• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 13, 2013

I’ve had a couple of meetings with some ad technology leaders in the past couple of days that are starting to make me think that what’s old in Madison Avenue media departments is new again with the tech crowd. Specifically, the way they are thinking about the structure of the business. It hit me first when I had a catch-up the other day with Aggregate Knowledge President Rob Gatto, and it hit me again today after meeting with Adly CEO Walter Delph. Both of them outline a business structure that begins with using data to target consumers, then implementing it, and finally analyzing how it worked. In other words, the modern ad tech marketplace is using the classic plan/buy/post model.

In the case of AK’s Gatto, he said that after being on the job for nine months and meeting with a bunch of agencies and big consumer brands, he has broken his business down into three phases: 1) data, 2) modeling and 3) attribution.

AK, of course, is a DMP, or as Gatto calls it, “a knowledge platform,” so it makes sense that he’d use those classifications, but Adly is an endorsement marketing platform that leverages celebrities’ social media reach, so Delph breaks the three phase thusly: 1) Using data to match the right celebrity with the right social audience for a brand, 2) Managing their endorsements in real-time, 3) Analyzing the ROI (return-on-investment) after the campaign.

When I pointed out to each of them that their models sync completely with old school planning/buying/posting, they both agreed 100%, noting that the only thing that has changed is that technology has sped up the process and the ability to scale rapidly in real-time.

“I like that approach,” Delph told me, adding, “because this isn’t rocket science. Marketers have always been trying to reach consumers and understand the return on those investments. We’re just using new technologies to do it faster and more scientifically.”