The future of ad tech was high on the list of priorities for digital publishers, advertisers, and of course, ad tech providers at Advertising Week New York this year. Trends in consolidation were on everyone’s minds and our CEO Tim Cadogan along with Sizmek CEO Mark Grether, The Trade Desk COO Rob Perdue and AdExchanger’s Zach Rodgers kicked off the week with the “Who Will Survive The ‘Winter’ of Adtech Consolidation?” panel.
Despite the session title, Tim was quick to point out that it’s not winter for ad tech but more so a British spring. He also offered a fresh perspective on why consolidation isn’t a bad sign for the adtech industry. Mature companies are buying scaled technology players to achieve growth into new areas and independent companies are buying point solutions to strengthen their core offerings. A prime example of this being our acquisition of two technology companies, Mezzobit and PubNation, announced on Monday.
While the duopoly is still growing as the pool of smaller players consolidates, the panelists agreed there’s tremendous value in having strong independent players in the industry. Independent players are the ones driving innovation and creating technology that moves the industry forward toward greater trust and transparency. What the consolidation frenzy boils down to is that buyers and sellers are taking a closer look at which tech partners provide them with the most value and who they trust – these are the companies that will ‘survive’.
To tackle the topic of “The Next Era of Programmatic” Tim joined Damian Garbaccio from Nielsen Marketing Cloud, Keith Eadie from Adobe, Jeremy Randol from Pandora and Jason Tollestrup from The Washington Post. Ad Age’s Brian Braiker moderated the sold out session where the panelists unpacked their expert predictions for the next couple of years for the industry.
Tim reiterated his optimism for the future of programmatic with his confidence that programmatic will be the default transactions system for digital media. Programmatic has made a lot of progress in the past few years already but the really interesting opportunities are still to come. The industry is just getting started in terms of leveraging rich data to make more informed decisions and applying programmatic to new, dynamic creatives. The panel also emphasized the importance of maintaining and growing relationships between buyers and publishers as programmatic becomes more prevalent and sophisticated.
If you’re pressed for time, not to worry. Our CEO recaps his top three takeaways from Advertising Week in just two minutes. Check it out below: