Digital Advertising Technology Landscape

This schematic has become my cheat-sheet of choice for making sense of the digital advertising technology landscape...


Source: Terence Kawaja, LUMA Partners via Slideshare

From my perspective, the take-away here is that the digital marketing ecosystem continues to fragment by the day as innovative firms find new ways to create value. In turn, the challenge is that each bucket that pops up adds another layer between the advertiser and the consumer (and another potential point of confusion for marketers getting hip, or trying to stay hip, to digital).

It's interesting to see how many buckets Google is active in through owned/operated properties. At my count (based on the original schematic below, not the updated one posted above) the Big G has a play in 9 of them:

DSP - Invite Media

Ad Exchange - DoubleClick AdX

Ad Networks - Google Content Network

Creative Optimization - Teracent

Ad Servers - DoubleClick

Analytics - Google Analytics

Mobile - AdMob

And, of course, since this chart only shows the "display advertising technology landscape," it doesn't include Video (YouTube), Search (Google) and all the other Google products.

Methinks it's only a matter of time before advertisers will be able to just go through Google to get to their audience and check all the boxes and buckets along the way.

In 5-10 years, the digital advertising landscape could look very well like this...

And, I suppose it's possible publishers could even be dis-intermediated too!

Now, surely, this outcome might cause some concern for marketers over Google having access to all the data, potentially fixing pricing, etc. But I think the benefits of centralization, simplification, and efficiency will outweigh the cons for 98% of the 5 million-ish advertisers that currently work with Google today. For the other 2% (big Internet retailers, Fortune 500's, etc.), there will still be a need for either a) agencies to act as their advocates or b) internal teams that will put all these pieces and buckets together themselves.

And, while the 2% may control a good 20% of the total digital advertising spend, that's a healthy 80% ripe for Google's picking. My bet is Dennis Woodside, Penry Price, Jim Lecinski, and the other Google ad sales big wigs have this cheat-sheet affixed to their desks as well.

Update 7/27: Just came across a great post by Doug Weaver on his blog, The Drift, reacting to this graphic. He likens the state of today's overcrowded display advertising technology landscape to 2 hobos slicing a bean. Rather than introducing "one more data source that's going to refine targeting by a quarter of a point" or "another technology or platform to shave a nickel off the CPM," Weaver urges us to focus on finding/creating companies that will create "new online wealth."