When The Trade Desk Dips, Ad Tech Drops
The Trade Desk has won the battle for supremacy on the open internet, says Needham & Company’s Laura Martin. But it might just be losing the war for the future of the web to walled gardens and AI search.
The Trade Desk has won the battle for supremacy on the open internet, says Needham & Company’s Laura Martin. But it might just be losing the war for the future of the web to walled gardens and AI search.
Classify is entering a crowded space of AI-powered contextual curation offerings. But the company is already teasing some high-profile integrations thanks to its network of well-connected advisors.
Programmatic promised clarity: automation, efficiency and measurable outcomes. What we got instead is complexity dressed up as optimization: a stack of acronyms performing trust theater.
The open web is dead; long live the open web. It’s healthy; it’s full of opportunity; it’s doomed; it’s a mess. Also, what even is the open web, and do consumers care about the definition?
Based on the way advertisers deal with publishers, you’d think they were sworn enemies. Our failure to prioritize collaboration on the open web and build a positive value chain has been our collective downfall.
Curation is a reaction to programmatic’s worsening queries-per-second problem, says Permutive’s Joe Root. DSPs are biased toward impressions that have an identifier attached, so SSPs are using curated deal IDs as a stand-in for third-party cookies.
The programmatic open marketplace is designed to sustain the business models of ad tech, agencies and consultancies, rather than serving the interests of advertisers, audiences and media owners. It cannot be fixed. It must be rebuilt.
Many in the digital advertising industry truly want to do better. But there are imminent obstacles that need to be tackled if we want to move from words to deeds.
Who gets to decide what is premium? Is it dangerous to outsource that decision to The Trade Desk (or any one DSP)? And how should publishers position themselves within the future of this so-called premium internet?
Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem …