AdExchanger.com recently asked several members of the advertising ecosystem about “Middlemen” and, specifically:
- “Are there too many parties trying to insert themselves into the online advertising value chain? How do you see this playing out?”
The following contribution is an agency perspective from Michael Brunick, VP, Media Technology Director at IPG’s Mediabrands Worldwide, and part of the leadership team of Cadreon, a media trading platform.
The proliferation of additional service providers and technologies living in between Advertisers and Publishers (and in all reality, Consumers as well) continues to dilute not only the overall online experience, but the essential management of brand-engagement and ultimate efficiency of media dollars as well.
DSPs, ad networks, inventory exchanges, data exchanges, creative optimizers, yield optimizers, verification services – all are vying for their piece of the pie. But at what cost? At some point, the number of incremental intermediaries that stand between the advertiser’s dollar and a publisher’s inventory will start to outweigh the benefits. At some point, it will start to dramatically affect a campaign’s overall performance. If every dollar gets sliced up along the way – all of these services come at a cost – the end result will be a very cheap bid/price, and even in this world of automated decisioning and dynamic ad-serving, you ultimately do get what you pay for.
As brands work to maintain quality interactions with consumers – ensuring a relevant experience for those consumers – they are going to need to push for more transparency, and more control over the stops and hops an impression makes along the way from ad-call to served-ad. The end result will essentially be a consolidation of many of these services into comprehensive, centralized platforms where all of these options can be managed holistically across an entire buy, and not bear incremental cost. Agency holding company service providers like Cadreon – and we have worked tremendously hard over the past few months to be able to deliver on this promise – are uniquely positioned to be able to integrate these capabilities into one seamless solution. This provides our clients with a single decision and management point across the entire digital ecosystem, putting more of that crucial control back in the hands of advertisers – where it truly belongs.
