Here’s how you succeed in ad tech: Analyze more data in more complex ways and turn that into differentiated products.
Ad tech players know it’s not that simple. Until recently, this path required obscure detours through data summarization and sprawling tech specialization.
But today, consolidated data and analytics platforms can simplify and streamline the path to analyzing more data in more complex ways – providing an accelerated route to innovative data products that unlock new opportunities to deliver more value to advertisers.
Tech sprawl is more than a cost problem
For most of the last decade, the volume and dimensionality of data in the digital ad ecosystem grew faster than the computing power to handle it.
But as data volume and analytics demands keep growing, ad tech companies increasingly recognize that what used to work well can’t scale infinitely.
Companies can’t continue adding new layers of tech forever. The cost inefficiencies of juggling proliferating technologies and systems – redundant costs to deploy and maintain each one-trick tool – stand out. But higher costs are just the most superficial problem with the summarize-then-specialize approach.
Consolidation as an accelerator
Data processing capabilities have finally caught up with the demands of the ad tech world.
More advanced warehousing solutions make use of faster CPUs and drives written to optimize this type of technology. In other words, ad tech companies no longer have to make trade-offs between scale and specialization or scale and summarization.
Ad tech companies can consolidate a wide range of analytics workloads (and replace multiple point solutions) with modern, high-powered data and analytics platforms. Leading platforms can ingest the torrents of multidimensional data in real time and can handle a company’s growing number of analytics applications and workloads within one platform and one interface.
On the surface, this consolidation approach delivers highly desirable cost efficiency. Companies can simplify their internal tech stack, trimming away the costs of point solutions from their balance sheets.
But in practice, the impacts of moving from the summarize-then-specialize approach to a modern, consolidated platform directly support growth and innovation in three ways:
- Embracing data richness to unlock new insights: Making big data smaller can work in many industries, but it’s inherently problematic in ad tech, where greater granularity drives more surgical targeting. Whether you’re doing campaign forecasting for troubleshooting or for bid optimization, data summarization will severely limit insight.
The computing power of modern consolidated platforms gives companies the ability to embrace big data at its full scale and in its full dimensionality. Harnessing this richer fuel source will enable companies to unlock more unique, nuanced insights.
- Making integrated analytics practical: Ad tech players increasingly want to integrate data streams and analytics workloads to drive sophisticated meta-analytic applications. Consolidating more workloads and data sets into a single platform wipes away most of these costs and challenges, making more sophisticated and integrated analytics applications practical and accessible.
For example, the looming prospect of increased M&A activity in the ad tech space will likely exacerbate data-engineering challenges as newly integrated companies seek to analyze more data in new ways to build deeper and richer targeting opportunities. High-powered modern platforms enable this deeper analysis on tight timelines, developing identity graphs and tracking attribution across omnichannel consumer journeys in ways that seemed impossible a few years ago.
- Empowering resources to drive growth: All the time employees spend managing a sprawling tech ecosystem is time they’re not spending generating revenue or advancing innovation. Consolidating to a single, modern platform frees up significant time that staff can rededicate to growth-focused activities.
Overcoming inertia to drive value-added consolidation
Most ad tech leaders have some idea of tech consolidation, tech modernization or “re-platforming” on their strategy boards. Yet the status quo retains powerful inertia.
Even recognizing everything that’s broken, the pain of change still looms large.
The current economy puts the high costs of tech sprawl into a bright spotlight, giving many organizations the push they need to make moves toward a consolidated approach to data and analytics.
But consolidation for consolidation’s sake will almost inevitably leave companies falling short of potential added value.
To build a more purposeful modernization strategy and build lasting momentum, ad tech leaders need to focus on the full business value of tech modernization.
Revenue. Innovation. Speed to market. These are what spur excitement and action in ad tech.
Ad tech companies need to build the business case for tech modernization around a full understanding of how a modern data and analytics platform will enable them to unlock and operationalize deeper, richer insights – faster.
Even as these next-gen platforms advance and proliferate, it’s critical to remember we’re not talking about simply buying a better mousetrap. There are no plug-and-play solutions for this consolidated approach.
The daunting and difficult part will always be bringing modernization or re-platforming to life. The tough reality is that, as advanced computing power becomes more accessible, more vendors pop up offering tech platforms that promise to enable a modern, consolidated approach.
Ad tech companies should fully vet vendors to identify partners that can bring both established technology and the proven service expertise to solve for operational and resourcing hurdles, offloading the burden of tasks like the integration of data and migration of workloads. Partnering with a vendor that provides technology, people and process is vital to accelerating time-to-value and laying the groundwork to realize the full potential of a consolidated, future-ready data and analytics platform.
