HFS Challenger: Zeta

At a glance

The latest firm to receive the coveted HFS Challenger accolade is Zeta, thanks to its fresh approach to marketing technology (MarTech). Its strategy offers enterprises more autonomy over their data while enhancing it with Zeta data, enabling them to advance with AI-driven capabilities to drive enhanced agility, transparency, and business outcomes. Zeta has emerged as a strong challenger to incumbent players that rely on complex integrations and restricted data ecosystems.

Founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley (former Apple CEO and Pepsi President), Zeta’s core mission is to redefine how enterprises connect with their customers. This means helping them move beyond static data solutions to AI-powered decision-making and hyper-personalization. With this mission in mind, Zeta has evolved into a strong MarTech firm with its flagship offering—the Zeta Marketing Platform, complemented by its own proprietary AI and an extensive first-party data network. Zeta hangs its hat on AI, having delivered predictive capabilities for years and now investing in generative AI (GenAI). You might be wondering why Zeta wasn’t on your radar; this is simply because the firm was traditionally focused on product development at the expense of brand visibility—but that is set to change.

The Zeta Marketing Platform unlocks customer data to drive personalization and precision

Trusted by enterprises in more than a dozen industries, Zeta has particularly deep expertise in the consumer retail, telecom, and financial services sectors. Unlike legacy cloud data platforms (CDPs) and marketing clouds, often fragmented collections of point solutions that add complexity instead of value, it delivers a unified, AI-native platform that streamlines execution and drives outcomes. The Zeta Marketing Platform has three core components: Customer Data (aggregate and enrich customer data via Zeta Data Cloud), Omnichannel Messaging (enable personalized campaigns), and Media Activation (deliver targeted advertising with real-time data). Enterprises can hand-pick each component individually or adopt the whole platform.

Zeta’s vision is to make sophisticated marketing simple. The key capabilities of each component are elaborated here:

• Customer Data: Zeta’s CDP, now enhanced with LiveIntent’s identity graph, serves as a system of record, delivering a single, actionable view of customers and prospects through real-time identifiers and key attributes. It supports deterministic and probabilistic identity resolution, improving audience creation and targeting accuracy by recognizing anonymous website visitors and enabling omnichannel activation. The platform adapts to custom data schemas with minimal configuration, unifies internal and external data feeds, and integrates deeply with existing marketing infrastructure.
• Omnichannel Messaging: Zeta’s Email Services Provider (ESP) powers cross-channel engagement—email, SMS, social, web, and more—using AI to trigger contextually relevant, individualized messages. This precision enables fewer, smarter communications that drive responsiveness and revenue.
• Media Activation: Zeta’s Demand-side platform (DSP) delivers audience targeting across paid media without the limitations of walled gardens such as Google and Meta. Campaigns are dynamically optimized with AI-driven insights, marketing mix modeling, and spend reallocation based on real-time performance.

In addition, Zeta’s Build Your Own Model (BYOM) capability allows enterprises to create customized AI models directly within the Zeta Marketing Platform. Leveraging proprietary data and GenAI, BYOM streamlines predictive analytics, audience targeting, and content personalization. This empowers marketers to rapidly innovate and precisely align AI solutions with unique business needs without complexity.

Zeta eyes AI innovation and geographic expansion to drive growth through 2025 and beyond

Zeta is already infusing AI into its marketing platform, with a commitment to adapt to the rapidly shifting technology landscape. Zeta executives explained how the company intends to launch a customizable AI workbench, which they believe will help enterprises drive AI/ML adoption throughout the organization without delving into the nitty gritty elements of the technology. In its low-code/no-code environment, the workbench will allow enterprises to create, test, and deploy AI models without deep technical expertise, letting marketers focus on what they
do best.

Zeta launched a European data center in a move that puts boots on the ground in the region but also solidifies its offering to existing clients in North America. By establishing regional cloud-based operations in Europe, the company will expand its existing dataset significantly by including localized data, enabling location-specific personalization and cross-market analysis. Additionally, the new location allows it to store and process data within the European Union, which should be a significant boost under GDPR compliance.

HFS’ take

Zeta is stepping into a new phase of maturity, evolving from a product-centric innovator into a global MarTech challenger with a growing enterprise presence. Its proven impact across 15 verticals gives it a strong foundation, backed by broad cross-industry knowledge and transformational use cases. The company has invested internationally, establishing AWS-hosted data centers in the US and Europe and building core regional hubs in London and Hyderabad to better support a global client base.

Zeta checks all the boxes that enterprises crave most—control, simplicity, and intelligence—all under one platform. Its modular architecture helps reduce the complexity of legacy MarTech, letting CMOs activate AI-powered capabilities without a re-platforming effort.

Zeta’s AI workbench and BYOM functionality put control of modeling and decision-making into marketers’ hands and without IT bottlenecks. With its new European data center expanding both reach and regulatory alignment, Zeta is emerging as an enterprise-ready partner entering its prime. Enterprises looking to scale with agility should align with partners in the right direction of their growth journey.

With AI now the defining force in enterprise marketing, Zeta has positioned itself as a true challenger in this AI-powered transformation.

Client case studies

Challenger fact sheet