‘The reasons behind rapid change are clear-cut, even if the consequences are not’

Henry Howe, Weve, product manager, display, discusses how competing mobile ecosystems,and ad tech firms continually repositioning themselves is causing fragmentation and confusion in the market, plus how those with first-party data can help simplify the audience buying process. 

Few other areas of the advertising industry are quite as fragmented as mobile display, a fact that regularly makes life very confusing – not just for media and advertising professionals used to straight-line relationships between advertisers, agencies and publishers, but for everyone bewildered by the pace of change in the market.

The reasons for this fragmentation and rapid change are fairly clear-cut, even if their consequences are not. 

Fragmentation

Smartphone adoption has exploded, as technology has evolved and component costs have fallen. At the same time, competition between handset vendors has increased dramatically, causing an arms race in terms of features and functions. 

The result is a market with a vast number of variables for any user of smartphone platforms to consider; different handset hardware, different operating systems (and different OS versions), different apps, different screen sizes. And that’s just the start of it; today’s consumers are fickle beasts, often switching between devices for different needs many times a day.

So far, so familiar. Marketers have been dealing with versions of this consumer-side problem for many years, to a greater or lesser degree. Display, though, adds new dimensions to the problem, especially as ad technology has evolved. 

What kind of animations/video can we do? How much in-app space do we have? How do we let users opt out if they want to? 

Answering questions like these takes time, energy and money, and new questions never stop coming; a headache for everyone concerned.

Which brings us neatly to the second problem. 

Confusion reigns as ‘everyone’ tries to do everything

Who is ‘everyone’, in this context? Gone are the days of straightforward desktop relationships of advertiser to agency, to ad network; instead, we have a far more complex organism to deal with, whose evolution is being increasingly complicated by the fragmentation on the consumer side. 

Now, we regularly have one set of creative that needs to run across all buys, putting pressure on existing agency models and technologies. At the same time, a shift in the way media is bought and sold via automation means more effective connections to more buyers, providing fairer prices for ad inventory.

This move from direct relationships between media buyers and sellers towards more programmatic methods of trading good on paper. But it has created some real chaos. Everyone’s adopting multiple technologies; supply-side platforms (SSPs) for publishers, demand-side platforms (DSPs) for ad networks. 

Agency holding groups like WPP and Publicis are creating trading desks, with multiple DSPs – often for specific clients – in order to maximise campaign optimisation, and increase value for the client. Ad networks are becoming DSPs themselves, to avoid being forced out of the market and in the hope of being adopted by the agencies. 

And just to make life really confusing, some ad networks are repositioning themselves as third-party data vendors, promising better targeting without convincing details on the composition of the audiences or the real-world performance of the data.

The result of this chaos is that everyone’s a bit, well, confused. 

Today, brands and agencies still don’t have clear lines of sight over how well campaigns perform.

They need better, smarter and above all simpler tools for monitoring and measuring audience engagement, not just cheaper ways of buying. In the non-stop smartphone environment, none of this is easy. 

Weve is trying to tackle these problems with unique first-party data assets and a new, recently-launched display technology platform; a combination that we think will set new standards for helping brands assess exactly how well they’re engaging with their audiences. 

All we know for sure, though, is this; unless it starts to consolidate rapidly, life is only going to get more chaotic for the mobile display industry and the brands it supports.