Long Live Ad Networks?

Advertising

Oct 18

Over the past few years, a growing number of so-called ad tech middlemen have been trying to go around each other.

On the buy side, you’ve had The Trade Desk launching Open Path, which promises brands direct access to ad inventory on “good publishers.” Who needs an SSP?

Not to be outdone, SSPs like Magnite have countered with Clearline, direct connections of their own. Who needs DSPs?

Now, the latest trend is curation, as Marketing Brew reports. Rather than promoting the long tail, and its nearly endless supply of blogs, communities, users and ad avails, companies ranging from The Trade Desk to Yahoo Backstage are now touting their ability to pull together select groups of publishers, the best of the best, to help brands reach engaged users and theoretically avoid all the bad stuff on the web (fraud, Made for Advertising sites, etc.)

It’s all deeply ironic, given that this harkens back to the earliest days of “interactive” advertising, when ad networks stitched together ad space on “clean and well lit” sites, no real time bidding needed. Might we suddenly see AOL resurface Advertising.com? Or Yahoo bring back Blue Lithium?

It’s not entirely clear if this trend toward curation will be followed by a concentration of ad dollars on the comScore top 100 or whatever, since brands say they want quality, but almost always care more about price. But if this back to the ad network era takes hold, it begs a few questions:

Will we still need all this ad tech?
Will it matter if the Feds make Google spin off its ad network or ad tech, if the winds are blowing away from the open web?
What happens to blogs, indie publishers, etc. who are already struggling?
Could this help stave off the coming explosion of “AI Slop”?
Will TV follow suit?
Will Retail Media networks looking to expand “off property” suddenly find themselves with fewer ways to do so?

I don’t have the answers, do you?

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