Commentary
Let's Drop 'Trading' From Our Industry Lexicon
- by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, June 12, 2025
The advertising industry is not the financial industry, so folks should stop trying to shoehorn financial market methodologies into advertising products and services.
This trend isn’t working -- at least not for advertisers, publishers or consumers, who should be the ones who matter.
As David Ogilvy taught us, the purpose of advertising is to sell products or services, today, tomorrow or at some time in the future. The introduction of digital media channels, data targeting and automated execution helped us execute Ogilvy’s vision in a coordinated and purposeful way across an ever-expanding number of consumer media channels, do it with ever-greater relevance to consumers, and launch those campaigns in real time at the push of a button.
But we quickly forgot all about that, and have lost our way.
Instead of following the pronouncement of Intuit founder Scott Cook to “fall in love with our customers’ problems, not our products,” we invited tens of thousands of wannabe financial market wizards to replumb our business with programmatic pipes. These wizards cared little (or nothing) about delivering value for clients and consumers (and certainly not publishers). What they cared (a lot) about was making and taking margins on each and every transaction.
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They get titles and workstations that make them look like they’re working on Wall Street (their parents, aunts, uncles and peers at bars are impressed). They throw around a never-ending stream of three-letter acronyms to make sure we know they're in the cool club -- and we’re not.
Personalization, automation and real-time attribution are very powerful capabilities to help ads sell more products and services, consumers find and buy things that they want and need, and publishers maximize the ad yield from their investments in journalism, entertainment or information.
Unfortunately, too much of the ad industry fell in love with the means -- automated, data-driven ad planning, buying and measurement -- as tools for media trading, not as tools for great advertising. Let’s change that.
Let’s drop “trading” from our industry lexicon. Everyone who matters will win.
Once again, dave, ( on the money) and once again in, who leads?
phil guarascio
Good question, Phil.
The answer, of course, is the advertisers, themselves, and by making their agencies take a firm stand. But then the agencies will have to retrain their planners and buyers and figure out new fee systems for handling digital buys. Will their clients be supportive--or will they speak loudly at industry gatherings about the problems Dave has articulated but carry a small--or no ----stick.
The real client in most cases is the CMO and his/her minions--but who is going to motivate enough of them to start the ball rolling. Maybe the ANA might act as a unifying catalyst? If not, I don't see much hope for an organuized movement towards change.
Ed, I agree with the challenges, but the real client are the shareholders and that is where the message needs to be taken. Fortunately, the developement and deployument of better attribution technologies and analytics will make it easier for Wall Street analysts to track how well (or not) companies are dong with their ad spend.