The marketing-technology consolidation wave that the Scott Brinker landscape diagram has been warning about for a decade arrived, properly, in 2025 and 2026. The number of distinct vendors on the most recent landscape did not shrink — it grew, as it always does — but the M&A activity among the three or four platforms that matter for an in-house marketing buying decision picked up sharply. Six acquisitions in particular, in the past eighteen months, are worth tracking. They tell a consistent story about where the marketing stack is heading.

This piece is a working read on those six deals. It is not a comprehensive M&A roundup; the goal is to identify the structural moves the three or four buyers in this category are making, and to read off the pattern.

The six deals

HubSpot acquires Clearbit (closed Nov 2023)

HubSpot’s $150 million purchase of Clearbit was the deal that effectively kicked off the modern consolidation wave. Clearbit, the B2B data-enrichment company that mid-market RevOps teams had been quietly relying on for years, became the firmographic and intent data layer inside HubSpot’s CRM. The deal mattered structurally because it bought HubSpot a piece of the data stack that the integrated competitor (Salesforce + Data Cloud) had a clear lead on, and it telegraphed HubSpot’s intent to build the integrated B2B platform rather than to remain the inbound-marketing tool.

What the deal signals: HubSpot wants to own the identity-and-enrichment layer for its mid-market customer base, not lease it from a third-party data vendor. The integration work has been visible across HubSpot’s product roadmap in 2024 and 2025.

Adobe acquires Figma (terminated Dec 2023)

We are including the Adobe-Figma deal on this list even though it never closed, because the termination is itself the signal. The $20 billion deal was killed by European and UK regulatory opposition; the lesson for the rest of the category was that platform-level horizontal acquisitions in marketing technology will draw serious antitrust attention going forward. The deals that have closed since 2024 have been smaller, more clearly vertical or complementary, and structured to avoid the merger-review attention the Adobe-Figma combination drew.

What the deal signals: the era of the multi-billion-dollar platform-platform marketing-tech acquisition is, at minimum, on a regulatory pause. Buyers should expect more $200M-to-$2B deals stitching together the stack rather than fewer $20B platform mergers.

Salesforce acquires Spiff (closed Feb 2024)

Spiff, the sales-commission and incentive-compensation platform, was a $419 million deal that slotted directly into Salesforce’s Revenue Cloud. It was a vertical extension into a piece of the revenue-operations stack that Salesforce had previously left to third-party tools.

What the deal signals: Salesforce’s response to the integration pressure is to buy adjacent revenue-operations functionality and bring it inside the platform, rather than to integrate horizontally with marketing or service. The Spiff acquisition fits a pattern that includes Slack (2021), Tableau (2019), and a string of smaller deals: Salesforce wants to be the system of record for the revenue function, end to end.

HubSpot’s Cacheflow purchase (closed Jan 2024)

Cacheflow, a smaller B2B SaaS billing and quote-to-cash platform, became HubSpot’s CPQ and recurring-billing layer. The deal got less coverage than the Clearbit one but matters structurally, because it closes off another piece of the integrated B2B platform HubSpot is building. CRM + marketing + data enrichment + CPQ + recurring billing is, structurally, the platform Salesforce is building from a different direction.

What the deal signals: HubSpot is racing to assemble the integrated mid-market platform before Salesforce can reach down into the mid-market with a credible alternative. The strategy depends on absorbing the categories Salesforce already covers at the enterprise tier and presenting them to mid-market buyers as one stack.

Adobe acquires Rephrase.ai (closed Dec 2023)

Rephrase.ai was an AI text-to-video and AI avatar platform that became part of Adobe’s generative AI portfolio inside the Experience Cloud. The deal price was not disclosed; the strategic logic was clear. Adobe needed AI-native creative production capability beyond its Firefly text-to-image work, and Rephrase brought a video pipeline with a working product and an India-based engineering team.

What the deal signals: Adobe’s consolidation strategy is mostly about the AI-creative tier of the stack rather than about the data or measurement tier. The company is doubling down on what it is good at — the creative production layer — rather than trying to be a Salesforce or HubSpot competitor in the broader stack.

Salesforce acquires Own (closed Jun 2024)

Own, a SaaS data-protection and backup company, was a $1.9 billion deal that brought into Salesforce a capability the platform had previously punted to third parties. The strategic read was about the AI agent rollout: Salesforce’s Agentforce program needs a data-governance layer to operate safely on customer data inside enterprise accounts, and Own’s backup-and-recovery capability is the closest thing on the market to a working answer to that question.

What the deal signals: the AI-agent rollouts the platform companies are running will need data-governance, lineage, and recovery capability that the platforms do not currently have. Expect more deals in this category. Backup-and-recovery is the unsexy part of the consolidation story; it is also the part the enterprise procurement teams are asking about in 2026.

What the pattern is telling us

Across the six deals, four structural patterns hold up.

The platforms are building toward the integrated revenue stack, from different directions. Salesforce is consolidating the revenue-operations function. HubSpot is consolidating the mid-market end-to-end stack. Adobe is consolidating the AI-creative production tier. The three are converging on the same destination — an integrated marketing-and-revenue platform — but coming at it from the angle each company is strongest at. The integration each platform owns is the integration the customer-base they sell to has been pulling them toward for years.

The deals are getting smaller and more strategic. The post-Adobe-Figma era is one of $200M-to-$2B deals targeting specific stack capabilities, not platform mergers. The buyers have learned to design around the antitrust posture. The category should expect the consolidation to happen in chunks of capability rather than in headline-grabbing platform combinations.

Data and governance are quietly becoming the priority category. The Clearbit, Cacheflow, Own, and (in a different way) Spiff deals all touch the data-and-governance layer of the marketing-and-revenue stack. The platforms are clearly aware that the AI-agent rollouts they are betting on will require a more serious data layer than the previous generation of marketing automation needed. The buying patterns are following.

Creative production is the lane Adobe still owns. The Rephrase deal, the Firefly work, and the broader Adobe roadmap have remained focused on the production layer of the stack. Adobe has not made a serious move into the data-and-CRM tier, has not made a serious move into the measurement tier, and shows no sign of doing so. The thesis at Adobe is that the creative tier is the lane where the company has unique strength and that the integration with the rest of the stack can be solved through partnership and API rather than through acquisition. The pattern of deals supports that read.

What this means for an in-house buyer

For an in-house marketing buyer evaluating the stack in mid-2026, three operating implications matter.

First, the integrated-platform bet (Salesforce or HubSpot, depending on where the buyer sits in the market segment) is more credible than it was two years ago. The platforms have absorbed enough of the surrounding capability that the “stitched stack with twenty tools” approach is structurally harder to justify than it used to be. The procurement teams pushing toward fewer vendors are operating from a stronger position than the marketers defending the best-of-breed stitched stack.

Second, the platform-versus-best-of-breed decision is not yet settled in the AI tier. The platforms are still behind the dedicated AI-marketing tools on capability at the leading edge, and the dedicated tools are still ahead on velocity. The in-house buyer who is investing in dedicated AI marketing tooling in 2026 is making a defensible decision, even against the consolidation wave, provided the integration costs are known.

Third, the data-governance question that the Own deal foregrounded is going to be asked of every buyer in the next twelve months. The marketing team that has not thought about agent data governance, data lineage, and recovery is going to be asked by its own legal and security teams whether it has. The work to answer that question well is best started before the agentic rollout, not after.

The consolidation wave is real. The map is moving. The teams that read the moves correctly are buying earlier and integrating less. The teams that read them late are paying the integration tax we covered, at length, in our 2026 buyer’s map.