HYPEBUSTERS: THE POST AD TECH ERA

It was supposed to make the industry more efficient…

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In 2006 / 2007 online advertising was exploding! In part, the very thing that made online

advertising so revolutionary, true one-to-one interactions, also made it incredibly complex.

Complexity is another word for EXPENSIVE.

With a big shift in spending to digital, media buying agencies had a problem How to buy digital at scale and profit

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We Had A Very Good Problem

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Enter the modern Ad Network model Which in turn began the Exchange and the Trading Desk Sure, you can buy heaps of impressions in a single interface

But is that a value achieved on behalf of the practitioners of the art, or is it significant to the entire process?

And is there actually an ROI? If you’re looking for clicks, yes, because you can optimize for clickers If you’re looking for more engagement, or actual sales, then not so much

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Which We Answered Poorly

VS

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Successful platforms can net huge profits for the winning ecosystem The race was on! How to make the complexity of digital ad buying simpler… How to buy at scale How to take a tariff from a high percentage of digital advertising

transactions

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There Was A Platform Solution Opportunity

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Venture funding flooded the ecosystem New companies with new ways of targeting came on stream

seemingly every day Every specific part of the stack had multiple players

SSPs DSPs Exchanges Data Providers

But we did not see TV ad dollars come online…in fact TV just got bigger

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The Race Was On

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Targeting by individual site is hard and expensive Targeting by some definition of behavior is much easier

although not nearly as effective This brought on the notion of targeting by demography Which required…

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Behavioral vs. Contextual

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Much of the “big” opportunity came down to targeting specific audiences In the past, editorial had been used as a proxy for demography The idea was to avoid the environment and go right to the audience, no matter where they were

Targeting by definition demands data Data has two big issues

Privacy Reliability

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Big Data

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Take a look at the automotive industry… Auto advertisers can buy upwards of 25 million individual cookies for

new car intenders, yet only 9.5* million or so new cars are bought or leased in America each year.

So was there any value in those cookies?

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25 Million vs. 10 Million New Cars

Source: www.motorintelligence.com

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They say an industry gets the media it deserves As we pushed more and more on the data and the

technology fronts we saw less and less accountability for the actual ad. Was the creative of impactful? Was the environment helpful? Was the ad even viewable?

The ecosystem became even less transparent Where, when and how were ads being displayed?

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Viewability

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Will data improve? Sure

Will programmatic ad buying and selling endure? Sure

Will innovation continue? I hope so

Will VCs continue to fund new and existing ad tech companies at past levels? Highly unlikely

Will ad buying and selling be part art as well as science? Definitely…

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The Future…