Commentary
The Krux Of Programmatic's Matter: Simplicity Vs. Complexity
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, October 4, 2016
It’s not as if ad tech’s universe is beginning to collapse, but some of the biggest players are beginning to consolidate. A day after marketing cloud giant Salesforce.com announced the acquisition of hot data-management platform Krux, performance retargeter Criteo announced the acquisition of retail site-oriented audience exchange HookLogic.
The consolidation is long overdue. There simply are too many single-point, me-too solutions in the marketplace that are often difficult to differentiate. While the rollups are unlikely to reduce the amount of hyperbole, they will at least concentrate it within a more manageable cluster of big, integrated programmatic ad-technology players. Which, of course, means there will be an inevitable land grab for the next tier of programmatic technology solutions to rush in and fill their place.
On the plus side, the consolidation will mean that big marketers and agencies will have to do less shopping to figure out their solutions. On the downside, they will have less flexibility for mix-and-matching services that fit their organizations and business models.
But in a world of increasing complexity, slightly more simplified solutions are going to win -- until a more complicated approach comes along and proves it performs better.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
As for agency (and publisher) "shopping," that has been the current condition to date because these customers are trying out different solutions to see what they like best. They will ultimately settle on a small set of solution providers. So the providers that can't differentiate themselves on feature set value will do so on price, which is hard to sustain. Thus many firms dwindle and fold. Welcome to technology.
Simplified solutions almost always win, because complexity involves too much work, causes staff problems because few have the expertise to run complex software, takes too long to learn and costs too much for features that about eighty percent of the customers don't use much. KISS - "keep it simple stupid" was one of the first data processing acronyms in the 1950s. It still holds today. Welcome to technology.