There are “point solutions” – and then there are “what’s the point?” solutions?
In ad-tech, many software vendors are risking ending up in the last category, as a dizzying array of function-specific tools risks confusing buyers.
That is according to one agency boss communicating how technological complexity is actually working against buyers and their vendors.
Oleg Korenfeld, chief platforms officer at Wavemaker, was speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Often enough this technology actually is serving the opposite of what it was supposed to be,” he says.
“Where it’s supposed to deliver in this kind of efficient way to activate the audience to cut media waste, we’re getting this fragmentation and fragmentation is doing the complete opposite of that.”
Korenfeld’s Wavemaker was formed from the merger of Group M’s MEC and Maxus.
In 2018, the ad industry is looking back on at least 10 years of explosive growth, during which new tools and data sets aligned to give marketers unprecedented new targeting capabilities.
But, in that explosion, the industry is now wrestling with complexity. The VC rush to ad-tech propelled a thousand flowers to bloom. Now buyers are grappling with which way to turn.
The display LUMAscape explained by @AdOpsInsider http://t.co/MtEzCcOmCV #digitalmarketing #adtech pic.twitter.com/3aoAOERKZS
— Remi Boudard (@rboudard) June 19, 2015
It is an irony, perhaps, that – as the industry continues suffering from fraud, transparency and brand safety problems – yet more new tech platforms are launching, playing whack-a-mole.
Korenfeld hopes for a contraction.
“As an industry, we’re over-engineered,” he says. “I think a lot of technology companies been developed to address very specific niche issues.”
“In order to simplify the stack, in order to understand what are the critical components of that stack, you need this kind of platform’s approach of very specific skillset.”
Unless that happens, Korenfeld fears buyers will simply give up on the whole ad-tech stack.
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.