consolidation, there is actually a need for DSPs today:  With several DSPs becoming victims of consolidation -- including AppNexus, dataxu, Rocket Fuel, and Sizmek -- there is demand for an independent DSP in mobile marketing today to enable marketers to more efficiently manage their advertising campaigns.

7. Marketers are more data- and technology-proficient:  All of the reasons cited above are relevant because, as marketers in-house more digital marketing functionality, they have become more knowledgeable in the intricacies of digital campaign management. This means that internal media teams can now take advantage of technology solutions including DSPs today which very few marketers could a few years ago.

As marketers face new challenges in 2021, including the end of IDFA on iOS as well as more privacy-driven legislation around the world, they will derive even greater value from technologies that can simplify their work while adding real business value.

When assessing the challenges of consumers and how they can best be addressed, it becomes clear that DSP technology is once again needed in today's digital advertising ecosystem.