When I first broke into the digital advertising industry, I was excited by what appeared to be an industry thriving with innovation -- one on the cutting edge of the communication evolution between advertisers and consumers. The possibilities and potential were truly endless, or so I thought.

Slowly my eyes were opened to a world that was failing on its promise and, in many ways, was not what it appeared to be. The promise of reaching the right user at the right time was replaced by a world of arbitrage, bot traffic and highly questionable websites that I had never heard of. I quickly learned that the oft repeated mantra of doing right by our clients was nothing more than just words. Fast forward to today, and we are at a crossroads, with the walled gardens threatening to swallow whole what is left outside of them.

The Triopoly of Google, Facebook, and the newest member, Amazon, is continuing to grow exponentially, driving increased revenues YoY, with no end in sight. There are many reasons for their continued success, starting with performance and efficiency, and many others that cannot be argued with. But now the marketing world is finally waking up to the fact that an industry dominated by 3 companies is not a healthy one. At the same time, we marketers are to blame for the success of these behemoths.

HOW WE GOT HERE

Our industry’s continued mismanagement and lazy practices around programmatic display have caused many advertisers to mistrust the channel and develop a negative opinion of it. Causing them to flee to the higher performing, less risky, and all too welcoming open arms of the Triopoly. It is time for our industry to unite and change our approach around media buying to one that brings out the best of what the digital media ecosystem has to offer, and drives true value for advertiser clients. If we fail to do this, then the very health of the internet is at stake -- which could very well result in our own demise.

Quality display inventory has made the internet one of mankind's greatest innovations. Advertising is what allows the free flow of ideas found on the internet to remain free while putting food in the mouths of the content creators who form its creative foundations.

It's no secret that publishers have been struggling to survive for years now. The onset of COVID-19 has only accelerated their demise, with news around media layoffs coming out almost every day, and budgets continuously being slashed. Before the global pandemic, we were proudly showing off the increased YoY media budgets flowing into digital pipes. Yet with spending having reached an all time high, how is it that the state of the media ecosystem has never been worse?

HOW WE CHANGE OUR COURSE

In our world, we know that Google and Facebook command 60% of the market share, yet neither produces or owns much premium content. While their tools add value for users, some might say they are effectively monetizing the content of others, without giving back nearly enough. From an advertiser’s perspective, appearing next to great content relating to your product has been an advertising staple for more than 100 years. In fact, that is what premium display is for. We must show advertisers how to correctly do this to get desired outcomes.

The first and most important step will be ensuring that display media is bought correctly. Our addiction to hyper efficiency and the lowest CPMs has had devastating effects on the premium publisher ecosystem and needs to be corrected.

Second, we need to rethink our investment in longtail inventory. The longtail (rarely heard of niche domains) was introduced to display advertising in an effort to drive better performance and scale big budgets. However, the move to buying the longtail has been detrimental to the greater health of the internet. If the moniker, ‘you get what you pay for’ has always rang true in business, why shouldn’t it apply to our industry? As marketers we should be encouraging advertisers to buy premium inventory where the highest quality audiences and best user ad experiences are, in an effort to bring real value to our clients.

Lastly, we must start measuring landing page traffic within our programmatic campaigns and tying it back to the domain sources of referral. Our industry blindly accepts that clicks do not correlate to high value business outcomes. Rarely do we take the next step and ask why that is and seek to address the issue. Once we begin measuring, we can start blacklisting sites that are driving traffic that fails to convert, and are eating our client’s budgets.

This leads us on to attribution. Google has been very smart to dominate the attribution market. Surely it is not a good state of affairs to have the world's largest ad tech company also grading its own homework. Facebook too has control of its own numbers and attribution. And was already most noticeably caught inflating their video metrics by as much as 9 times.

As industry leaders, we must educate the market on the importance of independent measurement, and emphasize the reality that web analytics, on its own, is not a credible media attribution tool. Furthermore, we must also end our reliance on cookie-based post view measurement and some of the unreasonable incentives that these practices encourage (too much retargeting and cookie bombing).

When bought well, display and programmatic can be an excellent channel for advertisers. But to achieve greatness, we must have zero tolerance for bad actors. Display, outside the walled gardens can be great, but only if we raise our own walls so that it's harder for bad actors to get onto exchanges in the first place.

LOOKING AHEAD

In a previous generation of the web, we had the Comscore top 100 and top 250. If we return to the idea that good display lives on premium publishers, we will simultaneously improve the real world performance and reputation of our channel. Longtail display can be a specialist tactic yet, it's not where most brands should be appearing. Once we have cleaned up our house, we can look to build a bigger and better advertising environment with future-proofed data options. When that is done, our industry will emerge from what will one day be looked back upon as its dark ages, and will enter into its renaissance.