VIEQUES, PR — Over the last few years, we have seen an avalanche of new advertising technology solutions come to market, all helping marketers reach consumers – and, arguably, all making their job even more complex.
Now we may see an accelerating flurry of mergers and acquisitions, as larger players gobble up vendors to streamline the ecosystem again, a panel convened by Beet.TV discussed…
- MediaMath ,CMO Joanna O’Connell
- Google, Head of Programmatic Media & Platform Sales
- Videology, North America MD Tim Castree
MediaMath’s O’Connell lamented that, too often, ad buying involves planning across multiple separate “fiefdoms” of publishers. “That creates disjointed user experience,” she said, adding that, in this day and age: “What really makes it magical is when you have a unified view of each user as a human, not as a cookie or a device.”
O’Connell said the industry is beginning to get a holistic view of consumers, even if it means piecing together different parts of an increasingly voluminous technology “stack”.
One way to get unification is through consolidation. “The notion of a single platform, it’s not going to happen,” said Videology’s Castree. “We’re going to see consolidation in three waves” – buy-ups of “point solutions” (single-task tech vendors), aggregation of decisioning technologies and further interoperability.
Who’ll buy? As the so-called “mar-tech” wave grows, Castree said: “I think you’ll see the Oracles, IBMs and Salesforces start to really look at advertising technology.”
Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, the founder of Furious Corp, asked if acquirers would be the usual big beasts like Google and Facebook.
Google’s own VanDerzee said: “It makes good theater to make it a zero-sum game, a battle of the titans. But the reality is, it’s not a zero-sum game. There are so many opportunities for companies to provide tremendous value. We’re going to see a lot of different entrants to the marketplace.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was moderated by Furious Corp founder Ashley J. Swartz.
