The Fragmentation Paradox: Why Media Teams Are Drowning in Tools, Tabs & Time Loss

If you ask people in advertising what their biggest challenge is right now, most won’t say identity. Or cookies. Or measurement. Or even AI. But at our roundtable with agency leaders this summer David Gaines from Mother Media put it very succinctly:

“I was horrified by the dogsh*t once I actually started to build out ad tech systems.”

This is the first in a three-part series on what’s gone wrong in modern advertising infrastructure — and what has to change to fix it.

Despite a decade of innovation, the typical media workflow has never been more overwhelming.. Each year, new vendors, dashboards, planning tools, measurement partners, identity solutions, and creative systems enter the ecosystem. Individually, they all promise efficiency. Together, they’ve created the opposite: a fragmented, operationally exhausting environment that slows teams down and makes modern media far harder than it needs to be.

This is the fragmentation paradox: More tools. Less productivity. More tech. Less clarity.

And the burden falls squarely on the people doing the work, eroding productivity across the entire industry.

The Daily Reality: A Workflow Held Together by Grit (and Spreadsheets)

Most media organizations didn’t intentionally build Frankenstacks. They assembled them out of necessity — adding tools as new channels emerged, patching gaps with point solutions, and layering new software on top of older infrastructure.

But as a result, today’s practitioner workflow looks like this:

1. A planning tool
2. A forecasting tool
3. A DSP
4. A second DSP
5. A measurement vendor
6. A reporting stack
7. A verification platform
8. An identity or onboarding partner
9. A creative platform
10. A supply-curation partner

Before activation even begins, teams are already juggling 8–12 disconnected tools.

At our summer roundtable with agency leaders, the operational burden became undeniable. “We actually sit on four different DSPs because certain clients want certain inventory and because each has different restrictions,” Sean Mahoney from Invisibly told us.

This wasn’t an outlier. It was the norm.

Each tool solves one part of the workflow. But together, they create a workflow that’s almost impossible to manage. Practitioners now spend 40–60% of their week bouncing between logins, exporting reports, reformatting spreadsheets, and stitching data together by hand — all to keep the wheels turning. It’s no surprise that teams regularly lose 12 to 18 hours every week.

The irony is hard to miss: the systems built to accelerate work are now slowing it down.

Why Everything Takes Longer Than It Should

Fragmentation doesn’t just add complexity —it builds friction into every handoff.

When planning, activation, targeting, measurement, and reporting all live in separate systems, tasks that should take minutes stretch into hours, and campaigns that should take hours stretch into days. Digiday found that 71% of media buyers say fragmented tools slow them down, and 55% say it negatively impacts performance.

And the slowdown isn’t just about time. It’s about the kind of work teams end up doing. Instead of making strategic decisions, practitioners spend enormous energy holding the fragmented stack together:

• rebuilding line items across platforms
• copying and pasting settings that don’t sync
• fixing pacing discrepancies between dashboards
• reconciling exports that never match
• restitching IDs and audiences that don’t map 1:1
• refreshing reports because one system updated late

Every manual step introduces risk: the wrong audience list, a missed budget shift, inconsistent naming, a broken frequency cap, a sequencing error. Accuracy drifts. Opportunities slip. Performance suffers.

This is the operational tax teams quietly pay—unbudgeted, unavoidable, and embedded in the stack itself.

Fragmentation Breaks Strategy, Not Just Workflow

Operational friction is frustrating — but fragmentation creates a far deeper problem: it breaks the entire customer journey.

Consumers today are constantly in motion. Infillion’s research on The Customer Journey shows that people don’t follow a neat funnel — they bounce between screens, platforms, and contexts in ways that are nearly impossible for siloed systems to keep up with. Our research found that, on average, consumers engage with 11 different touchpoints before making a purchase, moving fluidly across 30 possible online and offline interactions along the way.

One moment, they’re scrolling social on mobile. Next, they’re researching on a laptop. Then, checking reviews in-store and finally flipping back to a streaming device. The modern customer journey is a constant back-and-forth wave of channels, not a straight line.

When a marketer’s tools don’t share data or logic, they simply can’t keep up. Fragmented stacks lead to:

• Frequency caps that don’t sync
• Retargeting loops that fire because signals don’t pass between systems
• Ad sequences are out of order because each platform only sees part of the journey
• Touchpoints optimized in isolation instead of as a coordinated path
• Insights stuck in one channel, never flowing upstream to inform the next touch

The result isn’t just inefficiency — it’s a broken brand experience.

Consumers don’t think in channels, but fragmented stacks force marketers to operate that way. And when customer journeys are fluid, but systems are rigid, campaigns end up delivering:

• Repetition instead of relevance.
• Waste instead of coordination.
• Impressions instead of impact.

In a world where 95% of consumers are already considering their next purchase, marketers need systems that can follow people—not lose them.

Fragmentation makes that impossible.

The Human Toll of Fragmentation

What makes this problem so urgent is the toll it takes on teams.

Most media professionals entered this field to solve problems and build great campaigns, not to spend late nights reconciling spreadsheets or triple-checking pacing across siloed dashboards.

Burnout is skyrocketing: talent surveys by Adweek show that two-thirds of media and ad ops professionals report feeling burned out, and 70% say their workload has increased in the past year, even as team sizes stay the same.

And the emotional strain is real: 58% of media buyers say they feel overwhelmed by the number of platforms they must manage (Digiday), and 1 in 4 ad ops professionals (Forrester) has considered leaving the industry because the job has become too operational.

This isn’t the work they signed up for.
It’s the work the fragmented stack forces onto them. One that compounds with every new vendor, every new channel, every new demand placed on an already stretched team.

The Bottom Line

The biggest problem in advertising right now isn’t a new ID solution, a measurement shift, or even AI.

It’s the overwhelming fragmentation that has quietly eroded teams’ daily operations across the industry.

• Too many tools
• Too many vendors
• Too much manual work
• Too many fractured workflows
• Too much time lost to things machines should be doing

This is the root cause of the operational drag holding teams back. And it’s getting worse, not better. Every new channel, every new privacy regulation, every new measurement standard adds another vendor to the stack.

But operational chaos is only the visible symptom. The real damage shows up in the budgets—and the numbers are staggering.

Next in this series: How fragmentation quietly drains budgets long before media ever reaches consumers.