A rebuilt system conceived specifically for advertising would unify teams and enable collaboration by giving them one platform to conceive, activate, and measure their work. These are generalist tools, never built with media in mind. Today, in general, strategy is built and communicated in PowerPoint, planning is done in Excel, and analytics are completed in Tableau and then communicated in PowerPoint. That’s not just good for you it allows each channel to learn from each other and better serve the advertiser’s goals. Teams fight over budget, never want to be left out of a plan and wind up as implementers rather than key strategic assets.Ī rebuilt system would maintain a single workflow that would apply to every channel, with any necessary differences between them handled by OS-like technology rather than human process. Technology capable of going back to first principles and taking complexity out of the system so that the industry can function-as it once did-in a simple and straightforward way.īecause every channel currently has its own workflow, media agencies have separated buyers into channel-specific teams. If the tangles don’t strangle the industry first, industry leaders must see the situation for what it is and create a new foundation to grow, scale and meet the increasing complexity using technology that doesn’t rely on specialists or increased headcount. Things are only getting more complicated, with new platforms, channels, audiences, data signals, privacy rules, etc. That put more people in the mix, each following their own mandates and unable to effectively communicate with each other. As one example, to solve for an ever-growing number of channels, we created silos in agencies, each with different processes and concentrations of expertise. The more complex and difficult things get, the more we do the wrong things to try to solve the challenges and the more best practices break down in the face of new realities. Solutions to one problem often foreclose as many opportunities as they open, leading the industry into a constant game of whack-a-mole. That’s left us with enormous numbers of spot solutions, with several vendors for each claiming unique versions of them, a Babel-like lack of interoperability, and a reliance on black boxes and rarified expertise. There was no central vision for advertising, only one bright idea after another, one problem identified and solved after another. These things are just too hard.Ī lot of this is because of the way digital advertising evolved.

Sometimes working in media can feel like sucking a piano into your lungs: So many impressive things that media people would like to do but, because of the effort or the novelty or the other million things they have to do, they don’t. Back in his standup days, Steve Martin would lead off his act like this: “Before I get going, I like to do one thing that is impossible, so right now I’m going to suck this piano into my lungs …”

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