PDMI East 2025: The signal beneath the noise

At PDMI East 2025, industry leaders gathered to discuss the state of performance-driven marketing—specifically what’s breaking or broken, what’s new and innovative, and what brands must fix to stay relevant in a fragmented, performance-obsessed media landscape. Below are the takeaways that mattered—especially if you’re navigating growth across data, media, and operations.

1. CTV continues to grow—but it’s exposing the limits of disconnected data

The conversations we had at PDMI East made it clear: the debate is no longer “linear vs. streaming/CTV.” Brands are using both. The bigger challenge is how to plan, activate, and measure across them without duplicative systems and disconnected data.

Takeaway: If your teams are still buying media across disconnected platforms without a plan or solution for unifying data, you’re not cross-platform—you’re duplicating work and increasing the risk of error.

2. Continuity marketing requires more than strategy—it requires infrastructure

The industry is talking a lot about customer continuity—retention, LTV, subscription models—but many brands lack the data connections to support it. Without operational visibility into the full customer journey, continuity is just a goal on paper.

Takeaway: You can’t improve lifetime value if campaign data doesn’t connect to downstream systems like CRM, finance, or fulfillment. The strategy needs the systems to back it up.

3. Mid-funnel measurement is gaining traction—but execution is lagging

We heard a lot about the often neglected middle of the funnel. We noted that it meant growing interest in brand-building and audience engagement between awareness and conversion. But many people admitted they still lack reliable measurement and cross-functional alignment to make it work.

Takeaway: Mid-funnel investment is only effective if teams can track and connect signals across touchpoints. That requires tighter coordination across teams—and the ability to move data seamlessly across platforms, without manual reconciliation or one-off exports.

4. Automation > Scale

The big themes at PDMI East confirmed what we’ve been hearing: the brands with the best tools—not the biggest budgets—are winning. Automation came up frequently in discussions—not as a nice-to-have, but as a requirement to keep up with the speed and scale of converging media plans. Orchestrating cross-platform campaigns manually isn’t just inefficient—it’s a liability.

Takeaway: Data automation isn’t a backend bonus. It’s frontline survival. If your media and ops teams are still reconciling reports in spreadsheets, you’re not slow—you’re falling behind.

5. FTC scrutiny is increasing—and the burden is operational

A session on potential shifts in FTC enforcement warned of increased regulatory pressure, especially around data privacy and consumer protection. The focus wasn’t just legal exposure—it was operational readiness. Can your team map where personal data flows across tools? Can you prove compliance?

Takeaway: Legal risk often comes from operational blind spots. If your data isn’t traceable and governed across systems, fixing that should be a priority.

PDMI East showed that many marketers are aligned on the vision: converged, automated, cross-channel performance. But most challenges are still operational—fragmented systems, manual processes, and siloed data. Until those are solved, strategy will continue to outpace execution.

For teams focused on improving accuracy, execution, and campaign reliability, the path forward isn’t just better strategy—it’s frameworks, better processes, better connectors, and better systems. Automating the way data moves across marketing and operations is quickly becoming the baseline for performance.

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