At a recent school reunion, I met an old acquaintance who I immediately remembered as the worst goalkeeper I ever played football with. It’s a wonder he kept his place in the team the number of goals he let in. But the irony was that he had the best goalkeeping gloves money could buy. “The very same as Denmark’s No. 1,” he told me. It made the whole concept of him playing in goal all the more baffling to me. As a goalkeeper, he had the best tools at his disposal, but had no idea how to use the gloves to make saves and ultimately, help us win matches.
I get a feeling of déjà-vu when looking at the way the online advertising market is evolving in Europe at the moment. Media agencies and brand markers have some of the most exciting tools at their disposal for the first time in a long time, but they simply aren’t being used to their full potential. With real time bidding, dynamic creative optimisation, product re-targeting, multiple exchange buying, rich media, mobile and video all developing into extremely exciting spaces to watch, the online advertising market in Europe has risen to a total value of €20.9 billion annually with a year-on-year growth of 14.5 per cent. But in my opinion, it could be growing faster.
A single buy side platform
So the challenge lies in making the many innovations accessible to media agencies, so that they better their display campaigns. But at the moment, this is far from the case. The industry has evolved to have a high number of specialist vendors, focusing individually on dynamic creative optimisation, product re-targeting or exchange buying.
This calls for the use of a single buy side platform to simplify the online advertising process. There are three reasons for this:
Accessibility: a single buy side platform is more accessible in the fact that support is available for all major components from one vendor. This is surely a cleaner and more effective method for businesses to approach online advertising, as they look to embrace the innovations at their disposal.
Flexibility: A single platform also breeds more flexibility, controlling frequency across multiple channels and activities, delivering the right message to the user by using DCO and other creative tools, managing 1st and 3rd party data sources to segment target audiences, and accessing the best inventory using built in programmatic buying capabilities.
Cross-platform reward: At the same time the complete buy side platform should encompass all the digital channels including search, video, mobile, display and rich media. Such a platform will allow marketers to reap significant efficiencies while cross-fertilising data across channels and campaigns.
A step too far: Integrating supply and sell sides
With the suggestion of a single buy side platform, has come some calls for an integrated ad trading platform that serves both the supply and sell sides. They entertain the notion that online ad trading can be compared to financial markets. This is a step too far however and the model doesn’t work.
Financial markets have relatively few products, plenty of commodities, significant trading depth and the market can operate with live market prices and market makers offering relatively small spreads between buy and sell prices on a real time basis. In online advertising, however, every ad impression is a unique ‘product’ whose value varies significantly with the buyer (advertiser) and the user (the audience). There are a number of other parameters as well, such as 1st and 3rd party data, placement, time and context. As a result, justifying market prices let alone market making activities in ad markets is simply unattainable – a single buy side platform is as integrated as the industry should attempt to go at this stage.
Efficiency the differentiator
The biggest differentiator many marketers cite in delivering outstanding campaigns is efficiency. The fear is that the inexperienced marketer broaches the many innovations at their disposal in a way that simply won’t help them meet their online advertising objectives and ultimately won’t benefit the business. The industry needs to work to ensure that innovation is accessible and achievable, only then will the industry’s full growth potential be realised.
