25 years of ad tech and one conclusion: the fundamentals of trust never change.

I started in finance as a data-entry clerk at 21. Being a data-entry clerk is cool for a minute; eventually you want to understand why the data is going into the system. A friend at Dentsu explained the ecosystem to me. I joined a Swiss start-up that was building a one-order, one-bill system for newspapers so they could compete against TV, processing 1,800 newspapers as if they were one. I came in at the ground, put tear sheets into envelopes, talked to people about the benefits of newspapers, learned media from a newspaper perspective. The parent company invested in one of the first online advertising-technology companies for ad serving (Real Media, which became 24/7 Real Media and then Xaxis). They sent me to Lausanne and Paris for ten years to help build out Real Media Europe.

It was easy because we were first in. If you could listen to what someone wanted and you had the kit, even when the case studies weren't there, getting started was easy. Keeping them right was the game. Everything is a little easier when you put it through the right place, right time framework.

Three layers. A product that fits in the majority of markets. The operational schema that effectuates the go-to-market. Then the local-market fit. That last layer is what Adform has given me the opportunity to bring to bear. The company has been around for 23 years, with the DSP, the buy-side ad server, the DMP, and the ID Fusion graph. When you focus on the means of those products, the end becomes a means to an end.

The commercial-fit assessment runs through the right person: it takes a discourse that fits what they're looking at but didn't know existed. Depending on the constituency, what drives their success drives their decision-making for the products they choose. People are looking for the next stage of their career growth as part of choosing vendors. You don't pick a start-up if you're a massive company. The right kind of company can scale with you. When you bring a problem to someone they didn't know they had, with unique data (Adform has unique insights into the programmatic marketplace), wrapped together for the benefit of a brand's growth, they engage.

There's no such thing as Europe. There are 20 countries. Each has its own needs. Mainland European companies often land in England first to figure out their model before going to the US; American companies coming to Europe land in England first. England is the landing point for the two continents.

American companies often forget that you need local leadership. The German go-to-market is very different from the French and very different from the Dutch. Adform has 725 people in Europe, 28 offices, and each head of those local markets is a local leader. Send our American guy over and see how he does in Germany is the biggest mistake.

In other parts of the world, the pattern is family businesses controlling critical elements of certain markets and political alignment doing more of the work. Be mindful of those things; the welcome isn't automatic.

Linear television is the most effective, cheapest media that's ever been made. CTV is the extension of it, but priced at a point that makes it difficult to be a replacement. CTV is racing to become a digital display business in its model of efficiency and efficacy, but the sell side controls the market in linear, and that will continue on CTV. The sell side gets to choose who runs in the premium content.

This goes back to how a brand thinks about brand-building. Is content association critical, or are they looking for cheap GRPs? Cheap GRPs aren't available on CTV to the degree they are on linear. That's where the road splits.

The train is moving fast toward cross-platform. We have a solution that allows brands to buy cross-platform. The sell-side is mindful that if I spent all this money on the content and I brought somebody to my content, I don't want the buy-side to find them in other content and bring down the CPM I brought in. That's the same tension you see with walled gardens. Why can't you see duplicate reach between walled gardens? Because they don't want to be commoditised. The natural tension between buy-side and sell-side persists until the sell-side has been proven not to be commoditised the way the early online media companies were. Then more inventory opens up and scale happens faster.

There are two principles in the advertising ecosystem: those who build the content that attracts advertising, and those who pay for the products that need to be marketed. The rest of us are facilitators. As data got faster and smarter and the media moved down-funnel to lower CPA-driven metrics, the tech companies became more restrictive about the data they shared, the garden walls went up for econometric and efficiency reasons, and the principles got hurt.

You also have media intermediaries who take positions on inventory and resell it. They have every right to do that from a capitalist perspective (buyer beware), but where there's mystery, there's margin. Adform's position is that we declare early: extremely independent, your dollars go into your marketing objectives at the level you intended, with transparency on the fees. No media arbitraging. No data arbitraging. The principal (the marketer) is paying for everything in the ecosystem.

Can advertisers and agencies regain control? Only through purchasing power, which classically means withholding spend, and competition is too intense for that to happen organically. The answer is industry trade-body cross-collaboration to see what's happening in walled gardens and the open internet together, while ensuring no one is commoditised. A delicate balance.

Fragmentation persists because someone will always build the next cool device. The television glass manufacturers take small margins on selling the screen because the bigger margin is in monetising eyeballs once the device is in the house. More devices, cheaper, hoping to monetise. The only force holding fragmentation back is that two companies control the operating-system rails (Apple and Google). Google is an open OS. Apple is not. What happens between there will set the path.

The trend I watch is identity fragmentation in the marketplace while remaining privacy-safe. Brands don't understand that their match rate doesn't equal their reach rate. There's a dichotomy of value: I'm spending a lot of money on my consumer data platform, rightfully so, and now I need to get that first-party data into the marketplace. The transition is not visible to them; they can't see what they can reach against that matched audience. That's what Adform is changing. The reach match index is the missing piece.

Two main reasons COVID changed the market. The conference circuit has become the new meetings because people aren't back in offices to the same degree. The number of touches you used to have from walking the hallways of your constituencies is gone. A new crop of people came in who couldn't lean on a legacy Rolodex because they were starting off, which hurt them and benefited the people in market longer. You're seeing consolidation on the network effect of executives and professionals in ad-tech, irrespective of market.

Old-media versus new-media: old media had more trust and fewer choices. CBS wasn't going away. Now you don't know if your vendor will be there next year. Buyers have become a lot more intelligent and more curious, with many more levels of understanding about why a company will make it.

We're up against the titans, the walled gardens. You have to find the Davids who want to beat up the Goliaths. That's not something taught in school. It's a character trait. You want to come out swinging. The feeling that you can do it even though the obstacles are difficult. You can't see that on a CV. The way to hold a team together is to call it out: what you just did there was taking on the big guys.

People who love working for big brands love the innovation and carrying a great logo on their lapel. The degree to which they can be the David is lower by default. Some people like to go fast. Some like to go slow.

Literacy of the data and its impact (how media metrics drive business outcomes) will come together much faster. Operational tedium in advertising improves through AI, which moves people toward intellectual curiosity. MarTech and ad-tech come back together as brands push to save money. Retail media is the precursor because brands have two departments calling on one retailer, and the CFO is already asking why. That forces organisational change. The market brings forth an innovation, the innovation changes the organisation, when the organisation changes you either add people or realise you don't need as many. Change accelerates.

The first question: does the company I'm choosing have marketing knowledge? We treat Chief Marketing Officers as Chief Advertising Officers. They're not. CMOs have an understanding of how brand and creative is influenced by media, but they don't think of media first. The media industry and the ad-tech world need a one-year course in marketing. Get up to speed on what CMOs are thinking about in their day to day. Place media and advertising in the consideration set the CMO really has.

We don't often do that. We think my features are the best, I can get you the lowest insert-media-tactic-here. That's not how a brand rolls. A brand is thinking about longevity. Mental availability. Physical availability. That's a different play from selling 30-second ads or banners. We need to make marketing a critical skill across the industry.

If you're going back in time, the advice is more recognition than advice: you were pretty lucky to work for people who were smarter than you.

The substantive piece: people are not rational. If they were, they would vote for economists; instead they vote for storytellers. Your product may be the best fit rationally, but multiple pieces feed the decision-making process outside the value your product brings.

What I wish I'd known at the start: a more thorough understanding of decision-making and what truly goes into choosing partners. A good buyer will never tell you. Getting that answer requires a different muscle than people realise. You need people more experienced and longer in the market to teach you the patterns. Everything is pattern recognition. History repeats. Go work for highly accomplished people for free if you can; they'll give you the patterns at the age you are, and you can skip faster through the steps.