AI isn’t the competitive advantage anymore; data is.
In 2026, most marketing teams have access to the same platforms, the same automation tools and the same AI-powered bidding systems. Performance Max. Smart Bidding. Conversion modelling. Predictive audiences. The technology is widely available.
So why are results diverging?
It’s because AI only performs as well as the data it’s trained on. And for many organisations, that foundation is weaker than they realise.
Across industries, we’re seeing the same symptoms:
ROI that’s harder to explain at board level
Performance that plateaus despite increased investment
Discrepancies between finance, CRM and media reporting
Growing unease about privacy, compliance and future-proofing
In a privacy-first world, where third-party signals are shrinking and regulatory scrutiny is rising, your data infrastructure is no longer a back-end consideration. It is a growth driver - or a growth constraint.
This was the focus of a recent discussion between Google and Merkle: how to build data strength: a unified, privacy-safe, AI-ready data foundation that improves measurement confidence and unlocks smarter optimisation.
The real risk in 2026 isn’t that you’re underinvesting in AI; it’s that you’re feeding it incomplete, fragmented or low-quality signals, and asking it to optimise anyway.
Media performance is now a data maturity question
For years, marketers have optimised media by tweaking budgets, creative and channels. But the next phase of performance growth is structural.
When tracking gaps widen, conversion data weakens; when taxonomies drift, reporting fragments. When CRM and media signals don’t align, AI makes partial decisions.
The result? You’re still spending, but with less certainty.
Stronger data foundations change that dynamic. They recover conversions lost to browser restrictions, improve match rates and attribution accuracy, give AI richer inputs for bidding and modelling, create a single source of truth across teams, and reduce compliance and reputational risk.
This isn’t about adding more dashboards. It’s about creating decision-grade data: the kind that gives marketing leaders confidence in front of the CFO, not just the performance team.
From fragmented signals to decision-grade data
Historically, data collection has been fragmented across websites, apps, CRMs, ad platforms and cloud environments. Integration often required heavy IT involvement, long timelines and ongoing maintenance.
The shift now is towards unified command centres that simplify ingestion, maximise signal quality and activate insights seamlessly across platforms, all within privacy-safe frameworks.
The opportunity is significant:
Organisations deploying server-side tagging solutions are recovering, on average, double-digit increases in observable conversions.
Cloud-based architectures eliminate manual reconciliation between systems.
Structured data models accelerate reporting and activation across business units.
For senior marketers, the implication is simple: measurement confidence is becoming a competitive advantage. Those with resilient, AI-ready data ecosystems will extract more value from the same media investment than those still relying on legacy setups.
A unified command centre for your marketing data
One of the biggest barriers to performance in large organisations isn’t budget. It’s fragmentation. Web data sits in one place, CRM data in another, with offline conversions somewhere else. Media platforms operate in parallel. When those systems don’t speak to each other, optimisation becomes guesswork.
Modern data management tools are designed to solve this by acting as a single command centre, by bringing together first-party data sources, cleansing and enriching them, and activating them across platforms in a controlled, privacy-safe way.
For senior marketers, this means less reliance on heavy IT transformation projects, faster integration of CRM and media signals, clearer visibility over how customer data fuels performance, and greater control over how data is used and governed. The strategic shift is from “collecting data” to orchestrating it.
Recovering revenue hidden in tracking gaps
As browser restrictions tighten and third-party identifiers decline, many organisations are quietly losing visibility over conversions. That doesn’t mean customers aren’t converting, but it means your systems may not be observing them. Server-side tagging solutions, such as Google Tag Gateway, help address this by routing measurement through your own controlled environment rather than relying on third-party browser signals.
The commercial impact can be meaningful. Organisations implementing server-side measurement often see double-digit increases in observable conversions. For media teams, that translates into more accurate attribution, stronger optimisation signals for AI bidding, reduced over-spend caused by incomplete data, and greater confidence in performance reporting. In simple terms: better visibility leads to better decisions.
Building a resilient data foundation in the cloud
Behind the scenes, leading organisations are modernising their data architecture to ensure signals flow cleanly between systems.
The goal isn’t complexity. It’s resilience.
A modern cloud-based setup typically enables:
Consolidation of multiple data streams into a single ecosystem
Structured data layers that move from raw inputs to business-ready insights
Faster reporting cycles across finance, CRM and media
Scalable activation across campaigns and channels
Rather than manually reconciling reports across teams, marketers gain a consistent, trusted source of truth. And critically, this architecture is designed to be privacy-first by default, embedding secure data handling into the infrastructure rather than layering it on afterwards.
Why this matters now
The competitive advantage in 2026 won’t come from accessing AI tools.
It will come from feeding them stronger signals.
As optimisation becomes increasingly automated, the limiting factor isn’t algorithm sophistication; it’s input quality.
Organisations that invest in unified, privacy-safe, AI-ready data foundations will extract more value from existing media budgets, move faster when launching new campaigns, reduce measurement disputes across departments, and demonstrate stronger governance to regulators and boards. Perhaps most importantly, they’ll make marketing performance more explicable at a time when scrutiny is only increasing.
Audit before you optimise
In many organisations, media optimisation has become increasingly automated, but data governance hasn’t kept pace.
Before investing further in AI tools, new channels or incremental budget, senior marketers should be asking more fundamental questions:
When was our tracking last independently audited?
Are we confident in the completeness of our conversion data?
Do finance, CRM and media teams report from the same source of truth?
Are we proactively privacy-safe, or reactively compliant?
Can we clearly explain to the board how AI is making optimisation decisions?
If those questions feel difficult to answer, the issue isn’t platform choice. It’s data maturity.
Stronger foundations don’t just improve performance: they reduce risk, increase organisational alignment and protect marketing credibility at executive level.
From data collection to data confidence
The shift happening in 2026 is subtle but significant.
Marketing leaders are moving from asking “How do we collect more data?” to “Can we trust the data driving our decisions?”
That distinction matters. As automation increases, the margin for weak signals narrows. As privacy expectations rise, governance becomes strategic. As boards demand clearer ROI narratives, measurement confidence becomes leadership currency.
The organisations that will outperform are not necessarily those spending more on media, but those extracting more intelligence from the data they already have.
A practical starting point
Improving data maturity doesn’t require a wholesale transformation overnight. It begins with clarity.
A structured data readiness assessment can help identify:
Where tracking gaps are limiting optimisation
Whether server-side measurement could recover lost conversions
How aligned your CRM, cloud and media ecosystems really are
What quick wins exist before deeper architectural change
From there, the path becomes practical rather than theoretical - because loving your data isn’t a technical ambition; it’s a performance strategy.
Ready to strengthen your data foundations?
If you’re unsure whether your current setup is limiting AI performance, leaving conversions unobserved or creating reporting friction across teams, now is the time to take stock.
Merkle is offering a complimentary data readiness assessment to help you understand where tracking gaps, fragmented signals or governance risks may be holding back ROI, and where practical improvements could unlock measurable gains in 2026. Contact us to learn more.
Or, for a broader view of how leading organisations are building AI-ready, privacy-safe marketing ecosystems, explore Merkle’s 2026 Marketing Playbook, which outlines the strategic shifts shaping performance in the year ahead.
