• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

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.

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.