After 12 years of working in – or adjacent to – the ad tech industry, I am coming to terms with the simple answer to many depressing questions:
- How can made-for-advertising inventory thrive now more than ever?
- Why are vanity metrics still widely used to falsely prove performance?
- Why is there still such limited transparency in the ad tech ecosystem?
- Why are website owners still stacking their pages with tech from thousands of vendors?
- Why are buyers and agencies still not strictly buying on curated and vetted inventory only?
And the list goes on …
The answer to all of these questions: Pecunia non olet.
Wait, it’s all about money?
This nearly 2,000-years-old Latin saying is ascribed to emperor Vespasian and translates to “money does not stink.” When Vespasian (re)imposed a tax on the sale of urine from public toilets, his son Titus complained about the disgusting nature of this income for the treasury. Vespasian felt no shame and supposedly held up a gold coin, asking his son whether it smelt bad. Titus said no, and Vespasian replied, “Yet, it comes from urine.”
Long story short, Vespasian couldn’t care less about the origin of taxes. Money is money, and money is good. Interestingly, however, the urine was a useful material used in tanning and other crafts. We can’t say the same for many problematic issues in ad tech, which simply drain value from the ecosystem.
I consider large parts of the ad tech ecosystem to be similar to sewers, with a lot of crap passing through them. The reason for this is not related to any technical complexities, as filters are readily available and have been for years. Yet no one seems willing to press the button that stops the flow of crap. Why is that?
Money. It’s all about money. Capitalism creates perverse incentives for corporations and individuals to look the other way if there’s money to be made.
Vanity metrics are obsolete
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the Genuine Web. I urged readers to refrain from treating the open web as one big bundle at the risk of penalizing genuine content owners and rewarding nefarious operators. This would be so simple to do, yet it seems like the industry hasn’t progressed – at all.
The reason? There’s a lot of money to be made by looking the other way, and, as Vespasian said, money doesn’t stink!
Every impression, high-quality or not, is an opportunity for many parties in the ecosystem to make money. It’s a zero-sum game with hundreds, if not thousands, of parasi – sorry, companies – trying to nibble away as much of it as possible for themselves.
Unfortunately, most of the systems are easily gamed into rewarding inventory based on vanity metrics such as viewability or click-through rates, so a lot of impressions are falsely portrayed as being high quality.
And this isn’t just true for open web ad tech; the same types of issues are prevalent with operators of walled gardens. Just consider the recent Adalytics reports about YouTube. Or when Facebook heavily inflated video viewership metrics.
Bundling good with bad to earn as much as possible while not getting caught seems to be the modus operandi for many. With shareholders demanding continuous growth, who can blame them? Yet this type of bundling carries existential risk for the entire industry, as portrayed brilliantly in an iconic scene in “The Big Short.”
Too few people care about the origin of the dollars on the bottom line in financial reports, as long as there are more dollars flowing in than the previous period.
Pecunia non olet.
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