I had a long meeting with a very senior executive at WPP yesterday and we were talking about the challenges that face brand advertising across the interactive landscape. The single largest thing impeding progress (eg. moving traditional brand spend to the Web) was the friction that has been forced upon the media buying and selling process. We defined friction as anything that is making hard for a buyer to quickly and reliably build a media plan and execute it.
Interestingly technology seems to be biggest culprit slowing the transition of analog to digital dollars. This is due in part to its rapid pace of change and ability to cause disintermediation and fragmentation. Most would expect technology to increase productivity and make media buying simpler but the exact opposite has happened. And given the current economic climate that may be a good thing since in fact, Jeff Zucker (president and CEO, NBC Universal) put it very well – 'We are moving from analog dollars to digital pennies'. Did technology alone cause this, I don't think so but here is a reasonable list of tech oriented challenges that are slowing us down in converting brand dollars to the Web.
- Unlimited number of ad sizes across publishers
- Multiple creative formats (Rich media vendors)
- Publishing platforms making everybody a writer
- Wide range of metric definitions and providers creating confusion
- Many ad serving platforms servicing publishers and advertisers
- Inconsistency in media buying and planning tools among agencies
And the biggest of all
- No single vendor that provides a soup to nuts solution that connects the buyer to seller.
Google, anyone?
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