Confusion about why we call adtech adtech

03 April 2017

If you want people on the Internet to argue with you, say that you're making a statement about values.

If you want people to negotiate with you, say that you're making a statement about business.

If you want people to accept that something is inevitable, say that you're making a statement about technology.

The mixup between values arguments, business arguments, and technology arguments might be why people are confused about Brands need to fire adtech by Doc Searls.

The set of trends that people call adtech is a values-driven business transformation that is trying to label itself as a technological transformation.

Some of the implementation involves technological changes (NoSQL databases! Nifty!) but fundamentally adtech is about changing how media business is done. Adtech does have a set of values, none of which are really commonly held even among people in the marketing or advertising field, but let's not make the mistake of turning this into either an argument about values (that never accomplishes anything) or a set of statements about technology (that puts those with an inside POV on current technology at an unnecessary advantage). Instead, let's look at the business positions that adtech is taking.

• Adtech stands for profitable platforms, with commodity producers of news and cultural works. Michael Tiffany, CEO of advertising security firm White Ops, said The fundamental value proposition of these ad tech companies who are de-anonymizing the Internet is, Why spend big CPMs on branded sites when I can get them on no-name sites? This is not a healthy situation, but it's a chosen path, not a technologically inevitable one.

• Adtech stands for the needs of low-reputation sellers over the needs of high-reputation sellers. High-reputation and low-reputation brands need different qualities from an ad medium and adtech has to under-serve the high-reputation ones. Again, not technologically inevitable, but a business position that high-reputation brands and their agencies don't have to accept.

• Adtech stands for making advertisers support criminal and politically heinous activity. I'll just let Bob Hoffman explain that one. Fraudulent and brand-unsafe content is just the overspray of the high value platforms/commoditized content system, and advertisers have to accept it in order to power that system. Or do they?

People have a lot of interesting decisions to make: policy, contractual, infrastructural, and client-side. When we treat the adtech movement as simply technology, we take the risk of missing great opportunities to negotiate for the benefit of brands, publishers, and the audience.