It’s obvious that publishers and advertisers have a lot to offer each other. And yet, based on the way advertisers have dealt with publishers over the years, you’d think they were sworn enemies.
This is far from how things play out with major walled gardens like Meta and Google. There, ingenuity and openness prevail. The demand- and supply-side teams come together in good faith and work together, often with excellent results. Here we see collaboration instead of suspicion; partnership instead of counterproductive squabbling.
In our aspiration to preserve, grow and make the open web viable, the supply and demand sides are in an endless battle over anything and everything. Over the past 12 months, instead of talking about new ways to bring value, we’ve focused on made-for-advertising sites (MFAs), signal changes, cookie deprecation, invalid traffic, explicit content and supply-path optimization.
Our failure to prioritize collaboration and build a positive value chain has been our collective downfall. Most ad spend is going to unchecked closed platforms while the open web is fighting for scraps. Ironically, our effort to create a competitive, open web and provide value for both advertisers and consumers is one of the reasons for its demise.
Collaborate to compete
The publisher-advertiser dynamic, as it stands right now, is static – and has been for some time.
On the advertiser end, overreliance on the big platforms continues unabated, and with diminishing returns. The guiding logic until now has been that growth-via-social is theoretically limitless. But the saturation point can be reached rather quickly: Advertisers may be spending upwards of three times more than is necessary to retain the same number of consumers.
Part of why advertisers are hesitant to spend more on the open web is the perception that walled gardens are more reliable – better for brand safety and less likely to count bot traffic toward viewership goals.
However, virtually all the information we have on these platforms’ functioning comes from the platforms themselves. And open-web publishers have far stricter policies.
But the prevailing preference for walled gardens has created a hostile environment that stifles new publishers, pushes existing ones toward defensive, short-term strategies and hinders innovation among ad tech startups.
For the past decade, we’ve focused on eliminating unwanted behaviors – but we’ve neglected to initiate, incentivize and promote the value-based behaviors that will make us successful. It’s time to innovate.
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Collaboration yields innovation
When I started my journey in ad tech a decade ago, I often said, “99% of ad tech companies give the rest a bad name.” Back then, advertising on the open web was a jungle: Fraud was rampant, transparency was minimal and advertisers routinely got burned.
But to go on ignoring just how much things have changed is just as ill-advised as believing the big social platforms are flawless or entirely trustworthy.
Collaboration is now crucial. In recent years, Facebook has had a lot of success with its advertising carousels – essentially, interactive slideshows that consumers can click through, showcasing multiple products from a single brand. This was a genuine innovation that could only have emerged in the open, give-and-take atmosphere that defines platform-advertiser relations.
This type of collaboration also sparked other innovations such as new video ad formats (vertical and square) and unparalleled targeting, measurement and control capabilities for YouTube.
By contrast, advertisers and publishers lack this kind of collaboration. What is needed is a unified approach – one that links supply, demand, data and technology vendors in a single-minded pursuit of providing value and innovation to shift the scale.
Advertisers have nothing to lose from close collaboration with publishers and everything to gain – new audiences, unique solutions, new revenue opportunities and a real chance to reduce a dangerous overreliance on closed gardens.
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