From talk to action: 3 steps to make convergence happen after NAB 2025

The second in our two-part series on NAB 2025, focusing on what actually needs to happen to move the industry forward.
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In Part 1, we covered the six major trends dominating NAB 2025—with convergence still leading the conversation after years of industry discussion.

Let's be direct: Convergence isn't new. The vision of unified linear and digital advertising has been in conversations and presentation slides for the better part of a decade. Yet here we are in 2025, still treating it as an aspiration rather than an operational reality.

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The gap between strategy and execution

The candid conversations at NAB revealed a critical insight: despite promising unified solutions to advertisers, many media executives admitted their backend systems remain disconnected—requiring manual processes to deliver on these promises. This gap between convergence strategy and operational reality has become the industry's most pressing challenge.

What's actually holding us back?

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The convergence challenge: Best-in-breed systems need better connections

The adtech landscape has evolved with specialized platforms offering deep functionality for specific needs. This modular approach brings tremendous benefits but creates a new challenge: data integration.

Today's typical media technology stack includes specialized systems that excel individually but often don't communicate effectively with each other. The result? Powerful but siloed tools where teams manually bridge the gaps between systems that should connect automatically.
We've heard this sentiment repeatedly from media executives: They appreciate the innovation and specialized capabilities of modern adtech, but they need better ways to link these systems together.

This is exactly where the greatest opportunity lies.

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3 steps to make convergence a reality

Media organizations don't need more convergence conversations. They need a practical path forward:
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1. Embrace the tools we have, plus automation

The "one system to rule them all" approach often falls short of expectations. Forward-thinking organizations are embracing a more flexible strategy: keeping their best-in-breed systems while building an automation layer that connects them.

This means investing in technologies that can:

• Extract data from diverse source systems
• Transform it to match target system requirements
• Load it seamlessly without manual intervention
• Maintain a full audit trail for validation and compliance
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2. Automate the 80% that's predictable

Most media data workflows follow predictable patterns. The highest ROI comes from automating these standard processes first, while maintaining flexibility for the exceptions.

Leading organizations are starting with:

• Automated proposal generation from CRM to OMS
• Agentic workflows that automatically ingest Orders, Traffic Instructions and Creative assets into legacy systems
  New cost effective MDM solutions that align Local, National and International customer information. Linking Linear, Digital and Audio sales channel data increases speed and accuracy at each step of the order-to-cash workflow
• Standardized digital campaign setup across platforms
• Unified post-campaign reporting across linear and digital
• Automated order reconciliation and financial process integration
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3. Focus on the unsexy middle layer

The most valuable innovation isn't happening at the customer-facing front end or the financial back end. It's in the operational middle where data must flow between systems.

This "data plumbing" rarely makes for exciting conference keynotes, but it's where convergence actually lives or dies. Organizations that excel here gain massive competitive advantages in speed, accuracy, and scalability.

In multiple conversations, our team reported that senior leadership teams were sharing their plans to focus engineering resources on building robust APIs and middleware to facilitate seamless data movement—the true unsung heroes of the convergence revolution.
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The new competitive advantage: operational execution

With budgets tightening and the market getting more competitive, being able to move fast and work smarter isn’t just nice to have — it’s how businesses stay ahead.

The winners in this new landscape will be organizations that can:

• Move faster than competitors from pitch to payment
• Scale operations without linear headcount growth
• Reduce errors that cause revenue leakage
• Free talented teams from manual data tasks to focus on client relationships

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The path forward

The future of media isn't about upending systems—it's about how seamlessly they work together. In a fragmented technology landscape, data automation is the connective tissue that makes convergence possible.

At PremiumData360, we've built our entire company around solving this specific challenge. Our technology sits between your systems—CRMs, OMS platforms, Ad Servers, DSPs, SSPs, and ERPs—automatically translating, cleansing and moving data to create true end-to-end automation.

The vision of convergence is compelling. But the path to getting there isn't through more visionary keynotes—it's through practical, operational execution that connects the systems you already have.

The time for talking about convergence is over. The time for building it is now.