PHOENIX — Twenty-five years after the first web banner ad was supposedly sold, the digital advertising business has come a long way.
It took just a couple of years, after HotWired sold the ad to AT&T manually, for software to be applied to ad sales.
Now in what the DMP managing director of ad-tech vendor Sizmek, Joshua Koran, calls the “third decade” of “programmatic” ad sales, he describes what is changing…
- Decade #1: “You had a lot of innovation that was locked up within particular ad networks.”
- Decade #2: “We saw all of that innovation … be offered out to the marketplace independently, separated from the ad network. This fragmentation led to literally thousands of companies that marketers could use to mix and match, to better engage their consumers.”
- Decade #3: “We’re seeing this reconsolidation, but it’s looking different than what it did when we first started out.”
So, what exactly is different about the current phase?
“A lot of the value-add that the ad networks originally provided is still going to be provided by lots of different third-parties,” Koran acknowledges.
“But the UIs that we are building to make it easy for marketers to make use of all this technology are what are being standardized, as well as the pipes to exchange information across all these companies.”
In 2019, Sizmek is partly created by its earlier acquisition of the demand-side ad platform Rocket Fuel, which itself had acquired the early ad-tech outfit [x+1].
Koran says he is a strong supporter of the open web.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
