The Difference Between Reactive vs. Proactive Ad Tech

During the early adoption years of rich media, advertisers broke budgets scrambling to develop first-to-market creative. Rich media has since evolved to become an industry standard, supported by endless research proving its effectiveness over traditional static ads.

Fifteen years later, following the birth of the expandable banner in 2000, digital marketers have come to a few realizations:

• Impressions don't always translate to client dollars
• 1-2 percent engagement rates are nothing to brag about
• A low-budget viral video can outperform a strategic targeted media buy
• Digital ads carry enough data to know you better than your friends
• People prefer to be online on-the-go rather than from their home desktops

The point is that online trends continually change and are almost impossible to predict, which limits ad tech innovation to the speed of these emerging trends. Other technology genres enjoy the freedom of creating at will, while ad tech has to wait for users to show us which content, channels, and platforms drive the best engagement.

The good news is that ad tech can refine the inefficiencies of digital advertising, allowing us to better target, design, and serve ads. But how many times do developers, designers, and CTOs want to adapt to a new coding language, adopt a new platform, comply with non-standardized ad specs, or worry about whether their ads will even work on the latest smart device? In all honesty, print, TV, and radio are a walk in the park in comparison to digital advertising today, and the chase for brands and agencies to stay digitally relevant is exhausting.
 
So how do we as ad tech developers switch from reactive to proactive innovation? For starters, we need to begin seeing the digital ad landscape from a simpler, holistic point of view. Right now the landscape of digital advertising is mostly comprised of quick-solution vendors who concentrate on specific industry pain points. Rob Layton, former vice president of engineering at Adcade, said it perfectly: "We're at a place now where every competitor in the industry is hoping lightning will strike twice with their alternatives, without fully realizing one very basic thing: a different landscape requires a different strategy."
 
Let's use the role of Flash in digital ad building as an example. Advertisers over the last 20 years have relied too heavily on Flash to build campaigns, failing to see that Flash is a simple animation tool not built for digital advertising. Flash has zero cross-screen delivery capabilities, forcing advertisers to waste an average of more than 35 percent of their media buys serving backup images, resulting in lost opportunities and non-engaged users. In addition, Flash also causes development teams to build multiple versions of a single campaign to accommodate different device, screen, and publisher specifications. It's evident that Flash is not built for modern day advertising, and the industry adjusted by adopting HTML5 as the new standard codebase. Understanding Flash's inefficiencies, and eager to take advantage of HTML5's cross screen capabilities, the industry reacted hastily again and failed to see that HTML5, although cross-screen compatible, was also not built for digital advertising, but rather engineered for mobile web design.
 
This pattern of adopting shortsighted solutions will continue to lead advertisers to a fate of endless new platform adoption. Reactive innovation only fills the voids created by the change in times, while proactive innovation factors in a future expiration date before being built. As an industry, we'll only be successful when we look at our mistakes, study past platform efficiencies, understand existing workflow pain points, examine platform adoption trends, dissect traditional business models -- and admit to ourselves that today's ad tech needs will evolve tomorrow.

This post was featured on iMedia Connection on August 31st, 2015 here.