The display ad market is taking off again. Much of this growth has been driven by new technology innovations, in particular demand side platforms (DSPs), which give advertisers the ability to manage digital media campaigns across multiple inventory sources – through a single interface and in real time. Here, Erich Wasserman, co-founder and GM EMEA from MediaMath gives us his five things that marketers need to know about how this market is shaping up.
1. Demand Side Platforms are transforming the display landscape, giving marketing organisations much greater control over vast pools of media and data liquidity. This provides two significant benefits: first, it bring new efficiencies to metrics, pricing, placement and business results; second, it provides great internal workflow efficiencies owing to the automation of what are manual processes today. At the same time, richer media formats – in particular video, mobile and social media – have contributed to the renaissance in display.
2. The market is polarising. With growth comes an inevitable shake-out of the display ecosystem which in some senses represents a polarising of the market: consolidation (largely via acquisition) versus the interoperability of technology, data, media and analytics providers . Both approaches grow the display market and have advantages for advertisers and publishers.
3. Google is getting serious about display. The firm has made some high profile display related acquisitions including Teracent, Invite Media, and more recently AdMeld (an optimisation platform for publishers) for a reported $400m. These power moves send out a clear signal: Google is serious about display and its intention to deliver a ‘consolidated’ experience to marketers.
Google’s VP of display, Neal Mohan, has suggested that the channel will grow to become a $200bn industry by 2015. This is great for the display industry, not least because it has driven forward positive messages about the benefits of digital advertising over offline media, and of real-time bidding and campaign optimisation to marketers’ minds at the highest level.
4. Consolidation in the ecosystem? As opposed to search, in which marketshare is essentially controlled by a single player, display is a far more fragmented and complex ecosystem, characterised by a combination of disparate publishers, technology innovation and entrepreneurship. For this reason, and unlike search, it is highly unlikely that we will see a winner-takes-all market scenario. This means that marketers have a great deal of choice as to what’s right for their businesses. With the right technology in place to enable plug-and-play, this is empowering.
5. Interoperability lays the foundations for growth and innovation. This space moves at break-neck speed, especially at its fringes where video, social, mobile, digital out of home and other emerging formats live, and it is this speed and technological innovation which is driving the market forward and generating its own momentum. Moreover, interoperability between the best and brightest in the display space has a huge part to play and feeds innovation, allowing for flexibility and, more importantly, agility in creating an optimised service stack for each marketer.
Technology innovation is enabling businesses to unleash the power of digital advertising, revealing new and impactful marketing channels that grow revenue. With innovation comes smart software that makes adoption easier, enabling business to scale in this vast digital economy.
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