Keynote From Digiday Exchange About Technology And Direct Sales Merging

I had an excellent time speaking at the Digiday Exchange conference in NYC last week. Good job to Brian, Jack, Deanna, Anne, and Erika on a great event.

The 30 minute presentation was called “Tearing down the wall between technology and direct sales.” It spoke little of isocket, and was mostly about what’s happening in our industry, why 70% of the market has been largely ignored, and some lessons for both the publisher and advertiser sides (love the sausage!)

Here’s the video (and the slides to go with it on SlideShare):

Key points:

1. Our world today is pretty silly. 70% of the money is in Class 1 direct, yet most of the technology and attention is in Class 2 remnant. There’s a big gap in tech when it comes to direct.
2. This wall is breaking down, finally.
3. Because the inventory and workflows are fundamentally different between Class 1 and 2, fundamentally different technology is needed.
4. A review of how these new tools are working and how it’s different.
5. Tons of benefits for both sides. Buyers get access to better inventory with guarantees, and publishers control more of their high value premium sales.
6. Publishers should not let a justifiable fear of channel conflict paralyze them into shooting their own foot.
7. Advertisers should care about how the sausage is made so they can understand the differences – like how RTB is still remnant inventory.

Oh, publishers…

A big chunk of this talk was about publisher psyche, fears, and how they’re often hurting themselves more than they’re helping. For as much as we talk about this, and with all the progress publishers have made, there’s still a ton of poor decisions and unfounded voodoo fears. I ran into it again just today.

Here’s a sister blog post about how channel conflict is changing and most publishers are missing the mark.

Love the sausage.

One of the lessons for the demand side was loving the sausage. You often hear advertisers and agencies say they don’t want to know how the sausage is made. That Silicon Valley doesn’t understand Madison Ave. That all the techno babble doesn’t matter.

It’s certainly understandable. There is so much noise and lies in our industry it’s easy to become apathetic. Kind of like how most people feel about politics. But the only way to improve is to understand and weed out the bad stuff. To vote out the bad politicians and see through their lies. The good news is with some basic understanding, 80% of the battle is won.

A key example of this is understanding how inventory is sourced. Where does it come from? Is it just AdX inventory that’s been arbitraged and repackaged with questionable data? Was it sourced directly from the ad server through an API integration? And so on.

Tagged as: channel conflict, direct sales, Events, preaching, programmatic