If I say digital advertising, what do you think? Madison Avenue? Expensive? Overload? That’s not a bad list, though here’s a better one: Technology, APIs and complexity. The truth about digital advertising is that to a great extent it is run by engineers—technology is the support structure for the creative work that inspires people and makes the world entertaining.
Build the guts
The underlying structure of a house isn’t sexy. You’ve got pipes, a cement foundation, wooden beams, insulation and nails. No one wants to look at that, and in a finished house, we don’t. We see the eye-popping paint colors, the light that streams through glass windows and beautiful furnishings. However, without the underlying structure of the house, the aesthetics can’t exist and don’t matter.
The same is true for the establishment of a common set of open standards and advertising protocols that the IAB is attempting to develop and foster among its members. The IAB and its members are working to streamline the work of selling and buying digital advertising across all platforms and devices. J. Allen Dove of SpotXchange explained, “We aren’t writing code. We aren’t dictating deal terms. We aren’t telling people what data to exchange nor how to use that data. We’re just putting a mechanism in place to make the exchange of information uniform. Let’s stop wasting time on the mundane. We have the ability to self-regulate so let’s go for it. Let’s work together.”
Inefficiency breeds expense
Multiple and customized APIs that don’t talk to each other breeds tremendous complexity which leads to inefficiency which leads to extra time on logistics which leads to expense. Anyone can make a process more convoluted. It takes a special kind of genius to make a process simpler and easier. Geoff Petkus of Operative explained that his time on the publisher side opened his eyes to the tremendous cost of inefficiency. “You have to look long-term. It’s difficult for creators of original content to fund their work when the logistics of just putting an ad in place cost so much in terms of time and money. Streamlining logistics has the potential to make better content less expensive and more prevalent for the end-consumer. At the end of the day, we have a buyer and a seller trying to talk to each other and we’re standardizing the language. What’s for sale? What does it look like? How much does it cost?”
An eye on the prize
As I sat in the recent meeting of the IAB listening to members discuss the value of standardized protocols, data exchange, and interoperability—and the difficult work involved in establishing them and getting buyers and sellers to adopt them—I was reminded of that old adage of the three stonemasons. The first was miserable as he hammered away at his rock and couldn’t wait to go home. The second felt mildly interested in his work because he could see that his efforts, combined with the effort of others, would build a wall. The third smiled and was incredibly motivated by his work because he recognized that he was contributing to the construction of a cathedral.
These engineers are boldly taking on a Herculean task. The digital advertising world is full of fragmented players who have historically spoken in languages customized for every trading partner. It’s not sustainable and it’s wasteful. These facts are slowly though surely being recognized by more companies and individuals in the space, and they’re banding together to do something about it by collaborating on open protocols that can be adopted by everyone in the industry.
Brick by brick
Rome wasn’t built in a day. New standards and protocols for digital advertising won’t be either. Geoff shared with me that the television industry took 15 years to create the protocols now widely adopted in the world of television advertising. A standard set of protocols for digital advertising is a big dream and perhaps even bigger than the conundrum once faced by television advertising because digital has so many more players with so much more variety.
Luckily, the broad scope of standard digital advertising protocols can be broken down into pieces. “There’s no need to boil the ocean,” said Geoff. “We can break down the workflow of digital advertising and work on protocols one piece at a time. We’re starting with product catalogs and insertion orders, and that’s just the beginning.”