InterClick president Michael Katz had a nice writeup in MediaPost today entitled Ad Budget Crunch Puts Pressure On Supply Line. I believe that ad networks are going to be disintermediated in some capacity over the next few years and Katz sheds some light on this notion (from an opposite perspective.
Advertisers and agencies are shifting budgets away from publishers that deliver high-price real estate and “shifting the money to guys like us who deliver ads to target audiences,” Katz said.
My friends over at the AdExchanger (a great read btw) talked about my comments that I made at the OMMA Behavioral event held this past week in Manhattan. I didn’t write up the event on this blog but it was essentially most major ad networks including AudienceScience (formerly RevenueScience), Platform A, Yahoo!, Specific Media, Acerno, Akamai, etc, all sitting in a room talking about the future of digital media. My peer, Ed Montes, Managing Director of Havas Digital, took the stage in front of every ad network and told them that they may very well be disintermediated over the next few years from his perspective. Obviously, I agree to a large extent.
During the OMMA event, Darren Herman of Varick Media Management and Media Kitchen fame twittered “ed montes (Regional Manager, Havas) just pissed off every ad network in the room.” And then added, “I totally agree with him as he said that ad agencies are acting as tech players now and disintermediating.”
In terms of disintermediation, this means that agencies will have to build, adopt, and execute on technology that they’ve historically never had, nor rolled out. Agencies are not technology companies and don’t even come close to acting like them today. In order to fully disintermediate, not only will agencies have to learn code, but they’ll also have to switch culture a bit. I’m not saying the agency world is going to become Yahoo!, Google, and MSFT-like, but it’s going to have to switch around a bit. The interesting part of this is to see which agencies built it themselves and fail, which agencies acquire technologies, and which agencies partner.
I have a white paper that I’m releasing about this in the coming week or so, which was written back in November. I’m looking forward to sharing.
