Does ad tech really make publishers' lives easier, or has it made everything more complicated? Jim Spanfeller explains why it's not the silver bullet it was promised to be. Presenter: Jim Spanfeller, CEO, The Spanfeller Media Group @JimSpanfeller

1. HYPEBUSTERS: THE POST AD TECH ERA
It was supposed to make the industry more efficient…
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2. We Had A Very Good Problem
 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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3. Which We Answered Poorly
 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
VS
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4. There Was A Platform Solution Opportunity
 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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5. The Race Was On
 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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6. Behavioral vs. Contextual
 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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7. Big Data
 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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8. 25 Million vs. 10 Million New Cars
 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?
Source: www.motorintelligence.com
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9. Viewability
 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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10. The Future…
 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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