We've had a running joke in the office for the past couple years about "black boxes" and the sales reps who peddle them. To me, it seems ridiculous that anyone in this industry would want to put blind faith in a piece of technology without understanding fully why it works. After all, clients want to know what drives success and "we don't understand why it works - we just know that it does" is never an acceptable answer. Yet, technology sales reps often use "Sorry. That's proprietary" in sales pitches when media buyers dig too deeply into the technical aspect of things.
A certain ad network with proprietary optimization technology became wildly popular several years back. I never bought their stuff. That decision hinged mostly on the sales rep's insistence that I didn't need to know how the technology worked. The sales pitch seemed to be "Trust us. We'll make you look like a hero." Like many other such companies at the time, they merged themselves out of existence.
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I can't think of one success story in the online marketing space in which the success depended on keeping technology in a black box and never letting customers know what's inside. Two weeks ago, Mark Naples rightly pointed out that in the search engine marketing (SEM) business, many firms would like the marketplace to think there's a certain amount of black box magic at work, but in reality, there's nothing terribly proprietary about most of their offerings.
So why all the smoke and mirrors? Black boxes turn off potential customers, and anybody who really knows their stuff will be able to discern whether or not a handful of technology offerings in a given category are at functional parity with one another. Who are these black box technology providers trying to impress? Investors? Or, more likely, is there such a lack of differentiating unique selling propositions (USPs) in certain ad technology sectors that sales reps need to rely on the black box concept to avoid commoditization of their service offerings?
Whatever the case may be, the ad technology industry needs to acknowledge - and soon - that customers need to know what's going on behind the scenes. Technology ultimately serves the objectives of the advertiser, and if ad agencies and other client service firms don't understand how they're going about achieving those objectives, they're as good as gone.