“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Amihai Ulman, founder and chief operating officer at Mass Exchange.
We’ve all marveled at the new technology solutions entering the programmatic marketing and advertising ecosystems, along with the vast quantities of data produced. Everywhere a business problem could be quantified, in terms of something that can be counted or measured, a solution has sprung up, specializing in things like behavioral modeling, viewability and attribution.
I believe the untapped potential of all this data is to predict the future. If we took the 100,000-foot view across both marketing technology and advertising technology, we find a very interesting pattern. The land of mar tech and ad tech data is divided in to three main areas, but only one is populated with almost zero technology.
Some technologies can be found in the area I call “The Past.” There are lots of technologies that are in “The Present.” There are hardly any in “The Future” – there are very few forecasting technologies.
I predict the third generation of advanced mar tech and ad tech solutions will focus on telling publishers and marketers what will probably happen in the future. Predicting the future is an exercise of understanding how past data about what happened, when it happened and why it happened can be used as the colors to paint a picture of the future.
The Past: What Happened?
Today’s technology for data capture and storage is like a 100-megapixel camera – it provides a super accurate picture of what happened in the past. We have 100% certainty that what we measured happened. It’s not like there are other possible outcomes in the past.
Data storage solutions provide this vast understanding of anything that we chose to measure. If a data point was created and saved, it can exist forever. The evolution of this area of technology is focused on the expansion of what data is measured and captured. The ever-growing sea of data is a beautiful sight to behold for the analytical among us.
The Present: What’s Happening?
The last massive wave of technology innovation in mar tech and ad tech happened in this category, which focuses on the collecting and disseminating data about the present. The technology that collects data about what the present looks like is less sharp than data about the past. To understand the present, we need to pull a lot of data together really fast so we can act on it.
For data about the past, the effectiveness of analytics that bring data together is not limited by the amount of time that it takes. For that reason, the present is a little less sharp. We don’t have time to look at all the data together.
What’s more, as the sea of data being collected grows, the amount we can actually act on becomes an ever-decreasing portion of what we actually have. It’s more like a 20-megapixel camera.
Technologies that work to understand what is happening and take action include yield management, creative optimization and supply-side platforms. This area of technology is evolving with a focus on the expansion of delivering and processing an ever-growing data set to answer a question in less than a second.
The Future: What’s Going To Happen?
In this category of mar tech and ad tech, the fewest solutions exist. There are no companies on the LUMAscape dedicated to forecasting; I only know of one startup. Forecasting features in current technologies are treated the way municipal politicians treat sewage infrastructure: Nobody wants to talk about it, it’s hard and dirty work, but no one can live without it.
The future will never be as clear as the present or the past, but in this space of mar tech and ad tech technologies, innovation and investment have significantly lagged the market. Predicting the future is hard. It’s never like the past – it’s fuzzy and out of focus. Our current tools for predicting the future are, at best, like a 0.5-megapixel camera. It’s really hard to tell what will happen.
This is where a ton of untapped potential exists. Leveraging all this data being collected everywhere to build better modeling tools will help bring the future into focus. No one can predict when this market shift will gain significant traction, but I think we will see the future as an increasingly important topic of conversation for industry innovation and thought leadership in the next few years.
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