This trend isn’t working — at least not for advertisers, publishers or consumers, who should be the ones who matter.
As David Ogilvy taught us, the purpose of advertising is to sell products or services, today, tomorrow or at some time in the future.
The introduction of digital media channels, data targeting and automated execution helped us execute Ogilvy’s vision in a coordinated and purposeful way across an ever-expanding number of consumer media channels, do it with ever-greater relevance to consumers, and launch those campaigns in real time at the push of a button.
But we quickly forgot all about that, and have lost our way.
Programmatic pipes
Instead of following the pronouncement of Intuit founder Scott Cook to “fall in love with our customers’ problems, not our products,” we invited tens of thousands of wannabe financial market wizards to replumb our business with programmatic pipes.
These wizards cared little (or nothing) about delivering value for clients and consumers (and certainly not publishers). What they cared (a lot) about was making and taking margins on each and every transaction.
They get titles and workstations that make them look like they’re working on Wall Street (their parents, aunts, uncles and peers at bars are impressed). They throw around a never-ending stream of three-letter acronyms to make sure we know they’re in the cool club — and we’re not.
Powerful capabilities
Personalisation, automation and real-time attribution are very powerful capabilities to help ads sell more products and services, consumers find and buy things that they want and need, and publishers maximise the ad yield from their investments in journalism, entertainment or information.
Unfortunately, too much of the ad industry fell in love with the means — automated, data-driven ad planning, buying and measurement — as tools for media trading, not as tools for great advertising. Let’s change that.
Let’s drop “trading” from our industry lexicon. Everyone who matters will win.
This storywas first published by Mediapost.com and is republished with the permission of the audience.
Dave Morgan, a lawyer by training, is the CEO and founder of Simulmedia. He previously founded and ran both TACODA, Inc, an online advertising company that pioneered behavioural online marketing and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media, Inc, one of the world’s first ad serving and online ad network companies and a predecessor to 24/7 Real Media (TFSM), which was later sold to WPP for $649 million. Follow him on Twitter @davemorgannyc\
