I’ve been searching for the words to describe my feelings towards the current state of adtech. Terms like “stale,” “stagnant,” and “boring” are among the pejoratives that come to mind. But, if I had to be even more descriptive, I’d have to say that adtech is like a grocery storeand not in a good way.
Just like a grocery store will sell multiple versions of the same product, adtech too is a cacophony of competing firms each effectively doing the same thing. Break down adtech into its constituent taskslike A/B testing, attribution, analytics, or whateverand you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds of companies all touting the merits of their products.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of these companies might actually have good products, or they’re competitive on price. But are they innovative? Are they doing anything wildly new, or tackling an existing problem in an imaginative and helpful way? The answer is, almost always, no.
Adtech’s Getting Old
To be clear, this isn’t inherently a bad thing. Innovation for the sake of innovation is a recipe for products with no market fit, or with no obvious utility. We see this every time there’s a hype cycle. When crypto was at its most ludicrous towards the late 2010s, there were no shortage of companies that reimagined existing technologies, but on the blockchain. We’re seeing it again with generative AI.
Going back to the supermarket analogy, we’re at a point where adtech products are a bit like common household staples. Realistically, there’s only room for a few brands of tomato soup. And there’s no line of VCs desperate to back the next disruptive player in the tomato soup industry.
It’s here where I start to get worried. When there are no more frontiers to march towards, no more boundaries to cross, you end up with consolidation among existing players. I believe we’re in the early stages of this process, as demonstrated by the near-total collapse of VC investment into adtech startups over the past decade.
In 2015, investors ploughed almost $5 billion into the sector, according to Crunchbase Data, spread across nearly 400 rounds. In the first eight months of 2024, that lofty figure had shrunk to a mere $360 million. The lion’s share of that cash went to existing companies, rather than those in the seed stage.
Consolidation (and its sibling, saturation) is, obviously, a factor in this malaise. Adtech is a (relatively) mature industry, and over the past couple of decades, a handful of players have emerged as the dominant forces in their specific niche. These companies are now multi-billion dollar entities, and it’s hard to imagine a successful challenger emerging at this late stage.
For an investor, the prospect of a rival to, say, Hubspot or Salesforce, that exists to steal the percentage of customers that are unhappy with their service, and aren’t too locked-in to move, isn’t an enticing proposition. And that’s without mentioning the other factors that have likely complicated matterslike the E.U.’s stringent privacy regulations, the dominance of Google and Facebook in digital advertising, and the general post-pandemic slump in VC spending.
A Mirror of Tech
I’ve started to realize that what I’ve described isn’t unique to adtech. In the 2000s and 2010s, Silicon Valley set out to build the digital world. Now, it’s largely been built, and the companies that executed best during that period are now leaders in their segments.
Most product categories exist. There’s very rarely anything new. Even generative AI, arguably the most “new” thing we’ve seen in recent years, feels somewhat tired. Most commercial implementations are effectively papering on a new technology onto an old ideaand often with questionable, or negligible, outcomes.
But as the tech industry writ large treads ever-stagnant water, it’s worth remembering thatat least, when it comes to marketingwe have other options. Stagnancy is a choice, and it’s one that I hope we avoid.
The biggest problem with adtech is that it was more “tech” than “ad.” Advertising is, by its very nature, a fundamentally human pursuit. Every successful marketing campaign throughout history has been centered on creative content that spoke to someone, either through imagery, writing, or music. To be successful, you need to think about your audience. You need to understand them, and to think carefully about what things will resonate with them.
Tech is, far too often, not particularly human. And that’s especially true for adtech. Think of all the websites that are literally bursting with adtech productsanalytics, ad networks, and so onthat fundamentally degrade the user experience. These products answer one question (“how do we do this one particular task faster, or smarter, or with full automation?”), but leave one unanswered: how will people respond to this?
The fact that so many people are “opting out” of advertising, either through ad-blockers or by paying for ad-free subscriptions, because they perceive digital advertising as hostile and intrusive should be cause for alarm within the adtech industry. At a very least, it should provoke some soul-searching. Something which, I’m sad to say, hasn’t happened.
Worse, the dominance of the “tech” in “adtech” is actively clouding the judgement of marketers. Far too many marketers are glued to dashboards, obsessing over the numbers generated by their chosen analytics platform. We trust that these platforms are accurate, even though there’s no such thing as “perfect attribution.” Or, rather, not without being able to read the audience’s mind.
And so, we’ve forgotten the human aspect of marketing. It’s time to go back to basics.
Putting Creative First
I’ve been critical of the adtech industry throughout this piece, and not without cause. That said, I do think it’s worth acknowledging that there are some tools that are very good. Everything has its place, and in moderation.
The problem is that I don’t see the adtech industry solving the problems of marketers, now or into the future. It’s an industry that’s hit a brick wall, and has no new ideas. Worse, I think that our collective enthralment with adtech has blinded us to the capabilities and limitations of these products, and the fact that, as marketers, our audiences are people.
To be clear, this isn’t a kind of adtech luddite manifesto, arguing for a return to a 1990’s way of doing business. For better or for worse, advertising is a digital industry now, and there’s no going back.
Rather, it’s a plea for marketers to accept that the tech products they usewhether directly or indiectlyare no substitute for human creativity, and an understanding of the audience. While the adtech industry has made some things better, we need to acknowledge that there’s nothing new around the corner. There’s no new game-changing product category that will make our jobs easier, or our campaigns more successful.
We need to start relying on ourselves more. To understand that every conversion starts with a great piece of creative, and work back from there.
