Are lines between agencies and tech platforms blurring in India’s digital marketing?

Once known as the country’s IT capital, Bengaluru has quietly emerged as the beating heart of India’s adtech and martech revolution. The city hosts 129 adtech startups and more than 749 martech startups. Leading the space in Bengaluru are some prominent names like MoEngage, Capillary Technologies, LeadSquared, CommerceIQ, Ai Palette, AdPushup, Zoho, and Hubilo.

These startups are challenging the traditional ways brands approach digital advertising and marketing. They are not just building tools but redefining how brands target consumers, track campaign performance, automate workflows, and turn data into actionable insights. What’s particularly interesting is that these new players are moving well beyond the traditional agency playbook.

For the uninitiated, agencies have primarily been focussed on media planning, creative campaigns, and large-scale audience targeting. Today, this is changing as small and nimble tech startups are doing programmatic ad buys, offering real-time attribution dashboards, automating reporting, and personalising customer journeys with a level of precision agencies once only dreamed of. 

Brands today are no longer relying solely on large media agencies to run their digital plays. Instead, they are turning to tech-driven platforms that can deliver data-backed results, automated workflows, and performance optimisation at scale. This has definitely raised a big question in the industry: Are the lines between agencies and tech platforms blurring?

Agencies are no longer just competing with technology platforms, they are complementing them, said Uday Mohan, COO, Havas Media India & Havas Play. “While platforms offer access and efficiency, agencies provide the critical value of strategy, integration, and accountability. The future of media lies in leveraging these technologies intelligently, focussing on driving outcomes rather than just execution, and scaling proven solutions that solve real business problems.”

Shifting Dynamics

For tech platforms like MoEngage, the focus goes far beyond just running ad campaigns. MoEngage, a Bengaluru-based SaaS platform, that works with brands like Adidas, Domino’s, Unilever, Tata CLiQ, Big Basket, believes that today, the biggest challenge for brands is not just in reaching audiences but in sustaining meaningful engagement over time.

Raviteja Dodda, CEO & Co-Founder of MoEngage, said, “Brands often struggle with fragmented customer journeys, rising customer acquisition costs, and limited visibility into ROI from advertising spends. While traditional media agencies primarily focus on acquisition and campaign execution, platforms like MoEngage help brands go a step further, turning ad-driven first-time buyers into loyal, repeat customers. Our CDEP platform helps marketers make sense of data from different sources, analyse customer behaviour, and accordingly build data-driven insights to drive personalised engagement across numerous channels. MoEngage ensures that brands don’t just acquire users, but also retain and grow them.”

What keeps these adtech and martech startups often ahead of traditional agencies, is that their value isn’t limited to the solutions they offer. What truly gives them an edge is the growing number of key partnerships they have forged with big brands, helping them move beyond the typical agency-client relationship. 

Today, the relationship between large brands and adtech or martech players is evolving rapidly. Leading Indian companies are no longer relying solely on traditional media agencies to manage digital advertising and marketing strategies. Instead, they are increasingly partnering directly with startups, leveraging SaaS-driven solutions, programmatic ad buying, and advanced attribution tools to gain greater control over their marketing spends. 

For example, many players like Flipkart, PhonePe, Zomato, Nykaa, and BigBasket are either building in-house adtech platforms or adopting programmatic solutions and automated attribution tools, while integrating SaaS-based solutions for audience segmentation, real-time analytics, and smarter media buys to manage complex, multi-channel campaigns at scale. Even small agencies are offering SaaS-powered solutions, democratising advanced marketing technologies for mid-sized businesses. 

This growing collaboration between startups and large brands highlights a key trend: technology-driven marketing solutions are no longer just add-ons but central to how brands plan, execute, and measure digital strategies today.

One Bengaluru-based startup that has been making significant strides in the digital marketing landscape by partnering with prominent brands such as Acko and Wakefit, is Buzzlab. According to the brand's CEO and Founder Sidhu Biswal, “Bengaluru is quietly becoming the muscle behind modern media. AI startups are reimagining targeting beyond third-party cookies, SaaS players are building real-time attribution layers, and analytics firms track footfall from ad impressions to store visits—all without waiting for end-of-campaign reports.”

Tackling digital ad challenges

The biggest headache for brands today is visibility in digital advertising. According to Sidhu Biswal, CEO and Founder of Buzzlab, “Brands are bleeding money into black-box ecosystems between platform algorithms, agency markups, and inconsistent reporting. We flipped that model.” Rather than just selling media, Buzzlab provides a technology stack built around dashboards, AI-powered spend optimisers, and automated attribution layers that work across channels. 

Biswal added that today, even smaller agencies are rapidly transforming into mini-tech companies, integrating open-source bidders, no-code tools, and generative AI for smarter insights. This blurring of lines between creative boutique and data lab is central to how Bengaluru’s startups are driving India’s adtech and martech wave today.

At the core of this growth is what brands need most—greater control, deeper insights, and measurable outcomes. In a market overwhelmed by fragmented customer data, rising ad costs, evolving algorithms, content saturation, and stricter privacy regulations, the demand for smarter, automated solutions has skyrocketed. 

“Brands spend big on digital ads, but the real game is tracking how smartly those dollars are working. It’s not just about spending; it’s about having real-time control and knowing exactly what moves the needle,” said Rachit Malik, VP – Programmatic, CyberMedia. 

Keyur Dhamni, SVP – Customer Success (Key Accounts) & CoE, WebEngage, explains, “Brands today struggle with fragmented customer data, rising ad costs, evolving algorithms, content saturation, and stricter privacy regulations, making personalized targeting and ROI measurement difficult. Our platform addresses these challenges by unifying customer data across touchpoints for a 360° view, enabling automated, personalised campaigns across multiple channels, and leveraging AI-driven insights for predictive targeting.”

Adding to this, Uday Mohan, COO, Havas Media India & Havas Play, emphasises that “Today, clients expect agencies not just to run campaigns, but to orchestrate technology, data, and creativity into unified solutions that drive measurable business growth. Startups are expanding the toolkit available, providing advanced attribution platforms and automated campaign management solutions, but the real challenge lies in integrating these tools into coherent strategies that deliver real impact.”

As Bengaluru’s adtech and martech ecosystem continues to evolve, it is clear that technology-driven solutions are central to how brands plan, execute, and measure their digital strategies. From automated attribution and real-time optimisation to AI-powered engagement platforms, the startups emerging from this hub are redefining the industry playbook.