As the hopes and dreams of a truly open internet come crashing down around the adtech industry, is there any chance that a truly independent ecosystem can not only survive, but thrive in an era of privacy, walled gardens, and domination by a handful of key players? I believe there is.
To be successful we as an industry need to beat the walled gardens at their own game. It will entail leveraging the interconnected ecosystem of agencies/buyers, platforms, and publishers to scale a walled garden experience in an open, programmatic environment. While it sounds challenging, the foundation for achieving this is already in place. We need all of the key players from the buy and sell side to collaborate on curation.
Here are three ways this can happen:
- The walled gardens need to understand the value of programmatic media buying. As Amazon continues to garner more market share and players like Yahoo and The Trade Desk create more premium, exclusive deals around O&O (or 3rd party O&O) the stranglehold that the duopoly of Google and Meta is slowly being chipped away. Advertisers understand there is a vast network of high quality inventory to be bought across multiple channels outside of
- The supply side (i.e. SSPs) needs to focus their efforts not on creating competing DSPs, but rather partnering with buy side players (agencies, in-house teams, data providers, and other solutions) to curate customized networks that aggregate premium data that can prove top of funnel value by starting customer journeys that end with conversions. Basically, the SSP of the future is the curated ad network of the past. However, instead of competing directly for advertiser dollars the opportunity to even better collaborate with DSPs that already have the advertiser budgets will grow immensely as SSPs create more value for every niche on the buy side.
- The adtech industry as a whole needs to stop focusing on scale and more on value. For every advertiser and every tactic there is a point where incremental spend provides a negative ROI. Adopting a focus on value alone will go a long way in eliminating MFA and other types of fraud from the ecosystem and raise CPMs on the quality inventory that is out there. Everybody wins!
Do I think all three of these things will happen overnight? No. In fact, I think it will take a long time for #1 to happen. If the adtech industry can actually come together, focus on #2 and #3, and stop fighting useless turf wars we can force the walled gardens back into the programmatic ecosystem. It’s time to call a ceasefire and admit that it will take all of us (agencies, in-house teams, DSPs, SSPs, data providers, publishers, and other solutions), working together, with SSPs as the new ad networks, to create a better, curated ecosystem that provides value to every advertiser.