Keith Eadie is chief marketing officer at TubeMogul, a software company for brand advertising.
Brands are the smartest they’ve ever been. They have more information available to them and they are beginning to build the tools and talent to translate millions of lines of code into millions of dollars. They’ve leveraged CRMs to capture and organize mountains of consumer data. They’ve employed analytics platforms to identify and isolate the specific variables that change sentiment and influence behavior. They’ve commissioned millions of dollars of market-defining research and gained unparalled insights into how people think. They’ve built the tech stacks to tie online spend to offline sales and calculate ROI with improving accuracy.
And they risk losing it all.
Much has been made recently about the rise of walled gardens – one-stop shops that combine advertising inventory, media buying technology and audience data – and the conflicts of interest resulting from operating within a closed ecosystem.
The noise is warranted. If you’re a brand marketer and you’re integrating technology into your marketing stack, it needs to be independent. The first question any advertiser should ask a potential partner is “how do you make money?” If they profit from both sides of the equation, then advertisers have to wonder if they are really getting the best deal possible, or if the stack is just funneling money back into their media properties.
This same logic applies to media buying platforms with data offerings. How can an advertiser trust that their partner is objectively and judiciously applying data when it is in their best interest to apply it as much as possible?
It’s worth noting that several major digital media companies with burgeoning advertising solutions have come out recently with top-line messaging that, on the surface, supports the notion of independence and open platforms. However, these companies serve both sides of the digital advertising ecosystem, and by definition have obligations to their publisher networks to maximize yield. Under the pressure of quarterly earnings, the temptation to bias campaigns toward the inventory they represent may be too great. The potential for conflicts of interest that negatively impact advertisers will always exist for these companies.
While there are inherent risks for advertisers who align completely with a major digital media company, most people wouldn’t fault them for being lured by the appeal of these platforms: convenience, efficiency, scale and data that can provide a deterministic solution for cross-device targeting. From a distance, they look like goldmines.
But beware all that glitters. Ironically, the existence of multiple ecosystems can eliminate programmatic efficiencies. Advertisers won’t be able to frequency cap or measure performance across stacks. They won’t be able to use audience data from Stack A to amplify targeting in Stack B. They will have to log into multiple platforms and kill a small forest to reconcile reporting across their entire buy. They may fall victim to the same time-consuming manual processes that led some exhausted media planner to turn to his co-worker one day and say “there’s got to be a better way.”
Programmatic’s promise may even go unrealized, trapped within walls that advertisers allowed to be built. But they have come too far to let themselves fall prey to platforms that use their size and clout to blind them into believing they have no other choice. By demanding that their media, buying, and data solutions remain independent, advertisers will finally get to see the full benefits of the work they’ve done. We look forward to it.
Keith Eadie is chief marketing officer at TubeMogul, a software company for brand advertising.
