If knowledge is power, digital media buyers may be falling behind their traditional predecessors. While a slew of products aim to arm buyers with better intelligence, will any of them fire the magic bullet?
The life of a digital media buyer can't be an easy one.
If media could be defined by a handful of channels (say for example, the television market 30 years ago), it wouldn't be hard to know who was advertising where, what creatives they were using and how often they were disseminating their messages. But gathering competitive intelligence in the digital age is a lot more like trying to stay ahead of a rapidly evolving ecosystem than monitoring a media platform. And even those buyers who work strictly in a given vertical face the challenge of keeping tabs on new publishers, new ad networks and increased competition from corners previously unknown.
The reality of staying on top of what your competitors are doing in the internet age is nothing short of a headache, according to Jay Kulkarni, CEO and founder of Theorem, a digital marketing operations company.
"The promise of getting complete competitive intelligence has been a trend in interactive almost since the beginning," Kulkarni says. "The problem is that this kind of information is both an issue of access and staying on top of very perishable data."
Kulkarni, an early employee at DoubleClick before leaving to start his own business, likens the task at hand to trying to hit a dynamically moving target.
"Each of the major ad serving companies [of which DoubleClick, now owned by Google, is one] are rich repositories of this kind of information," Kulkarni explains. "But trying to get at that data without those companies is quite difficult. So, in practice this isn't a technical problem as much as it's a business problem."
But not all media buyers have the money or muscle to command the best data, and that's where some independent firms have been looking to pick up the slack.
Consider the case of Yureekah, a startup profiled last month in The Washington Post. The product, which works like a search engine for banner ads, offers media buyers some insights into where their competitors are advertising and what creatives they're using.
Devaraj Southworth, one of Yureekah's creators, told The Washington Post that the product allows his creative shop to better inform smaller clients as to what their competitors may be doing and where they're doing it.
But according to Mason Wiley, VP of marketing at Hydra Network, the solution presented by Yureekah has its pros and cons.
"In theory, it's a great concept, but it's somewhat limited because there just isn't a lot of inventory on there," Wiley explains.
Still, Wiley admits that something like Yureekah is better than nothing at all; or, as the case may be, better than Google, which has trouble tracking banners because they're primarily unlabeled images that aren't terribly friendly to search engines.
But according to Kulkarni, independents will always want for data because they are very much on the outside looking in. Media buyers -- especially smaller ones -- will need a relationship with an ad serving firm or an ad network if they are to get the kind of competitive intelligence they need to execute. And as is so often the case, you get what you pay for.
The human touch
For Wiley, machines and sophisticated algorithms aren't likely to replace people altogether because relationships, at their core, will always be a human issue.
"Despite how high-tech we get, this will always be a relationship business," Wiley says. "A lot of the actionable intelligence that's out there comes from just talking to people and working your network of contacts."
But Wiley's assertion that online advertising will always be a relationship business isn't held by everyone working in interactive, and the rise of ad networks has made the commoditization of media an increasingly common reality. Yet, even as ad buys become rapid-fire transactions between machines finely tuned by the latest algorithms, people are still likely to serve as the glue that binds buyers and sellers together.
However, human relationships -- if they are to last -- often depend on values like transparency, which isn't always part of an ad network buy. In fact, many ad networks -- often to stay competitive -- provide little or no information on what publishers they sell inventory for. That puts media buyers in a tough spot when they try to plan a campaign -- and in a nearly impossible position if a client wants to know where a specific ad is going to run.
Does a service like Yureekah address that issue? It tries to, according to Wiley, but it's not nearly as comprehensive as it needs to be. And those looking to keep tabs on ad networks they already do business with, as well as vet new ones, will likely have to look elsewhere.