• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

Today's column is about industry firsts. Actually, a multitude of them, but starting with two being announced just this morning.

One is "an industry-first integration" between sell-side technology provider Magnite and Interpublic's Acxiom unit touted as being the first to enable "audience decisioning on the sell-side using Acxiom’s full suite of data services."

I received that pitch early Wednesday afternoon and immediately followed up asking the press contact to clarify how it actually was an industry-first, or whether it just was a first for Magnite and Acxiom, and if it truly was an industry-first, how Magnite backed the claim up.

I never heard back, but I did a little digging and found numerous references to other "sell-side" data integrations "activating" demand-side programmatic buying, including a 2023 announcement by Magnite itself touting adoption by three buy-siders: GALE, GroupM (now WPP Media) and Omnicom Media Group, as well as others using similar claims by peers and competitors like one from Pubmatic three years ago.

This morning's other "first-to-market" announcement comes from Clinch -- the self-described "Agentic AI platform for omnichannel advertising" -- which touted "a new first-to-market DCO [dynamic creative optimization] strategy available within its Flight Control platform, the ability to optimize creative performance using media performance data. This evolution empowers advertisers to connect creative decisions directly to measurable business outcomes, further closing the loop on attributed campaign performance."

The responses didn't exactly substantiate how and why it was an industry first, but it reiterated the claim, asserting:

"It is a new creative optimization strategy available in Clinch’s Flight Control platform. Flight Control ingests aggregated performance data from media partners, integrates them into its creative optimization engine, to optimize towards creatives driving the best performance, and visualizes  those insights for ongoing learnings. Clinch is the first to offer this because it is the only solution that automates the process of connecting creative and media data to deliver real-time optimization and holistic, end-to-end campaign analysis."

The announcement did include a third-party testimonial from an agency using the new tool -- Canvas Worldwide, which used it for its automotive client Genesis -- and included a quote from Canvas Vice President-Director of Performance Strategy Marisa Corvallis describing it as an innovation enabling the feature to optimize its media tactics and creative placements, but it still wasn't clear how and why it was an industry-first capability.

To their credit, Clinch was able to provide a graphic illustrating how the media/creative optimization actually works (see below).

The point of this lead isn't to make light of industry-first claims. I've been getting them for nearly half a century as an advertising trade reporter, and it is my job to vet the claims and put them in context for our readers.

The real point is that it's getting harder and harder to vet those claims, because they often are about proprietary, black-box technologies -- or more recently, "data integrations," "clean rooms," and other ad-tech industry hyperbole that sound important, but often are difficult to explain, challenge and vet other than people saying what they say. That's one of the reasons I often use explicit "pull quotes" from executives as photo captions of them backing up the claims, because if they're willing to put their good names and reputations on them, who am I to say.

The truth is, I'm knowledgeable about how ad tech works for a trade reporter, but I'm not an engineer -- so even if I get the opportunity to look under the hood, I probably don't have the ability to understand what's actually going on.

So in the end, I can only report what people claim, how they respond -- or don't -- to follow questions asking how I can back their claims so our readers can accept them.

A second point is that the language the tech-heavy side of the ad industry uses to describe things has become equally difficult to understand and often is just meaningless buzzwords filling in for explicit explanations about what the moving parts do and why they do them better than what others have been doing before.

This has only increased over time. I don't have the quants on it, but I'm thinking about how to get my arms around it and may come back with an analysis on that in the near future.

Nearly a quarter century ago, when I began covering this part of the ad industry more closely for MediaPost, former MediaPost colleague Paul Gough and I began publishing a recurring feature to shed some light on this. We called it the "Hyperbabble Of The Day" (a mashup of hyperbole and babble) in which we would pull a verbatim sentence or paragraph from a press release illustrating the fine art of ad-tech hype, jargon and meaningless rhetoric, and published it, anonymously, of course.

Some ad-tech industry press contacts said they actually appreciated it at the time, because it helped them explain to their clients why such language might not actually be a good thing.

Anyway, I've been thinking about resurrecting that feature, and maybe even coming up with an annual MediaPost editorial award for the best of each year.

Meanwhile, I was inspired by today's industry-first to at least try to quantify what I've perceived as a growing trend in that hyperbolic direction, so I indexed my own inbox for press pitches using those keyword phrases since the beginning of the year (see chart above).

I'm not saying my inbox is a representative sample of industry hype, but as editor-in-chief of MediaPost, it's not nothing. Take it for what it's worth.

Addendum: After this column was published, a Magnite spokespersons did follow up and clarified that the industry-first news was actually just an Acxiom-first sell-side integration, adding: "Essentially it enables advertisers to activate data on the sell side and allows for increased match rates, advanced forecasting and more budgets towards working media."