The Cure For Digital Marketing Chaos: Good Information

“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem.

This week it is written by Laura Koulet, Analyst, AdExchanger Research.

Being a product manager taught me that building good product is complicated; one reason is that you have to evaluate not only where the industry is today, but where it will be, and then set the vision for tomorrow.

This is a special challenge in the programmatic space, where the lines between channels and technologies are increasingly blurred, and the breakneck speed of innovation can be dizzying. Companies that were once SSPs now have DSPs; DMPs now have full creative management suites; DSPs are DMPs. The list goes on.

So imagine my delight, as a recent hire of DataXu, to walk into one of AdExchanger’s events to discover a wealth of information on this very topic. This was the pot of information gold at the end of a long and winding rainbow that has disoriented many a marketer seeking answers to seemingly direct questions: What do I need? Why do I need it? When? And in what format and scale?

I couldn’t help but think: How cool is it to be an industry analyst in this space, and to have a well-lit, 10,000-foot view into this new and vibrant ecosystem?

Fast-forward to Tuesday, when I formally joined AdExchanger Research. I am thrilled to be part of this team – not only to serve my own curiosity and observe innovation by companies both known and unknown, but more importantly, to become a resource for the community of marketers, agencies and technology vendors that need to understand this sector.

To take a macro view of how I see the digital marketing space today is to say that I strongly believe that we, as an industry, power the free Internet. Programmatic advertising is the economic heartbeat of scale that gives us all access to such diverse content anytime we want it, on any device, anywhere in the world, without having to manage a multitude of paid subscriptions.

Our ecosystem is exciting because of the incredible real-time technology and the myriad of both scrappy and established players that are attempting to hang their hat in the space. But clean and simple it is not.

So without further commentary, this is why I joined AdExchanger Research: to support our nascent industry with the best information possible. I hope to sift through the noise and confusion to provide some insights that are truly actionable. Everyone plays a critical role in pushing our ecosystem forward, and I look forward to contributing as much as I can to the industry’s collective knowledge to do just that.

You will hear from me on a variety of topics, but two areas of particular interest are the convergence of video and TV, and privacy, a decidedly less sexy but nonetheless critically important topic for marketers to understand.