The undiscovered truth

In media, everybody feels compelled to say that they have the technology and data to deliver ‘the answer’ – without actually saying what that answer is, writes UKOM’s Ian Dowds.

Like you, I have attended a number of Digital Media conferences over the years. The quality of presentations varies enormously at every event. Some good, some middling and some poor. Rarely are they consistently excellent or even good. A disclaimer: I have given some fairly middling or poor presentations myself at a number of these events. I know, I was there.

Conferences with themes of Real Time Advertising, Programmatic or Automated Trading have increasingly contained presentations – often poorly disguised sales pitches or, more often than not, completely undisguised, but nonetheless poor, sales pitches – built on the foundations of the words ‘proprietary,’ ‘market-leading,’ ‘innovative,’ ‘agnostic,’ ‘cross-platform’ and ‘efficient’ and all involving the revelation of at least one new TLA.

Now, I am no stranger to Three and Four Letter Acronyms – as CEO of UKOM, owned by the AOP and ISBA with board representation from ISBA and the IPA, how could I be?

My personal favourite TLA is PMP. Why? Because nobody can explain to me what the second ‘P’ stands for – last time I looked ‘marketplace’ was one word. But heaven forbid a two letter acronym for Private Marketplace.

It is genuinely very hard to talk about anything in digital media and use only two letters together…try it, in any sentence about automated trading, ‘PM’, it just feels and sounds strange, doesn’t it?

One of the main things that has struck me at RTA/RTB get-togethers is that while there is talk on stage of collaboration, there is a palpable sense that the ad-tech and mar-tech vendors actually feel that they are all really playing for the one last seat at the table alongside the digital behemoths and nobody can afford to admit doubt or weakness, let alone acknowledge the strengths of a potential competitor, in the fight for that one space.

Maybe I am looking back with rosy specs on, and perhaps it was the same back in my ITV or Turner days, but the lack of ‘all in it together’ feels more desperate and cynical to me in the ad-tech world.
[advert position=”left”]
Now of course we have all enjoyed the strong dose of digital-guff-antidote that a good Bob Hoffman ‘The Ad Contrarian’ session brings.

Bob delivers his polemic on ‘The Digital Delusion’ and states “nobody is smarter than the facts” before calmly dismantling the tech and data driven claims of the world-changing cross-device ad-targeting capability of many media tech businesses and questioning the rush of media agencies to benefit their clients (and maybe themselves) by partnering with them.

The audience laughs knowingly at the clear logic that Bob espouses and everyone agrees that he really does have a point. The audience then all chat in the coffee break and agree to catch up at the next day’s programmatic-data-driven-targeting-efficiency Jamboree at another central London venue.

All this brings me to a massive however…because I recently saw one of the most refreshing and thought-provoking presentations at the IAB Real Time Advertising Conference.

Refreshing, because you don’t often see a presentation entitled ‘Is Targeting Killing Advertising?’ at a conference which is, to all intents and purposes, about targeting.

Thought-provoking, because it was given by MEC UK’s Dan Plant, group strategy director and real time planning director and because the subtitle was ‘How technology is changing consumers’ relationship with advertising and what we should do about it‘.

Dan’s opinion was that too much targeting is making advertising less valuable. He referenced a 1970 Book, Akerlof’s ‘A Market for Lemons’, to explain how brand advertising fills ‘the knowledge gap’ for consumers, creating value for the brand, or as Dan looked at it another way, ‘it is the waste that does the work.’

Now I’ve sold TV and I’ve sold behavioural advertising with its resultant targeting efficiencies, and I now consider myself relatively bilingual in both broadcast and targeted languages.

I have been frustrated by the mainly black and white proclamations from both sides of the debate and Dan Plant nailed it for me when he stated that ‘Targeting in media planning is not an unqualified good and some “wastage” is essential.’

There was one piece of Dan’s logic that didn’t necessarily ring true for me, and that is that you should avoid advertising to people who definitely won’t buy your product.

But I think that’s because I once had the privilege to introduce John Hegarty on stage and he said then that the value of a brand is built as much by the perceptions of those who will never buy the product as it is by potential customers.

I liked that. It must have been the old ITV sales guy in me; I remember telling a client “it’s not waste, it’s free”.

I still hear that said now by TV people and, by the way, I think now what I thought then, even as I said it: that it’s not absolutely correct because while any cost per thousand is indeed driven by the size of supply only of the single traded audience, the other part of the equation is actually the demand of revenue targeting all audiences.

Anyway, you don’t often hear the non-polemic approach at RTA/RTB/adtech get-togethers but Dan Plant took a position I whole heartedly agree with: that broadcast alone isn’t the answer, targeting alone isn’t the answer, the truth lies as yet undiscovered in between.

In my experience, in this hyper-competitive landscape, nobody likes to say they don’t have the answers. Everybody feels compelled to say that they have the technology and data to deliver the answer, without actually saying what the answer is. That is because we don’t really know what an answer looks like yet.

It was good to hear someone smart admit it, and commit to the exploration that may find it.

Ian Dowds is the chief executive UKOM.