Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs

In 2021 Forrester published three separate Wave evaluations of this market in a single year.

One covered enterprise marketing suites, scoring eight vendors against forty criteria. Another covered independent platforms, scoring thirteen vendors against thirty. A third covered Asia Pacific. Underneath them sat a Now Tech report mapping forty two providers in total.

Forrester's stated reason for the split is the interesting part. A tranche of independent players had begun competing with established marketing technology providers, and in Forrester's assessment the leading independents were delivering innovation that outshone many of the suite competitors. Comparing them head to head against enterprise portfolios would not have produced a useful ranking.

By the Q4 2024 evaluation the market was one Wave again, fourteen vendors against twenty eight criteria. And the three Leaders were Salesforce, Adobe, and SAS.

All three are suites. Every independent that Forrester had separated out three years earlier, on the grounds that they were out-innovating the suites, placed below them when the two groups were finally scored together.

What the category does

A cross-channel marketing hub orchestrates customer engagement across email, mobile push, SMS, in-app messaging, web, social, advertising, and increasingly physical channels, driven by a unified view of the individual.

Forrester's framing describes it as the nerve centre of the modern consumer technology ecosystem, and the criteria in the current evaluation give a fair picture of the scope: content, offers, and promotions; experience optimisation; mobile; social media and advertising; business performance optimisation; alongside innovation and roadmap.

The lineage runs deep. Forrester published its first evaluation of this market in 2008, when it was called cross-channel campaign management and the job was largely outbound: build a segment, send a campaign, measure response.

What changed between then and now is the direction of causation. Campaign management pushed messages on a schedule the marketer decided. A marketing hub reacts to what an individual does, in the moment they do it, which requires the customer data to be current rather than assembled the night before.

Why the suites won the rematch

The 2021 separation and the 2024 result together describe something specific about how this market resolved.

The independents were genuinely better at the messaging layer. Faster to ship, more sophisticated on mobile, better at the mechanics of orchestration. That was Forrester's own assessment and it was not wrong.

What they did not own was the data.

A cross-channel hub is only as good as the profile it acts on. Identity resolution across devices and channels, consented preference data, transaction history, and the ability to compute a segment in real time are the inputs, and they sit in the customer data platform layer. Adobe's Leader positioning names this directly: scalable customer profiles, identity and privacy, and a unified data architecture in Adobe Experience Platform underneath Journey Optimizer.

The suites spent the intervening years building or buying that layer. Once it existed and was integrated, the messaging sophistication that differentiated the independents became a smaller share of the total value.

There is a second factor that has nothing to do with product. Marketing technology budgets consolidated after 2022. An organisation running eleven point solutions and being asked to reduce spend does not evaluate the best orchestration tool. It asks which capabilities its existing suite already covers adequately. That question favours incumbency regardless of feature comparison.

Forty two providers mapped in 2021, fourteen evaluated in 2024. That is the consolidation showing up in the research.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q4 2024

The evaluation scored fourteen vendors against twenty eight criteria.

Salesforce, Adobe, and SAS placed as Leaders.

Adobe's citation centres on Journey Optimizer as a unified cross-channel platform built for enterprise, supported by scalable customer profiles, identity and privacy management, digital intelligence, and the unified data architecture described above.

MoEngage placed as a Strong Performer with the highest possible score in seven criteria: innovation, roadmap, content and offers and promotions, experience optimisation, mobile, social media and advertising, and business performance optimisation. A reference customer's comment recorded in the report emphasised proactive collaboration from the vendor's team.

Seven maximum scores including innovation and roadmap, and a Strong Performer placement. That combination is worth sitting with, because it means the criteria where an independent excels are not the criteria that decide the tier.

Bloomreach also placed as a Strong Performer, and was one of only three vendors in the fourteen to receive above-average customer feedback. Forrester assessed it as "ahead of CCMH rivals when it comes to conversational AI innovation".

Braze had placed as a Leader in the preceding Q1 2023 edition, recognised for enterprise B2C customer engagement.

Three of fourteen earning above-average customer feedback is a low proportion, and it echoes the pattern seen in several other categories in this series. In a mature market with converged feature sets, how customers feel about the vendor relationship is where the real differences remain, and most vendors do not distinguish themselves there.

The air traffic controller idea

The most interesting conceptual contribution in the current evaluation comes from Forrester's assessment of Bloomreach's generative AI approach, which it distinguished from what it called the usual copilot thinking, describing instead marketers elevated to the role of air traffic controllers with AI tools operating beneath them.

That distinction is worth taking seriously because it describes two genuinely different products.

A copilot assists a marketer performing a task. It drafts the subject line, suggests the segment, summarises the results. The marketer remains the operator and the volume of work stays roughly constant.

An air traffic control model inverts it. The AI runs the campaigns, and the marketer sets the constraints, monitors the pattern, and intervenes when something looks wrong. The volume of activity becomes far larger than a human could execute, and the human's job becomes supervision rather than production.

The second model is where this category is heading, and it has an obvious prerequisite that vendors are quieter about. Supervision only works if the marketer can see what the system is doing and why. A hundred thousand individually assembled journeys running autonomously is unmanageable unless the reporting layer explains the aggregate behaviour, not just the aggregate results.

Brand safety is the other constraint. An autonomous system optimising for engagement will find the messages that generate engagement, and some of those are messages a brand would not have approved. Guardrails on what the system may say, to whom, and how often are the difference between air traffic control and abdication.

A note on the B2B reader

This is explicitly a business-to-consumer category. Forrester's reports state that they help B2C marketing professionals select a vendor, and the criteria reflect consumer scale: mobile push, in-app messaging, high-frequency engagement across millions of individuals.

The B2B equivalent sits in different Forrester coverage, around B2B marketing automation, revenue orchestration, and account-based platforms, where the unit of analysis is a buying group rather than an individual and the cycle runs months rather than minutes.

The reason a B2B reader should still know this category is that the technology flows downhill. Real-time triggering, journey orchestration, and identity resolution all matured in consumer marketing before arriving in B2B tooling, generally three to five years later and with the buying group problem bolted on afterwards.

The current example is the air traffic controller model. Autonomous campaign execution with human supervision is being sold to consumer brands now. The B2B version, where the system decides which member of a buying group to engage next and through which channel, is exactly what the conversation automation vendors are building toward. Watching how the consumer version handles governance, brand safety, and explainability is a reasonable preview of the arguments that will arrive in B2B shortly.

What the merge means

Return to the structural observation. Forrester split this market in 2021 because independents were innovating faster than suites. It merged the evaluation by 2024 and the suites took every Leader position.

The straightforward reading is that the suites caught up. That is partly true and it understates what happened.

The more accurate reading is that the basis of competition moved. In 2021 the question was who orchestrates messages best, and the independents had the better answer. By 2024 the question was who can act on a unified, current, consented customer profile at scale, and that question is answered by data infrastructure rather than by messaging capability.

The independents did not get worse. MoEngage's seven maximum scores demonstrate that. They were competing on a dimension that stopped being decisive.

Which has a consequence worth stating for anyone evaluating now. If your customer data is already unified in a platform from one of the suite vendors, the orchestration decision is substantially made, and the honest question is whether the gap between their hub and a specialist justifies a second vendor and an integration. If your data lives elsewhere, or nowhere in particular, then the hub selection is the smaller half of your problem and the data layer is the larger one.

That is not a satisfying conclusion for a category evaluation, because it points outside the category. It is the one the evidence supports.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.