“There are more problems on the tech side than there are holes in a piece of Swiss cheese.” That was the opening gambit from GroupM’s director of technical operations, Timothy Whitfield, on the Media Summit Digital Reality Check panel.
The panel’s aim was to explore the tech and digital issues such as viewability, adblocking and ad tech that create friction points across the market and see just how big a deal they are.
Whitfield said when it comes to issues faced by the industry the list doesn’t really stop, however, for him a major issue is that there are a lot of tech players overselling their capabilities which is creating a perception gap.
“The biggest problem I would say so far is the ‘adpocalypse’. From where we sit, I feel digital media is about $1.5 billion in Australia and $300 million goes towards adtech,” he said.
“There’s 1878 companies in America and 150 of them are in Australia. I’ve interviewed maybe a hundred-ish at the moment and the big problem I’m seeing is the perception versus reality in a lot of these companies.”
Whitfield claimed in fact that they are outright lying about their capabilities, while the terms “snake oil” and “vapourware” were brought up by VivaKi’s, Lynn Chealander, and
Apex Publishing’s, Pippa Leary, whose concerns over the digital ad tech space are around what’s being promised is very different to what can often be delivered. They said ad tech vendors often leverage the complexity and confusion in the market to ‘bamboozle’ publishers, agencies and clients.
On ad tech, REA Group’s head of media operations and strategy, Jonas Jaanimagi, said clients need to “dig deeper” when they’re investing in their tech stack and aim for a “unified” offering rather than what he dubbed a “Frankenstein’s monster” of plugins and disparate services that don’t work seamlessly together.
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