Commentary

A Network By Any Other Name

I think I'm jaded and cynical this week. Maybe it's the soupy humidity in Boston. I don't know. Typically we really don't have much news in our industry this time of year. It's somewhat of a siesta with agency folks doing summer Fridays, East Coast people cramming in their holiday time so they can actually enjoy sunlight, and a lot of the business on auto pilot. However, this summer has been headline-laden with news of acquisition after acquisition for mammoth amounts of money.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Just what the hell is going on? It seems as if all the 800-pound gorillas out there are gobbling up the small guys and for boatloads of money -- yes money, not stock. AOL just announced its acquisition of Tacoda for $275 million after recently acquiring Third Screen Media, Lightningcast and AdTech AG. Google announced its intention to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Microsoft has announced a planned purchase of aQantive for $6 billion and just announced it has purchased AdECN, a Californian Internet advertising exchange platform. Yahoo bought Right Media for $680 million. WPP Group spent $649 million for 24/7 Real Media.

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Am I the only one left scratching my head? Haven't we all been using ad serving, contextual targeting, and behavioral targeting for years now? Putting my media hat on for a second here... when planning, I like to cast a wide net across sites with big reach, as well as do a deeper drive with smaller sites that have a more loyal audience. Will AOL's scoop up of Tacoda mean I'm not dealing with niche sites? Or sites with a high composition of a given audience?

And what about ad serving technologies? I remember when they were new and we beta-tested them. Then we tried to figure out not only how to best use them but how to get authorization to sign contracts, incorporate technologies, understand, track, report and optimize data. And yeah, there was that heinous billing factor. I remember my CFO wondering, "Why the hell do we need this stuff anyhow?"

It was an odd time. No one knew what the market would bear for pricing such technologies out. The contracts were hard to cut from an agency perspective. No one wanted to hang their hat on a specific number of impressions served monthly for a period of times. Our business is so nimble. What if we bought up media and found the site was tanking? Of course, we would kill the buy and reallocate impressions elsewhere, right? What if we lost a client? The contract held us liable for a cost per thousand (CPM) against a number of agreed-upon impressions. We paid it for a while, then we got smart. Most of us got gobbled up by huge holding companies that made us tout clout, which equals rate-cutting the hell out of something. Cut the dollars so much and many of these companies fell by the wayside. You know the rest.

One of my friends stayed at one of these companies. I feel like her company was on life support for a while, then it seemed to reinvent itself by getting into other arenas. It took the bucket-of-data mentality. That was a smart move -- think about it. It doesn't matter if it is online display, paid placement search, email, mobile, whatever - it's all a bucket of data that needs to insure that an advertiser gets what s/he paid for. Perhaps it insures your campaign will flight within a given geography or daypart. Or maybe it's rules based and centered around interactivity within the unit. Whatever it may be, it's still a bucket of data. You get out of it what you put into it.

Then why the slump for so many years? Why are we still paying pennies for it? Skip to the next scene...the company is bought up by an online powerhouse that has a ubiquitous name and sheer reach. It makes me think, why didn't a company like eBay buy DoubleClick? When you think transaction, bidding, dayparting et al, it's all eBay.

I guess my bottom line, as I think aloud here, is that a network by any other name simply is not the same. Do you agree, or do you agree to disagree? Is it me or is it the humidity getting to my brain? Post to the Spin blog.

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