Advertising Week NY is always an invaluable pulse check on the industry. The event brings together a concentrated level of strategy, innovation and partnership discussion that’s critical for the advertising ecosystem. This year I sensed a distinct pivot in the core conversation: It wasn’t just about what the next big thing is — it was about how we actually build the next big thing.

The theme that we surfaced in our Snowflake session and “market tested” repeatedly during the week was the decline of the monolithic “one-stop-shop” platform and the rise of composability. Composability is an architectural approach that allows you to assemble your marketing and media stack with specialized, best-of-breed applications that all operate directly on your data and that can be enhanced with data from other trusted sources.

If you didn’t catch our panel, “Partnering in the Composable Marketing and Media Ecosystem,” I want to share my biggest takeaways and offer some practical advice for companies — marketers, agencies and publishers — who are trying to navigate this new era, with insights from our panelists: Chris O’Neill, CEO of GrowthLoop; Gerry Bavaro, Chief Solutions Officer for Data and Technology at dentsu; Elena Bond, Head of Marketing Science at Snap Inc.; and John Hoctor, CEO and Co-Founder of Newton Research.

From data movers to data composers

For decades, the adtech playbook was simple: To integrate a new piece of technology into the stack, you had to copy your data into its environment and start growing a new data silo. This created a mess of fragmented data that became expensive to maintain and impossible to govern.

The foundational shift we discussed with industry leaders is that the cloud has made moving data obsolete. As marketers and media companies moved their critical data to central cloud environments, tech providers followed. The smartest solutions today aren’t asking you to move your data; they’re building their applications directly on top of it. This opportunity to derive value from the “data where it lives” is the essence of composability.

Here are three core reasons why that matters to your business:

1. Adaptability is your new competitive edge

When your tech stack is a collection of monolithic vendors, adapting to a new privacy regulation, AI technologies, another sudden market shift or a new channel (like retail media or CTV) is like trying to turn a battleship: slow, costly and painful.

Composability is about modularity. As Snap’s Elena Bond highlighted, this approach dramatically increases partnership success because you can swap in a new, best-of-breed solution for a specific need — a new measurement tool, a better identity solution or a different activation path — without tearing down your entire infrastructure.

A great example of this kind of modularity is the bidirectional data flow between a marketer and a publisher. Historically, this was a manual, trust-based nightmare. With a composable environment, a publisher can securely share an audience segment with a marketer, and the marketer can return a privacy-preserving performance report — all without the raw data ever leaving either party’s governed environment. 

2. The unifying power of the AI-ready data layer

The conversation around composability is inseparable from the discussion around artificial intelligence.

If your customer data — your transactional history, campaign exposures, product usage and more — is scattered across 10 different vendor systems, your AI models will be inherently weak. As Chris O’Neill from GrowthLoop emphasized, applying AI to only a portion of your data limits its power because it lacks the context of the full customer journey.

The panel’s advice: Your number one priority is establishing a modern, secure and governed data foundation as the central nervous system for all your marketing and advertising activities. When all of your data is accessible in a unified environment (structured and unstructured — such as videos, call transcripts and creative assets), your AI can work with and learn from a truly holistic view of the consumer and other aspects of your business. This is how you unlock next-generation customer segmentation and media insights — and allow your AI to learn and evolve.

The democratization of data access and efficiency gains from conversational and agentic AI is also a game changer. John Hoctor from Newton Research emphasized the value of AI agents for business users, but this power comes with a critical need for oversight and tuning, creating a crucial new planning need.

3. Tying composability to the bottom line

Ultimately, none of this matters if it doesn’t improve the bottom line. Composability can drive better return on ad spend (ROAS) and customer lifetime value (LTV).

When you unify your first-, second- and third-party data from structured and unstructured sources, you achieve more precise audience segmentation and better personalization. The improved interoperability between apps enhances your identity graph, leading to efficiency and effectiveness gains in data processing and matching. For publishers, this translates directly to higher yield and monetization because they can more effectively demonstrate the value of their unique audiences to advertisers. For marketers, this means unlocking superior LTV through more precise and innovative personalization and the ability to measure true incrementality.

The ability to link a campaign to a measurable business outcome — an actual purchase, sometimes weeks later — is the standard for assessing incrementality, and it’s a standard that only a composable stack can truly support in this evolving environment.

An advertiser’s single most important to-do

Advertising Week confirmed that the future is flexible, open and modular. The era of vendor lock-in is over.

If I could leave you with one piece of advice from everything we discussed, it is this: Stop moving data and start owning your architecture.

The only way to make your business future-ready is to establish a singular, governed data environment where every customer interaction — every click, every impression, every purchase, every service chat … everything — is unified. This single source of truth becomes the high-context fuel for all your applications and, critically, for your AI models. By focusing on this architectural shift, you gain the agility to compose the best tech for any challenge, ensuring your team is always ready to unlock measurable ROI and the next wave of innovation.

Snowflake: Where data does more

This year’s Advertising Week made it clear that data is no longer a siloed resource but the connective tissue of the entire advertising ecosystem. Snowflake’s prominent role in these conversations as the Tech Stage sponsor — from the technical deep dive on composability to the strategic discussion on AI’s impact — underscores its position as a foundational partner for marketers and media companies building for the ecosystem of the future.