Even though programmatic RTB has seen the lion's share of venture capital funding and an enormous amount of innovation, RTB buying only accounts for 20%-30% of all digital media dollars. The real money still flows through the direct buying process, with agencies spending up to 400 hours and $50,000 to create the typical campaign, and publishers burning through 1,600 hours a month and 18% of their revenue responding to RFPs. What a mess—and an opportunity.
Everybody's battling for a slice of that direct sales pie, and the game is all about helping buyers and sellers automate the manual processes that drive almost 80% of transactional value.
The End of the End-to-End Stack?
The notion of a single end-to-end "stack" for the digital marketer is a tough vision to execute upon. Build a system that has every little feature that a huge agency needs and you have effectively built something no one else can use. The flip side is building something so standardized that individual organizations find little value in it.
The "operating systems" of the future that will win should enable agencies and marketers to leverage a standard operating system, but customize it with their own pricing, performance, and vendor data. More importantly, the modern operating system for media must be extensible, to allow for a wide variety of point solutions to integrate seamlessly.
Connecting the Dots
More than anything else, the most exciting thing happening in digital media is seeing real programmatic connections between buyers and sellers for guaranteed media. After so much innovation in programmatic RTB (hundreds of vendors, billions in venture capital), we now have some amazing pipes that impressions can flow through.
Unfortunately, this has largely been limited to lower classes of inventory and focused almost exclusively on the DR space. Creating the same programmatic efficiencies for "premium" brand-safe inventory is now starting to happen. Whether it comes from new "programmatic direct" pure play technologies, or happens through the RTB pipes, it will not happen successfully without transparency.
Time for Real Time
Look at all the RTB players who want a piece of the guaranteed action. Three of them (Rubicon, Appnexus, and Pubmatic) will IPO soon, and be under tremendous pressure to increase revenue, margins, and continue to innovate and find new markets. When international expansion stops providing double-digit growth increases, then it's time to look toward new streams of demand generation—namely, the 80% of deals not currently flowing through their pipes.
As the Chinese curse says, "may you live in interesting times." Indeed, the past several years of ad tech has been nothing but interesting, but the real action is just starting—and it's taking place in what was the most uninteresting field of workflow automation.