• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 7, 2011

Joanna O’Connell, Senior Analyst at Forrester is demystifying the display ad technology marketplace for OMMA Display attendees, and she just showed her own, far more simplified version of Terrence Kawaja’s infamous LUMAscapes chart. It has fewer columns and rows and bubbles, but O’Connell admitted, it’s still, “just a mess.”

O’Connell reaffirmed my own personal sense that the online display marketplace is still highly dysfunctional, for all the functionality the advertising technology companies have brought to it. Mainly because of the human beings involved in using it.

O’Connell divided it into two types of humans: those digital native interactive agency people who grew up with data and technology; and those old school ones who grew up with the “three martini lunch model.”

“It’s a really strong legacy,” she noted, admitting that even her own background included some of that legacy: a former interactive agency boss of hers indoctrinated her in the fine art of media haggling, which in a world of real-time bidding, probably doesn’t make much sense anymore.

“Haggling on price is a huge part of our jobs. It’s always been a huge part of our jobs,” she admitted, adding, “That’s what all buyers learn how to do.”

The problem, she said, is that the systems do it better than the people, citing a number of technospeak terms like “data-driven decision-making” and “de-averaging pricing” that made my human brain whirl.

In the end, O’Connell said that her presentation fundamentally boiled down to the same man vs. machine debate of the panel that preceded her, and that her job was to “stick a Forrester logo on it.”