The Case For Connectivity

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Ashley Herzog, vice president of product at Visto.

Like a good mass transit system, interconnectivity is the key differentiator for advertising technology these days.

But for any brand embarking on a self-serve programmatic strategy – for many an agency, too – it’s not as straightforward as simply plugging services together. Challenges and delays remain in vetting potential programmatic partners, reviewing commercial terms and poring over contracts – time-consuming work that can all be for naught if the systems can’t be integrated.

One big hurdle: vendor vetting friction. Considering the current size of the Lumascape, just assessing hundreds of providers for initial fit could take an eternity. Seemingly every day a new partner enters the ad tech ecosystem, offering new or sometimes duplicative services to brands and agencies. The most persistent or notable often push their way to the front, whether or not their technology truly warrants the recognition.

What is more, marketers need sign-off from multiple people within their organization. A customer wants to assemble a group of diverse and complementary partners with experience and market equity, but putting together the puzzle can be like solving a Rubik’s cube.
Another challenge is the commercial negotiation. There is a steep adoption curve to embracing programmatic platforms’ business terms. Most will require a 12-month upfront contract with minimum spend guarantees, which have now risen to upward of 20%. Some providers require a strict and steep monthly minimum, which for a brand manager can add up to a lot of early pressure. In many cases it may take two to four months to ramp up a team to the kind of understanding or visibility to drive significant results.

Finally, there is the contract review. Legal due diligence is important – and time-consuming. I recently learned of one big publisher that took more than six months trying to get its legal team to review a programmatic ad tech contract. And I heard about one major brand that already had a data management platform and programmatic director in place, but just didn’t know where to start to build out its programmatic stack. Just getting one demand-side platform in place took it more than eight months.

These points of inertia are not just road bumps slowing down brands’ inevitable adoption of programmatic tools – they are actually suppressants discouraging many from jumping in at all. I have seen many advertisers and agencies, put off by these challenges and complexities, actually shy away from the prospect.

Programmatic buying is still a mystery to most marketers, according to the ANA, with only 23% claiming to understand how to effectively leverage programmatic strategies. This simply isn’t good enough – when brands are looking at investing millions of dollars in media spend, any mistakes are costly. It’s on the vendors to add in a layer of product onboarding and training to help alleviate this gap.

When I think about how my peers in engineering can smooth out the disconnection and inefficiencies between the core executional actions of advertising platforms from a technical standpoint, I enviously wish there were an equivalent magic wand we could wave over on the business side, to reduce the friction and uncertainty around vetting, negotiating and clearing supplier contracts.

That is why I think everyone in the industry needs to make a concerted effort to reduce the inertia and increase the simplicity with which customers can onboard themselves to a programmatic stack.

Too often, people leading brand marketing efforts are overwhelmed at the first step on the on-ramp. That can limit spending against tactics that may be extremely valuable to a brand, but are deemed too daunting to explore. So, vendors should take it upon themselves to make the best in programmatic solutions as accessible as possible.

Building the first programmatic stack is about contracts and fine print as much as it is about APIs and data. The industry needs to make these business matters as plug-and-play as the technology in the platforms it sells, reducing the time it takes to assess partners, negotiate terms and review contracts.

Follow Visto (@vistosays) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.