Category Archives: Ad Ecosystem

Oct 05 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Economics, Media Agencies, Online Media, Predictions, Publishers, Startups

5 Important Memes for the Digital Advertising Industry

Oct 05 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Serving, Ad Technology, Economics, Online Media, Predictions, Startups

Entering the Fourth Wave of Ad Technology

By Eric Picard (Originally published on AdExchanger.com, 9/18/2012)

Ad tech is a fascinating and constantly evolving space.  We’ve seen several ‘waves’ of evolution in ad tech over the years, and I believe we’re just about to enter another.  The cycles of investment and innovation are clearly linked, and we can trace this all back to the late 90’s when the first companies entered the advertising technology space.

Wave 1

The early days were about the basics – we needed ways to function as a scalable industry, ways to reach users more effectively, systems to sell ads at scale, systems to buy ads at scale, analytics systems, targeting systems, and rich media advertising technology.

There was lots of investment and hard work in building out these 1.0 version systems in the space. Then the dot-com bubble imploded in 2001, and a lot of companies went out of business.  Investment in the core infrastructure ground to a halt for years. The price of inventory dropped so far and so fast that it took several years before investment in infrastructure could be justified.

We saw this wave last from 1996 through 2001 or 2002 – and during that dot-com meltdown, we saw massive consolidation of companies who were all competing for a piece of a pie that dramatically shrank.  But this consolidation was inevitable, since venture firms generally invest on a five to ten year cycle of return – meaning that they want companies to exit within an ideally 8 year window (or less).

Wave 2

The second wave was really about two things: Paid Search and what I think of as the “rise of the ad networks.”  Paid search is a phenomenon most of us understand pretty well, but the ad network phase of the market – really from 2001 to 2007 was really about arbitrage and remnant ad monetization.  Someone realized that since we had electronic access to all this inventory, we could create a ‘waterfall’ of inventory from the primary sales source to secondary sources, and eventually a ‘daisy-chain’ of sources that created massive new problems of its own.  But the genie was out of the bottle, and this massive supply of inventory that isn’t sold in any other industry was loosed.

It’s actually a little sad to me, because as an industry we flooded the market with super cheap remnant inventory that has caused many problems. But that massive over-supply of inventory did allow the third wave of ad tech innovation to get catalyzed.

Wave 3

Most people believe that the third wave was around ad exchanges, real-time buying and selling, data companies, and what I like to call programmatic buying and selling systems. But those were really just side effects. The third wave was really about building out the next generation infrastructure of advertising. Platforms like AppNexus and Right Media are not just exchanges; they’re fundamentally the next generation infrastructure for the industry.  Even the legacy infrastructure of the space got dramatic architectural overhauls in this period – culminated by the most critical system in our space (DoubleClick for Publishers) getting a massive Google-sponsored overhaul that among other thing opened up the system via extensive APIs so that other technology companies could plug in.

Across the board, this new infrastructure has allowed the myriad ad tech companies to have something to plug into.  This current world of data and real-time transactions is now pretty mature, and it’s extending across media types.  Significant financial investments have been made in the third wave – and most of the money spent in the space has been used to duplicate functionality – rather than innovate significantly on top of what’s been built.  Some call these “Me too” investments in companies that are following earlier startups and refining the model recursively.  That makes a lot of sense, because generally it’s the first group of companies and the third group of companies in a ‘wave’ that get traction. But it leads to a lot of redundancy in the market that is bound to be corrected.

This wave lasted from about 2005 to 2011, when new investments began to be centered on the precepts that happened in Wave 3 – which really was a transition toward ad exchanges (then RTB) and big data.

That’s the same pattern we’ve seen over and over, so I’m confident of where the industry stands today and that we’re starting to enter a new phase. This third major ad tech wave was faster than the first, but a lot of that’s because the pace of technology adoption has sped up significantly with web services and APIs becoming a standard way of operating.

Wave 4

This new wave of innovation we’re entering is really about taking advantage of the changes that have now propagated across the industry. For the first time you can build an ad tech company without having to create every component in the ‘stack’ yourself. Startups can make use of all the other systems out there, access them via APIs, truly execute in the cloud, and build a real company without massive  infrastructure costs.  That’s an amazing thing to participate in, and it wasn’t feasible even 3 years ago.

So we’ll continue to see more of what’s happened in the third wave – with infrastructure investments for those companies that got traction, but that’s really just a continuation of those third wave tech investments, which go through a defined lifecycle of seed, early, then growth stage investments.  Increasingly we’ll see new tech companies sit across the now established wave 3 infrastructure and really take advantage of it.

Another part of what happened in Wave 3 was beyond infrastructure – it involved the scaled investment in big data.  There have been massive investments in big data, which will continue as those investments move into the growth phase. But what’s then needed is companies that focus on what to do with all that data – how to leverage the results that the data miners have exposed.

Wave 4 will really change the economics of advertising significantly – it won’t just be about increasing yield on remnant from $0.20 to $0.50. We’ll see new ad formats that take advantage of multi-modal use (cross device, cross scenario, dynamic creatives that inject richer experiences as well as information), and we’ll see new definitions of ad inventory, including new ad products, packages and bundles.

So I see the next five years as a period where a new herd of ad tech companies will step in and supercharge the space. All this infrastructure investment has been necessary, because the original ad tech platforms were built the wrong way to take advantage of modern programming methodologies.  Now with modern platforms available pretty ubiquitously, we can start focusing on how to change the economics by taking advantage of that investment.

I also think we’re going to see massive consolidation of the third wave companies. Most of the redundancies in the market will be cleaned up.  Today we have many competitors fighting over pieces of the space that can’t support the number of companies in competition – and this is clearly obvious to anyone studying the Lumascape charts.

Unfortunately some of the earlier players who now have customer traction are finding that their technology investments are functionally flawed – they were too early and built out architectures that don’t take advantage of the newer ways of developing software. So we’ll see some of these early players with revenue acquiring smaller newer players to take advantage of their newer more efficient and effective architectures.

Companies doing due diligence on acquisitions need to be really aware of this – that buying the leader in a specific space that’s been around since 2008 may mean that to really grow that business they’ll need to buy a smaller competitor too – and transition customers to the newer platform.

For the investment community it’s also very important to understand that while Wave 3 companies that survive the oncoming consolidation will be very big companies with very high revenues, it is by nature that these infrastructure heavy investments will have lower margins and high volume (low) pricing to hit their high revenues. They still will operate on technology/software revenue margins – over 80% gross margins are the standard that tech companies run after. But the Wave 3 companies have seen their gross revenue numbers be a bit lower than we’d like as an industry.  This is because they are the equivalent of (very technically complex) plumbing for the industry.  There are plenty of places where they invest in intelligence, but the vast majority of their costs and their value deal with massive scale that they can handle, while being open to all the players in the ecosystem to plug in and add value.

Being a Wave 4 company implicitly means that you are able to leverage the existing sunk cost of these companies’ investment.  Thomas Friedman talks about this in “The World is Flat” – one of his core concepts is that every time an industry has seen (what he called) over-investment in enabling infrastructure, a massive economic benefit followed that had broad repercussions.  He cites the example of railroad investment that enabled cheap travel and shipping that led to a massive explosion of growth in the United States.  He cites the investment in data infrastructure globally that led to outsourcing of services to India and other third world countries on a massive scale.  And frequently those leveraging the sunk cost of these infrastructure plays make much more money from their own investments than those who created the opportunity.

So what should investors be watching for as we enter this fourth wave of ad tech innovation?

  1. Companies that are built on light cloud-based architectures that can easily and quickly plug into many other systems, and that don’t need to invest in large infrastructure to grow
  2. Companies that take advantage of the significant investments in big data, but in ways that synthesize or add value to the big data analysis with their own algorithms and optimizations
  3. Companies that can focus the majority of technical resources on innovative and disruptive new technologies – especially those that either synthesize data, optimize the actions of other systems, or fundamentally change the way that money is made in the advertising ecosystem
  4. Companies that are able to achieve scale quickly because they can leverage the existing large open architectures of other systems from Wave 3, but that are fundamentally doing something different than the Wave 3 companies
  5. Companies that take advantage of multiple ecosystems or marketplaces (effectively) are both risky but will have extremely high rewards when they take off

This is an exciting time to be in this space – and I predict that we’ll see significant growth in revenue and capabilities as Wave 4 gets off the ground that vastly eclipse what we’ve seen in any of the other waves.

Aug 22 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Economics, Online Media, Predictions, Publishers

Why Media Companies Are Being Eaten By Tech Companies

By Eric Picard (Originally published on AdExchanger.com, August 20, 2012)

My friend and colleague Todd Herman (LinkedIn) once wrote a strategy paper about video content when we worked together at Microsoft. Called “Don’t be food,” it was a brilliant paper that laid out a strategy for effectively competing in a world where content is distributed everywhere by anyone.  I love the concept of “Don’t be food.”  It applies to so many existing business models, but clearly where Todd initiated it – Media – it applies incredibly well.

The media business is being forceably evolved through massive disruptions in content distribution. In the past, control over distribution was the primary driver of the media model. Printed material, radio and television content required a complex distribution model. Printing presses and distribution are expensive. Radio and television spectrum is limited, and cable infrastructure is expensive. Most media theory and practices have been deeply influenced by these long term distribution issues, to the point that the media industry is quite rigid in its thinking and cannot easily move forward.

One of my favorite business case studies is the Railroads.  Railroad companies missed massive opportunities as new technologies such as the automobile and airplanes began to be adopted. They saw themselves as being in the “railroad business,” and not the “transportation business.”  Because of this they lost significant opportunities and very few of the powerhouse companies from the rail era continue to exist.

In media, new technologies have been massively disrupting the space for more than a decade. And there is an ongoing debate about technology companies stepping in and disrupting the media companies. Google is a prominent example, and its recent acquisition of Frommer’s is yet another case where it has eaten a content company and continued to expand from pure technology into media.  But Google isn’t moving into media based on the existing rules that the media companies play by – it is approaching media through the lens of technology.

But this issue doesn’t only pertain to the oft-vilified Google: Amazon continues to disrupt the book industry by changing the distribution model through the use of technology, and is clearly gunning for magazine, radio and video content as well.  Microsoft is changing the engagement model and subsequently the distribution of content to the living room via its ever-expanding Xbox footprint, and is broadly expanding toward media with Windows 8, its new Surface tablet devices and smartphones – again using technology.  Apple has turned distribution models on their ears by creating a curated walled garden of myriad distribution vehicles (apps on devices), but charges a toll to the distributors – again using technology to disrupt the media space.  Facebook, Twitter and social media are now beginning to disrupt discovery and distribution in their own ways – barely understood, but again based on technology.

Existing media models are functionally broken – and will continue to be disrupted.  Distribution is always a key facet of the overall media landscape, and will continue to be.  But as distribution channels fragment, and become more open, the role that distribution plays will radically change. Distribution is no longer the key to media – it is inherently important to the overall model of media – but it isn’t the key.

Technology is the key to the future of media. Technology can and has profoundly changed the way content is distributed, and will continue to do so. The future of media is wrapped up in technology, and this is an indicator of why technology companies are eating media companies’ lunches, if not actually consuming them in their entirety.

Media companies don’t understand technology because they are not run by technologists. And there is a vast gulf between the executive leadership of media companies and the needs to understand technology. Every media company should be running significant education efforts to pass along the concepts needed to compete in the technology space, but I’m not convinced even that would be enough to fix the problems they face.

At Microsoft I once had an executive explain to me why most of the executives running businesses at the company were from a software background.  He said something along the lines of, “A super smart engineer who can wrap his or her head around platforms and technology issues can probably learn business concepts and issues faster than a super smart business person can learn technology.”  And he was right – it’s that simple.

Business schools should have requirements today for anyone graduating with an undergraduate or graduate degree to learn how to write software, and most importantly to develop a modern understanding of platforms. These platform models are the future of distribution, and are barely understood even among many technologists. The modern platform models used broadly on the Internet and to create software on devices that drive content distribution are relatively new, and are frequently not understood by people with technical backgrounds who haven’t spent time working with them.

Bad business decisions continue to be made by media companies because of the significant lack of technology leadership in both executive and middle management. As technology evolved, the model for many years was that business people figured out “Why and What” to build and “Where” to distribute it, and engineers figured out “How and When” something could be delivered.  Great technology companies break down the walls between Why, What, How, When and Where. Engineers have just as much say in all of those things as the business people. Great technology companies don’t treat engineers and technologists like “back room nerds.”  They recognize that engineering brilliance can be applied to the business problems facing them, and that technology innovation will drive their businesses to disrupt themselves toward future success.

Media companies must evolve away from their historical strengths based on distribution control, and must embrace technology as a key principal.  And they need great engineers to do so. The problem is, great engineers won’t work for mediocre engineers. Great engineers won’t take bad direction from people they don’t respect, especially business people. And many media companies have treated their existing engineering organizations as an extension of traditional IT models. The groups that are responsible for the corporate network, intranet, conference room systems, email servers and laptop support do an important job. But it’s vastly different from building software and inventing new technologies.  Media companies often have not understood this.

For a traditional media company to compete effectively with Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and the thousands of hot startups now competing with them, they must build world-class engineering organizations. This isn’t a light fuzzy requirement, it’s a core fundamental of their ability to survive for the next century.  These companies must evolve forward.  They must find ways to empower internal disruption.

Media companies must build startup organizations within their own internal structures that are isolated from the existing IT leadership and given bold broad empowered charters with the leeway to disrupt other teams’ businesses.  They must build a new technology driven culture within these large media companies that is separate from the existing groups, and then embrace those internal startups as the future of the company.  This isn’t easy.  It’s nearly impossible.  And this very likely will not work the first time it’s tried. But if media companies don’t commit to this kind of change, they are going to be eaten.

Aug 14 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Media Agencies, Publishers, Startups

How real-time bidding works

By Eric Picard (First published on July 19, 2012 on iMediaConnection.com)

The real-time bidding ecosystem is still fairly new, and for many in our industry, there are a lot of misconceptions about how all the different parts of the ecosystem fit together. I’ve had a lot of requests from folks in the industry to explain how RTB works, and how the different players in our space fit together.

The biggest concept to get your head around with real-time bidding is the concept of programmatic buying and selling. The idea here is to streamline the buying and selling process by removing humans from the transaction. Now this is a very important thing to understand: By “the transaction,” I don’t mean that buyers and sellers no longer interact, or that there’s no role for sales in the equation. I simply mean that the act of booking the buy — let’s call it “order taking” — is completely automated. Ultimately this is a good thing for sales teams, as it lets them focus on building the relationship and selling the buyer on the value of their publisher brands. It lets the seller step away from the order-taking process.

Programmatic buying and selling is absolutely the future of this industry; it’s just a question of how long that transition will take. The lower cost of sales for publishers and more efficient buying for media agencies absolutely will make up for any hit to average CPM. And many (myself included) believe that we’ll actually see higher CPMs as a result of all this streamlining. Today most of the inventory that’s available is remnant, and it’s not the high-quality premium inventory currently handled by sales teams. Ultimately, all inventory will transact programmatically. But, like I said, sales will still play a very important role.

At the center of the RTB ecosystem are the ad exchanges. These platforms allow all the various players in the ecosystem to share supply and demand and create liquidity in the market. Examples of ad exchanges include Right Media, the DoubleClick exchange, AppNexus, and many others. On top of these pure-play ad exchanges are many ad networks and supply-side platforms that have essentially built ad exchanges on top of their existing products. The lines get very blurry between the “pure play” ad networks and the other aggregators of inventory that make that inventory available programmatically.

Similar to how stock or commodities exchanges allow inventory to be transacted upon at high volumes with maximum liquidity, the advertising exchanges play that central role. But it’s very important to understand that, just like in the financial services world, the big revenue opportunity is not with the exchange; it’s with brokers representing buyers or sellers. It’s these brokerages that represent the bulk of the value and that pull away the highest percentage of the transaction costs.

The equivalents of brokers in the RTB space are the ad networks, the supply-side platforms (SSPs), and the demand-side platforms (DSPs.) All of these ecosystem players have important roles and provide value. However, it should be noted that the lines are beginning to blur throughout the ecosystem. I predict that in the next few years, many DSPs will roll out SSP services, and many SSPs will become full-fledged ad exchanges. (But more on this in another article.)

So let’s follow the ecosystem participants from start to finish:

The impression starts with the consumer and runs through a web browser. (I didn’t put device in here, but note that even on mobile and tablets, there’s a browser involved.) The impression moves over to the publisher, through some SSP (or ad network) to the ad exchange, and then through to the DSP that is managed by an agency trading desk team on behalf of an advertiser.

There’s nothing very sophisticated about what I’ve drawn here — but note that this is the simplest way I could draw the RTB ecosystem. Here’s another view:

Note that even this is a simplified view, and that many of the various partners can service numerous blocks in the ecosystem. At the end of the day, the RTB ecosystem is made up of dozens of players (possibly hundreds), and they’re all scrambling to figure out their business models. This new ecosystem is definitely the future, but how all the pieces will ultimately fit together is still being determined.

The important thing to note in the RTB space is that from the moment consumers visit a web page, the entire transaction of selling and delivering the advertisements to them takes only a few hundred milliseconds. And this is where the revolution plays out; the competition over those impressions plays out in real time. The best ad for monetizing that user is theoretically shown, and the highest yield for the publisher is achieved. Thus, it should make the ad ecosystem function much better.

But there are many changes that have to take place, and I believe we’ll see it happen. First is that publishers need to push more and more of their premium inventory into the RTB environments. Publishers can make use of almost any ad exchange or SSP to create a private exchange where they can define advertiser-specific or agency-specific terms that are negotiated in advance, and the transaction simply makes use of the RTB infrastructure. Terms with specific advertisers can be reached in pre-decided negotiations, and the transaction takes place through the RTB infrastructure.

In a nuts-and-bolts summary article like this, I’ve glossed over a lot of the nuance and details, and I’m sure we’ll hear from a few parties about what I’ve missed or how I’ve not quite explained this correctly. But I welcome the dialogue. In the RTB space, I think there’s a lot of focus on the details, and not a lot of high-level framing going on — which alienates some of the industry folks who are looking to participate but haven’t dived in yet.

May 26 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Publishers, Rich Media

Making the most of the New IAB Creative Formats

By Eric Picard (First published May 21st, 2012 on iMediaConnection.com)

The IAB has finally released new creative standards for the first time in a decade. The new rich media branding units (formerly called “rising stars”) are now officially the newest standards out there and should drive a new revolution in advertising online. Creative formats are the No. 1 reason that major brands have not adopted online advertising to the extent that spend matches hours spent. (There are several other major issues, but this one is the biggest.)

So where do these new rising stars fit in the overall continuum of online display advertising? And how fast can we expect them to be adopted? Let’s review.

There are two types of advertising experiences that are created on major publisher sites today.

One is an extremely brand-centric page-takeover type experience that is very custom and fundamentally overtakes the user experience on the homepage (or section front) of a major publisher to give a quality brand significant creative license. This is great for everyone, including the audience visiting the site. The experience is custom, crafted, and well considered. But this doesn’t scale as a business model, and many publishers don’t yield much profit from these implementations. They’re essentially loss leaders that bring in more spend on scalable inventory.

So what is “scalable inventory?” Well, judging from the 20 or so major publisher sites I just visited, it looks like that has consolidated around a combination of two standard IAB formats — the leaderboard (728×90) and the medium rectangle (300×250). There are, of course, a few other formats that are used at some degree of scale, particularly various formats of the skyscraper ads out there. But I’ve been seeing fewer of these on major publications, which seem to be consolidating on the 728×90 and 300×250 combination.

On one level, this makes me very happy — because I made very strong recommendations to adopt these two formats as the industry standard when they were released. In 2002. Yes, the UAP format standards were released to the industry way back in 2002. (Yes, that’s a decade ago.)

The problem with this lag is that while screen resolutions have radically increased in this timeframe, the formerly “large” 300×250 standard ad unit is now a postage-stamp sized unit.

The graphic above is one I created in 2009 to make the point that creative formats were too small. The problem has gotten worse with wide-screen monitors becoming the new standard.

Now that we have the first new formats available in a decade, it’s on the shoulders of media buyers and publishers to force this issue. First, media buyers must demand this inventory from publishers at scale. They should be pushing to get these units on every page of every publisher they buy from. These shouldn’t be a more-scaled version of the page takeover; they shouldn’t be special media buys that are a fixed percentage of a buy. They should be the bulk of every buy.

As for publishers, they need to enable (and quickly) every page on their sites to immediately adopt these units as their standard unit. The UAP is a decade old, far too small, and very prone to banner blindness by users. These new ad formats are well-thought-through and do a great job of catching user attention.

Publishers also need to make sure that these new units are not held aside as special options and used like rich media has been used for more than a decade now — as the way to preserve floor price. Yes, that’s a good thing for us to do; publishers should be preserving floor price wherever they can. But if we don’t aggressively move off of the long-in-the-tooth formats from 2002, we’re going to continue to see overall CPM erode.

Publishers must also make sure that these new units are made available for programmatic buying and selling. If we move to a world where hand-sold inventory is the rising star units, and all page views serviced by ad exchanges are UAP ads, publishers are going to cause a huge economic problem for themselves. I can imagine the argument being made that this helps with channel conflict resolution — but it won’t. It will create a new class of ridiculously cheap inventory that will further erode overall CPMs.

If media buyers demand that all their buys fit these new formats, and if publishers ensure that there is no friction in acquiring ads in these formats at scale, the whole industry will significantly benefit.

May 07 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Online Privacy

The inconvenience of privacy revisited

Back in 2004 I wrote an article called, The Inconvenience of Privacy. It was the first article I wrote about privacy, and I still go back and read it. Frankly it wasn’t a great article, the best thing about it was the premise of the title: Privacy is inconvenient to achieve even if it’s something people want!

The simple fact is that most people aren’t privacy fanatics. Most people don’t understand the implications of privacy issues, and most simply can’t be bothered to figure out how to keep their activity private. One common meme for the last few years is how “younger generations” today don’t care about privacy like “we used to” back in the pre-internet days.  I actually don’t agree with this statement – I’d argue that young people simply never care about privacy, in any generation. They don’t have anything to protect yet, they don’t have any real short term harm that could come from a lack of privacy. Until you have assets, a career, a professional reputation, a family – in other words – something to lose, privacy just doesn’t seem too important, especially since it’s so damn inconvenient to achieve.

The problem is that almost everything done on the internet is permanent. So while in the pre-internet world, our youthful indiscretions were washed away by time, the pictures from Spring Break 2009 are still showing up in web searches for your daughter’s name. And when her prospective bosses go and look her up online, their impression of her may well be set by the most indiscreet moments in her young life, certainly not what she’d want to be characterized by when interviewing for a job.

The problem is – with social media tools such as Facebook, and photo sharing sites like Flickr, the power to have these ‘interesting’ life moments immortalized is in the hands of others. And once something exists on the internet, it’s out in the public domain forever. Most people aren’t even aware of tools like “The Way Back Machine” or don’t realize that search engines maintain searchable archives of pages and images they’ve indexed.

With all the social unrest in less democratic and stable societies, privacy is more than just an issue of convenience or professional acceptance – it can be an issue of freedom and personal liberty – possibly even mortal danger. Technologies to understand who is tracking us, but in my opinion far more importantly, that protect us from being tracked, are floating around in the market. The most recent example that I’ve seen is SpotFlux, which raised $1M in venture funding.

Regardless of the issues, privacy and advertising are extremely intertwined due to the overlap of various behavioral targeting and tracking technologies and the fact that some consumers feel that their behavior is being tracked without permission to make some unnamed faceless corporation money. The upshot of this is at some point, a backlash against various tracking technologies – and broader adoption of extremely simplified and convenient technologies for keeping your online activity private will come onto the market. And the debate will simply end.

Then the debate about people blocking their activity from publishers will become a bigger issue, since publishers need to be able to track their users over sessions and over time, such that they can more easily sell ads. So privacy and advertising are deeply intertwined and simply can’t be disconnected.  The right solution to this problem has not come along yet, but I’m confident it will eventually.

Mar 03 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Media Agencies, Predictions, Publishers, Targeting

Why Facebook will ‘own’ brand advertising

(Originally published in iMediaConnection, February 2012) by Eric Picard

I’ve been watching and reading the Facebook IPO announcement frenzy with curiosity. The most curious meme floating around is the one that pooh-pooh’s its strike price, market cap, and valuation because its ad business “clearly isn’t going to be able to sustain growth the way Google’s did” — to which I call BS.

Here’s why Facebook will ultimately be the powerhouse in brand advertising online (and eventually offline as well):

Facebook is a platform

To really do this one justice, I’d need to write a whole article about the power of platforms and explain why platform effects are almost impossible to defeat once they’ve started. Platform effects are similar to network effects, so let’s start there in case you’re one of the 20 people left on the planet who haven’t learned about them. Network effects are basically when multiple users have adopted a platform or network, causing the platform or network to be more valuable. Telephones are the primal example here — the more people who have a phone, the more valuable the phone platform or network is to its users, therefore more people get telephones. Facebook has cracked that nut — it’s a vast social network, and network effects have rendered it as difficult to avoid getting a Facebook account as they have rendered not having a telephone or email address to be almost impossible.

Platform effects are similar, but even stickier: They come from opening a platform to third party developers. Once you have developers creating software that relies on the use of a platform, the platform becomes more useful and therefore becomes more adopted by end-users. This has been proven repeatedly — from Windows beating the Mac originally because so many software developers and hardware manufacturers supported the Windows PC platform. Apple has of course had the last laugh there, with the iPod/iPhone/iPad apps marketplace taking a page right out of Microsoft’s playbook and kicking them in the teeth.

Facebook is a platform that “consumer facing applications” like Zynga and other game companies have made good use of. But also it’s a massive data and business to business platform, which has been less broadly publicized, but which is beginning to gain adoption. And that part of its platform, tied to the data from the consumer side of its platform, is why advertising will ultimately bow to Facebook (barring some horrible misstep on their part.)

Facebook takes user data in return for free access to the Facebook platform

Facebook requires all users to opt into its platform — and despite all the various privacy debates and discussions about Facebook, it is actually pretty good about being transparent and providing value to users in return for sharing all sorts of data.

Facebook is right now (my opinion — open to debate) the most authoritative source of data on consumers, their interests, and brand affiliations. It’s going to grow and become more comprehensive, meaning that it will become the main source of all data used by brand advertisers to reach targeted users.

To my mind this is already destined to happen — and locked up due to the fact that Facebook is a platform. It builds content that no media company would be able to build (social content.) So in that way it really doesn’t compete with online publishers. Online publishers wisely have adopted Facebook as a distribution platform as well as an authentication platform for allowing consumers to accesstheir content.

It’s only a matter of time before publishers become so intertwined with Facebook’s platform that all their content becomes effectively part of the Facebook platform. But not in a way that publishers should be worried about Facebook disintermediating them. If Facebook is smart, it will work this out now and find a way to give publishers what they want in return for this: Let the publishers own their own targeting data, and work out a way to help them make more money without losing that data ownership.

Facebook will own brand advertising, and will not need to own direct response

Most of the wonks in the ad space are pooh-poohing Facebook because of a near-sighted over focus on direct response advertising. They believe in this false premise because of a single proof point, which is Google paid search advertising. The idea is that, “Since Facebook owns ad inventory that is further ‘up’ the purchase funnel than Google’s, Facebook will never justify a high enough CPM to compete for supremacy in the online space. Since Google is the owner of advertising online, and it did this by creating a vast pool of inventory that is sold at extremely high CPMs (because it is so close to the purchase on the purchase funnel) and because most of the online ad industry has been focused on DR for its entire existence, DR is where online must go.”

The wonks are wrong on this topic. Google undisputedly “owns” paid search advertising. But the entire paid search market is made up of something close to 250 billion monthly ad impressions. Google gets a very high premium on those ads — around $75 CPM. But Facebook has many more ways to play in the ad space than Google, and a lot more inventory to play with. Estimates put display ad volume well above 5 trillion monthly impressions, and Facebook has a huge percentage of these.  Since Facebook can cater to brands, it can be an efficient platform for selling ads to brands that target authoritatively to very granular audiences. Nobody has cracked that nut yet — the targeted reach at granularity and scale “nut” (disclaimer — this is specifically the problem I’ve been working on for the last year.)

So Facebook could own brand advertising online, could own a role as the authoritative data provider for brand advertising, could own the way that the big brand content platform of TV makes its way into a more modern and effective ad model, and could very well be the winner of the online advertising (nay the entire advertising) space for brands.

Facebook will dominate local advertising

Facebook has already grown a massive advertising business, and my bet is that when the details of its ad revenue are fully disclosed, a big chunk of that business will prove to be locally based. It is the only real play to be had for local businesses online right now; the only place to get local audience reach at any kind of scale. Local is a massive advertising market — one that nobody has been able to crack online, and Facebook will be the gateway between traditional media and online media for local advertising. Zuckerberg must already secretly have 200 people working on this problem as I type.

I’m very bullish on Facebook, but then, this is all just my opinion: I don’t have any idea how much of this Facebook really understands itself. All it really needs is some decent ad formats, and it’s got everything pretty well sewn up.

Mar 03 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Economics

Why the display ecosystem might implode

(Originally published in iMediaConnection, November 2011) by Eric Picard

I sat on a panel at OMMA display on Monday, and the discussion was designed to determine if ad exchanges were going to be relegated to the land of direct response advertising, or if they would foster brand-friendly environments.

I’ve written a lot over the past few years about the future of display, and the issues we face and need to overcome. But this panel brought up many key issues that I thought I’d take a quick look at in this article.

Creative formats for display are really awful
If we don’t solve this, we might just need to give it up. Display ads are just too small to really give an effective brand experience. Even the “brand-friendly” banner units like the venerable 300×250 are too small. Are we really saying that pre-roll is the best we can do?

I suggest we think through the issue of brand-friendly space, and fix websites to accommodate it. We should strip all the banners off every page of a major publisher, and replace with a brand-friendly unit that gives the advertiser a great venue to show brand content and is still user friendly. It’s not so hard — there are all sorts of vehicles to use here.

“Sliding ad units” that move the content down for a moment on page load, then retract to reveal a “leave behind” unit that can be explored by the consumer (and re-expand the ad) if they’re interested are my personal favorite. I like this better than over-the-page ads that cover the content in general. But even expanding ads (my last startup, Bluestreak, pioneered expanding ads back in 1997, so I’ve thought about this a lot) work well for this kind of thing as long as they don’t expand on mouse-overs. They should expand for one to three seconds on page load, and only re-expand on clicks. If they very quickly expand on page-load, retract to show that they’re “there” and interactive, and the entire expansion and retraction takes less than three to five seconds, consumers won’t backlash too badly.

Targeted reach is critical to brand advertisers
Brand advertisers will pay to reach audiences that they define. They don’t need to have a conversion tracked, nor do they need to track CPA during the life of the campaign. They don’t need to track clicks — except you’ve fought so hard to convince them of this, that they finally have shrugged their shoulders and said, “Fine, show me the clicks.” Too many people in our industry are drinking their own Kool-Aid.

Why do I still have people argue with me that GRPs and TRPs are not what we should use? They’re good enough metrics for massive amounts of ad spend — tens of billions of dollars, in fact. And we have the arrogance in this industry to simply refuse to adopt and promote something that people with money have been requesting for more than 15 years. Really? The customer isn’t right? You know better? They have money to spend.

I get worked up on this topic — it’s ridiculously stupid that we won’t sell a product that customers with big budgets would like to buy from us. And the argument I continue to hear come out of the mouth of smart people? “We can do better.” This is a fool’s errand. When people say, “I’m thirsty, and I’d like to buy a nice bottle of seltzer water from you”, the response isn’t, “No, that’s not what you want. We sell the water and bubbles separately. It’s much, much more effective that way — I have data to prove it.” And they keep saying, “But I just want a nice bottle of seltzer water.” And we keep telling them to pound sand.

More than this — we keep building incredibly complex tools to manage buying and selling in our space. That makes it very hard and inefficient for brand media buyers to adopt online display since they can get massive reach at a reasonable price from traditional media — but not so much from online.

So I have an idea: Let’s sell the customers something they want — gross and targeted reach and frequency (GRPs and TRPs) that mesh well into the combined cross-media plans that they do, and let’s give them tools that don’t require them to get an advanced math degree to use.

And still I’m going to have comments on this article that “we can do better than GRP and TRP.” Fantastic — you go do that. But why not give them GRP and TRP too? Does it hurt to give them what they’re asking for? Calculating GRP and TRP isn’t that hard.

Build tools that are ideal for brands to use and that make it really easy to buy online display advertising in ways that make sense in the context of all the other money they spend. Give consumers better ad formats that actually are great venues to showcase brand ads with emotional impact. It’s not hard technically. It just requires some group consensus. And I fear that we’re not going to pull it off — despite its relative simplicity.

On the OMMA panel I was on, three of five panelists said that they felt that there was a real chance that the economics of display advertising could implode over the next few years. I was on the dissenting side of this panel. Let’s not make me a liar, shall we?

Mar 03 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Economics, Media Agencies, Publishers, Startups

3 ways that display advertising must change — or else

(Originally published in iMediaConnection, October 2011) by Eric Picard

Despite all the excitement in our industry about programmatic buying and selling of inventory (via ad exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, and a variety of direct-to-publisher vehicles like private exchanges and private marketplaces), the vast majority of dollars today are still spent the “old fashioned” way.

Since display ads began being sold in the mid-1990s, very little has changed in the way that the vast majority of ad dollars are spent. Most ad dollars are spent via a guaranteed media buy — either a sponsorship (the brand is placed on a specific location for all impressions served to it) or a volume guarantee (ad space of a specific volume is reserved against either a specific location on a page, or a specific group of pages, but will rotate out dynamically on a per-page view).

Sponsorships are great for buyers and sellers because they’re easy to manage. The buyer gets a fixed location, takes over every impression delivered to that ad location, and the seller doesn’t need to worry much about over- or under-delivery. (Sometimes they will sign up for a volume guarantee here, but many times they don’t.) And generally while sponsorships tend to yield low CPMs for the publisher, the ad buys are frequently for solid brands and the size of a sponsorship tends to be large on a dollar figure, if not large on CPM basis (e.g., it may be a multi-million dollar buy, but the CPM is probably low).

The oft-misunderstood publisher benefit of sponsorships, despite the low CPM, is that the cost of sales tends to be much lower. A sponsorship buy can be executed quickly and doesn’t require a lot of labor after the fact. I’ll discuss more about the issue of cost of sales when I touch on efficiency. But don’t underestimate the importance here.

Guaranteed volume-based buys are in many ways the cause of vast problems in our industry, despite being generally more lucrative and higher yielding on a CPM basis than sponsorships. First, they tend to be very sales and operations intensive, which means the cost of sales is often extremely high (frequently above 30-40 percent, and sometimes significantly higher for some of the most complex campaigns). There are several reasons why guaranteed volume-based buys are complex and costly.

First is that when inventory is sold in advance, there is some degree of prediction involved to determine how much inventory of any specific type or location will exist in the future. This inventory prediction problem is still one of the biggest issues we face as an industry. The ability to predict how many users will visit a specific section or page of a site is quite difficult on its own. Given the guaranteed nature of these buys, the prediction methods need to be extremely accurate, and getting accurate predictions is hard, even just based on seasonality and one or two locations. Once additional parameters, like various types of targeting, frequency capping, and various competitive exclusions are applied, the calculations are near impossible to calculate accurately.

This difficulty with predicting specific inventory in advance is the root of the second problem — optimizing buys on the publisher side during the life of the campaign. This rears its head in general, but much more so when the buy is targeted. Most buyers have no idea of the complexity of delivering these buys and how much work happens behind the scenes at most publishers to pull it off. Frequently there are daily (sometimes multiple daily) optimizations done behind the scenes to make sure a targeted campaign delivers against its goals. This can involve making changes to prioritization in the ad delivery systems, spreading the buy to larger pools of inventory, and bumping lower-paying campaigns out of the same inventory pool (at least temporarily) in order to ensure delivery.

Most publishers are not aware of the vast amount of labor done by ad agencies on their buys across publishers in order to ensure that advertiser goals are met. This can range from just ensuring that volumes that were agreed to are met, to ensuring that click or conversion rates driven by the buy are meeting a performance goal (for the direct-response advertisers). In either case, the amount of work done by agencies to optimize these buys, frequently across dozens of publishers, is huge.

Buying and selling inventory must get more efficient
This brings us to our first big problem that must be solved. Media buying and selling needs to get more efficient. If you compare efficiency (i.e., costs) of buying and selling traditional media versus online media, there’s a very clear difference. I’ve been told by numerous sources that the efficiency is between 10-15 times less efficient for big spenders for buying online versus offline media. And certainly there is a similar lack of efficiency for selling of online media.

One way that both buying and selling can become more efficient is through basic automation. Much of the back and forth of a media buy between buyer and seller is manual. There are not simple standard efficient means of automating the media buying process. There are numerous tools on the market that try to do this in the guaranteed space, but adoption has remained small so far. Between TRAFFIQ (full disclosure: I run product and engineering at TRAFFIQ), Centro, FatTail, isocket, Donovan Data Systems, DoubleClick, and others, there is plenty of choice to automate buying and selling of guaranteed between systems focused on the buy or the sell side of the problem.

And despite the promise of programmatic buying and selling removing much of the inefficiency from the space, most publishers are so worried about putting premium inventory into exchanges that we are still relegating exchanges to massive repositories of remnant inventory. Publishers must start using the private exchange and marketplace functionality that’s available to represent premium inventory.

This doesn’t mean that salespeople go away, and it doesn’t mean that publishers lose control of their inventory. It just means that much of the inefficient order-taking and campaign optimization that is done on both sides of the media buy can be removed from the system and automated. Sales become a more evangelical process, less work goes on behind the scenes, and salespeople stop spending so much time “order-taking.” Today publishers can set dynamic floor prices against exchange cleared inventory, buyers can automate their bids, and at the end of the day, the whole marketplace can get more efficient.

Publishers often say they don’t want this to happen because they fear a drop in the CPM of their guaranteed buys. The reality is that the cost of sales is so extreme on guaranteed media buys — especially targeted or frequency-capped ones — that publishers could easily skim 20-30 percent off their floor price if the cost of sales was significantly reduced.

One major reason that we’re having such trouble in the display industry is the predominance of performance or DR spend in our space. This overemphasis on DR for display has huge consequences to our space — from depressed CPMs to a focus on metrics and methodologies that require a lot of work. This leads us to our second major change that must take place.

Online display must become a brand friendly medium
Let’s face it. As a brand advertiser, you’re much better off putting your message on television or in magazines than on almost any digital vehicle. Our ads are too small to give the brand a proper emotionally reactive vehicle to reach audiences. Even the “brand friendly” 300×250 ad unit is tiny on today’s modern high-resolution screens. Luckily the IAB is responding to this problem with action, and there are many new larger standard ad sizes being promoted across the industry. But publishers have got to adopt them, and buyers have got to demand them as part of their RFPs. We should be moving much faster here — especially when you consider how many new tablet form-factor devices are moving into the hands of consumers.

But beyond the simple size of the ad, the design of most web pages leaves a lot to be desired from the perspective of a brand advertiser. There are too many ad units, not enough “white space,” too much noise on the page, and not enough back-and-forth value to the site’s own visitors or to the brands from the “advertising experience,” meaning the way ads are integrated with content. In a perfect world, the audience and the brand should be at the very least “neutral” in tension, and ideally the ads should be adding value to the viewing experience.

But there hasn’t been a huge outcry from the brands to fix this because they don’t see online as a medium that caters to them or is brand friendly. The flat CPM pricing is fine, but the lack of available GRP or TRP measurement in order to provide some cross-media evaluative metrics is a major roadblock.

Another reason that the biggest brands haven’t come online, beyond both the efficiency and brand friendliness issues, is that the ad units are shared with numerous less brand-centric advertisers, many of which run creatives that no brand advertiser would ever want running alongside their own creatives. This massive over focus we have on direct response or performance advertisers has somewhat tainted online display, and the willingness of publishers to liquidate every single available impression at fire-sale prices has led to overall much lower CPMs than media that have focused on brands as their primary customers. This issue leads to our third and final major change that must happen in online display.

Online display must increase overall CPMs of inventory
If we can transform display into a high-quality space for brand advertising, we should be able to demand higher CPMs. This sounds nice and wonderful to most publishers, but many of the people reading this article will somewhat cynically push back at this point and talk about the “reality” we face in online display today.

So let me dispel a few myths by explaining the economics of our space in terms many of you have probably never heard.

Every emerging media that I have researched or lived through has focused initially on DR advertisers as their primary target in the very beginning. There is an economic theory that drives this: budget elasticity. The idea is that a DR advertiser is theoretically managing spend based on pure ROI. That is, they only buy ads that drive profitable sales of product or services (i.e., the budget is “elastic”). This, in theory, means they will spend as much as they can as long as the media buy creates more revenue than ad spend. And because the media experience is new in an emerging media, and the advertising is novel, response rates to those new ads in new media types tend to start out much higher, and then they will eventually plateau.

The problem with this theory is that it only works out well for publishers catering to DR buyers when the conversion rate on their inventory is high enough to drive high CPMs. The type of inventory that drives high conversion rates is typically extremely well-targeted inventory, typified in our space by paid search advertising, where the users tend to be searching for the very thing that the advertiser is selling. There are some forms of display advertising that also drive high conversion rates. They are frequently driven by retargeting of search queries, very lucrative behavioral segments that show a user’s propensity to buy is higher than average, or similar principles.

Like all other emerging media, when display advertising first started out, the focus was on getting DR advertisers in the door. And like all other emerging media, the response rates on ads were relatively high in the early days. But unlike all emerging media before online display, we wrote software that managed media buys online right at the beginning of this industry. And all of the DR “knobs and dials” were locked down in code, which made it much harder to evolve out of DR into brand advertising. If response rates had grown or remained high, this wouldn’t have mattered. But like most “top of purchase funnel” ad experiences, the response rates are too low to justify high CPMs by the DR advertisers.

When a media type does not drive a very high conversion rate, DR advertisers are only willing to spend a very low CPM. There’s a magic point at which the price of the inventory is low enough that the DR formula for positive ROI starts to make sense even for low performing inventory. This inventory is generally cheaper than 50 cents and frequently cheaper than 5 cents. And there’s a ton of it available in our space. This overemphasis on DR has numerous unintended or unrealized consequences.

Many large publishers sell their guaranteed inventory at well above $3 on average, and many publishers average between $5 and $9 for what is sold by hand. But this typically represents well under half of their inventory, and for many publishers it’s more like 30-40 percent of their total inventory. Once you dip below the conversion threshold of a DR buyer on most ad inventory, you’re driving very hard toward the basement on your prices. And if more than half of your inventory is sold off for less than 20 percent of your total revenue, then something is very wrong with the way we’re managing our space.

Publishers would be much better off stripping half the ads off of their site, redesigning the site to accommodate larger brand-friendly ad units, selling a lot more sponsorships with their human sales force, and selling the remainder of those ads mostly through a very automated sales channel, such as a private exchange, or at the very least automating their sales with one of the available tools.

Even selling10-20 percent more ad inventory through premium channels would significantly increase yield for most publishers than all of the remnant sales that take place today. Simply repurposing the sales and operations teams away from the remnant inventory problem and focusing them on selling premium could solve this.

To conclude, if we can make buying and selling inventory across the online display space more efficient, more brand friendly, and significantly increase our CPMs, then we’re going to have a rapidly growing and expanding space — one that would rival venerable offline media like print and television in size and scale. And that would become the perfect vehicle for those media to travel through as they become “tablet-ized” and “streamed.” But with such a huge overemphasis on DR, massive inefficiencies in buying, and low CPMs, we have a ways to go.

Mar 03 2012
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Ad Ecosystem, Economics

Why the ad industry is ripe for consolidation

(Originally published in iMediaConnection, September 2011) by Eric Picard

The other day I was talking to a good friend of mine who is on the executive team at a startup in the ad technology space. We were talking about strategy — and in the midst of the conversation, I suggested that since the company hadn’t taken any money yet, it should strongly consider selling at its early “life stage” for $10-20 million now. He gasped and told me, “Are you kidding me? I’d put our valuation at between $100-200 million.”

I stopped talking for a minute, and then said, “I’m not sure how you could possibly have the revenue to justify that.” This is, after all, an early stage startup that only has been in business for a year or two, and I’m fairly familiar with the company and its customers; I know it’s not doing more than $2-3 million of annual revenue right now.

And he said, “In (insert niche here) nobody is bought on a multiple of revenue — it’s always based on strategic value.”

To which I replied, “That might be true of funding — of course VCs and increasingly PE firms are betting on the long-term value of disruptive technologies. But for an acquisition, at least for a rational one, nobody is bought without some discussion of ‘comps’ for similar companies and revenue, and some ‘reasonable’ multiple is definitely a factor.”

My friend rattled off several examples of companies that have been acquired (for what I see as irrational amounts of money) lately and some of his beliefs on their revenue pictures — and we picked over the specifics of the acquisitions. And that’s when I started to get worried.

This conversation has been rattling around in my head for days now, and I have to say I’m concerned about the market. I see this space as primed for consolidation. The Luma Partners display ecosystem slide is a perfect example of much that is wrong in our space:

As dollars move between advertisers and publishers, the folks sitting in the middle are trying to find a way to strip off some money as it passes through the ecosystem. The only way they’re going to be able to strip some pennies off of the dollars as they flow through is if they provide some value back to the ecosystem. The problem is both the number of companies in this space and the exuberance of those companies for how they believe they’ll participate. Many are not realistic on what they should be paid.

There’s opportunity in this space; don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be invested so heavily in online advertising if I didn’t believe that there is a strong opportunity for me and my company. But let’s all be very clear about what that opportunity really looks like. The greater the provided value, the more money that the company in the middle can take away. So is the value a moderate improvement in efficiency — or a substantial change in value? How significant is the change? At the end of the day, the market will bear only so much being stripped away, so only those companies that have disruptive technologies are going to be able to extract significant amounts of money.

It might be useful to look at what percentage of spend various vendors are able to extract today. Let’s start with agencies, which are often the target of technology companies trying to find a place to disrupt the market through disintermediation. But that’s crap. First of all, the agency lives in thepower position in the ecosystem. And despite the kvetching of the technically minded who don’t “get” what agencies do (nor even the difference between a creative and media agency), agencies provide a lot of value to the advertiser (their customers). Agencies are not easily disintermediated — nobody has been able to disintermediate them so far.

Most startups vastly inflate the amount agencies get paid — typically the number that is thrown out is somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of spend, which would be freakin’ awesome if it were true. But those kinds of percentages went out of style in the ad space along with well-tailored suits, smoking a lot of cigarettes, and drinking whiskey and water like it’s going out of style. Most big agencies no longer negotiate their contracts with the marketing team as an advertiser; they negotiate with procurement offices and negotiate for fixed margins — very low margins, in many cases. They’d be psyched to claim 15 percent of spend. They’d be excited about 10 percent of spend — even 5 percent, in some cases, would be cause for ecstatic celebration.

OK, so agencies are not where the money pools. What about tech startups? The reality is that technology vendors take small percentages of the dollars out of the flow and make it up on margin and volume.

Ad serving is a great example of this. A third-party (buy side) ad server is typically getting between $0.07 and $0.15 CPM for its service. That is really not a huge amount of money. It typically comes in at less than 5 percent of spend — and at volume, and depending on price, it frequently is down below 1 percent.

In traditional media, typical vendors are well below 1 percent of spend as the money travels through their systems. But ad serving is commoditized, you might say (and I’d argue that before too long, most technologies are commoditized). Look at DSPs, which have been the much-laureled darlings of advertising technology for the last three years. There’s very little differentiation here. They’ve all commoditized out to varying degrees, competing only on price or service, or minor feature differences, rather than by disrupting each other. (And for the record, there’s nothing wrong with this — which is sort of my entire point.)

“But the DSPs are the future,” you might say. “They’re the ones who are bringing automation and efficiency to this space; they’re the future of advertising! Damn it!”

Well — yes and no. DSPs are playing in an emerging media — the real-time inventory market. In emerging media, the top-line media spend CPMs are generally higher. (Let’s not have any illusions here — it’s a product of supply and demand in which the amount of available inventory is low and the demand is high.) DSPs are in an emerging space where supply is vast, and demand is small (but growing), and they still are taking a proportionally large chunk of spend (8-20% depending on the contract and volume) because the market is emerging and the average deal size is still quite small.

In emerging spaces, the technology vendors typically take much bigger pieces of the pie. For example, look at ad serving back in 1998 — CPMs were closer to a dollar. Look at rich media vendors, which could easily pull close to $2 out of the ecosystem back in the early days. But the core CPMs of the media in an emerging market are higher. Look at mobile: In 2004, the average mobile CPM was between $60 and $80, and is now below $5 (depending on who you talk to). And when the CPMs are high, and the market is still figuring itself out, vendors can take a big piece of the pie. Even in paid search, which hasn’t seen the bottom drop out of CPMs (for very strong economically provable reasons), the percentage of sustainable media spend by vendors hasn’t been very high. The simple truth is that mature media markets are only willing to allow very small amounts of money to leach away between buyer and seller for “table stakes” technologies.

Does this mean that the online advertising space is not as “hot” as investors have believed for the last decade? I think this space is incredibly hot — and that there’s a huge amount of value to be created and we’re only at the beginning of it. But let’s be clear. Let’s look each other in the eye and not pretend that the dynamics of an emerging market are sustainable over the long term.

There are only two tricks to play out here: You either need to be the Donovan Data Systems of your market (i.e., you are indispensible, are taking a reasonable percentage of spend as the dollars flow through you, and you’re the stand-out leader in your space). Or you need to be the company that redefines the market completely (i.e., you will use technology to fundamentally change the way the market operates). And if technology is at the center of that disruption and technology is the driver of that fundamental change, then suddenly the rules are different.

What bothers me about the space we’re in right now is not only that it’s getting really crowded, but also that most of the parties playing in the middle are not adding the value that a full corporate entity needs to be adding in order to both create and extract the value needed. Most of these startups are really more of a feature rather than a whole business. But if they’re just a feature, what do they plug into?

The problem is that consolidation is not easy. It actually sucks majorly — for everyone involved. I speak from experience; I was on the deal teams for of a bunch of companies we acquired when I was at Microsoft. I was involved in the projects to consolidate those acquisitions, and I’m friends with a bunch of folks who were in similar roles at Google, AOL, Amazon, Yahoo, etc. And it’s just never easy. The buyer has this nasty problem of a new and generally incompatible technology, plus a completely different culture — both of which are super hard to converge successfully.

And what about when you’re getting bought? It only works out well for those who are fairly mercenary — the ones who ran after the idea because they wanted to exit well, and who were determined to exit well, and were plenty happy to exit as early as they could. But what about for those who are in love with their own startups, who see them as children? Great entrepreneurs I’ve met look upon an acquisition as an opportunity to get their struggling products the visibility and distribution might that they deserve. And it’s called an exit for a reason. When your company is acquired, it ceases to exist. It’s no longer your company; it belongs to someone else, who is very likely going to screw it up and kill it.

The trick for having a successful startup in this space and a successful exit (not only for the cash value, but to have your beloved business count for something going forward) is for folks to be realistic about both the value they bring to the table and the way they can be leveraged. And let’s not forget that in order to really be valuable when you are acquired, your technology has to somehow rationally live in the context of the acquiring party’s landscape — both technically and culturally.

Exit earlier rather than later if you can — while you still own a good chunk of the company. As a founder, would you rather have 30 percent of $20 million, or 5 percent of $80 million? I’ll give you some advice — earlier is better. Exit before you have to scale the thing up — before you have to invest in customer support or in operations, before hosting everything in the cloud stops scaling for you cost effectively and you have to invest seriously in capital expenses and need to raise a lot more money.

And please — build your technology in as abstracted and “ingestible” a way as possible. Please — I’m begging you!

But I digress. The reality is that there are a lot of companies that are stuck. They’ve taken a lot of money, but they aren’t the leader of their space or disrupting their space significantly. And most of them have become targets for new companies coming in and running after them — and either exactly copying them (further commoditizing them) or disrupting them.

It’s these second-generation companies that are the ones to watch. They’re typically bootstrapped and generally doing more interesting things than their established competitors. And they’re the ones who are most ripe for consolidation because they can afford to exit for much less money since they haven’t taken as much from investors.

The only question is this: What happens when they get acquired? And what happens to the middle of the market — those that have raised $15-40 million and that have stalled on growth and suddenly face a plethora of competitors? They had better find a way to get profitable real fast.

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