Clinch's Oz Etzioni on Driving Better Outcomes With Orchestration

by Dana Lee on 5th Feb 2026 in TRADERTALK

In this Trader Talk TV episode, Oz Etzioni, CEO & co-founder of Clinch, joins ExchangeWire COO Lindsay Rowntree at the legendary whiteboard to discuss orchestration, the connection between creative and media, and how the two pillars can be optimised to drive better outcomes.

Clinch is an omnichannel orchestration platform working mainly with agency holdcos and Fortune 500 brands. Their goal is to provide one unified platform that streamlines the whole workflow. This enables organisations to identify the right audiences and channels while also optimising and creating efficiency throughout the process.

Silos Between Creative and Media

Creative and media are the two main drivers of outcomes in ad tech, with each contributing about 50% to the equation. The problem is not in these individual facets, but in the middle. How can enterprises connect the two to ensure that the right creative gets to the right impression, at the right time?

Currently, creative and media are connected by siloed activations, made up of different channels and technology partners. That messy middle stays the same, even as creative and media grow from the acceleration of channels, audiences, and capabilities—an exponential growth further fuelled by AI.

Along with that growth, scale, speed, and cost are also rising, creating more pressure on the fragile middle. We can think of those siloed connections as small rope bridges, which are not load-bearing. The workflow eventually collapses under the weight, resulting in a complete disconnect between creative and media.

Impact & Solutions

The collapse of the middle impacts both the 'C' level and operations teams that run the day-to-day. As a result of this infrastructure problem, deciding how to consolidate and drive better outcomes becomes a bigger problem. Consider the CMO driving market share and performance, the CTO focused on innovation and connectivity, the CFO prioritising cost efficiency, and the CEO seeking a competitive edge.

What many brands and agencies try to do is create specific point solutions throughout the workflow. However, this causes bigger problems by creating bottlenecks that simply push problems to the next step of the funnel.

In contrast, orchestration platforms present a solid, unified solution. They create a more concrete middle bridge held up by four pillars: content, strategy, optimisation, and analytics. Rather than multiple point solutions, all the different strategies and data signals fall into in one place, making everything more transparent and actionable.

Optimising Between Activation and Data

Orchestration also fuels data, providing creative intelligence which can be pushed to the media side to inform spend and build better audiences. At the same time, the data can be pushed back to the creative to understand how every asset is performing.

"It's not just regular data; it's actually a very unique type of data because it's the type of data that was always there, but you didn't have the ability to reach out and use it and make it actionable. Think of everything as automatically tagged—everything is known and indexed ... Now it's possible."

Put it all together, and you get a never-ending loop that continues to optimise between activation and data, and that keeps growing to provide better outcomes. A key example is retail media networks utilising the data piece to feed back into and enrich their first-party data.

Results

With this data, enterprises gain a deeper understanding of their audiences and can plan better media, creative, and strategy. Orchestration enables true omnichannel, building a solid infrastructure that provides a holistic view of workflows and makes data immediately actionable across every channel.

According to Oz, this approach has driven measurable results, including:

2-5x scale

80% increase in speed

85% cost-saving

Such outcomes can empower both the 'C' level and operations teams to better understand, optimise, and execute. With data-driven insights and methods like predictive scoring, there is also a dramatic reduction in waste as they understand what needs to be created—and just as critically, what won't work—before resources are spent.