• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, July 29, 2015

Programmatic ad-buyers are consumed with the lure of cross-channel advertising. It makes sense because, well, why wouldn’t an advertiser want to reach the same audience across screens, formats and devices with targeted messages?

The desire for platforms that can handle these cross-channel campaigns is changing the way the industry looks. This morning, for example, TubeMogul added display advertising support to its platform. This is coming from a platform that has been focused exclusively on all things video for nearly a decade -- one that even has the word “tube” in its name.

Client pressure -- which can also be read as "an opportunity to win more business and make more money" -- is reshaping the ad tech industry. TubeMogul is not the only ad tech company that has expanded its capabilities to meet the wants and needs to marketers.

AOL is the most obvious other example of this. They acquired Adap.tv nearly two years ago -- a competitor of TubeMogul’s -- and in the months that followed, built up an ad tech stack around Adap.tv. The culmination of these efforts came earlier this year, when AOL rolled all of those properties into one platform and released a new product, literally named “One.”

If you look around the landscape, you’d be hard-pressed to find an ad tech firm that does exactly what it always has done. They aren’t non-existent -- PubMatic is still a pure-play supply-side platform (SSP) and Videology still deals exclusively with video, to name a couple -- but the amount of “point solutions” is smaller today than it was one year ago. 

The writing has been on the wall. In fact, nearly two years ago to the date, I wrote an RTBlog titled “The Inevitability Of ‘End-To-End Solutions’” -- and we’ve only moved closer to that inevitability since then.