Don Marti

Sat 06 Dec 2014 09:24:34 PM PST

Thought Leader Insights

Thought Leader Rob Rasko writes: One of the greatest fears publishers face is an impending loss of revenue, based on the spread between what they earn selling their premium inventory and what they earn from programmatic. In some instances, the delta between publisher premium and programmatic can be as great as ten to one; in other words, some publishers’ programmatic ads are earning only ten percent of what their premium counterparts earn. Since programmatic is here to stay...

Too much corporate speak. Let's see if we can find someone who puts it more clearly. This is my neighborhood. You and your friends have to show me a little respect, ah?....You should let me wet my beak a little.

Adtech proponents don't say it like that, though. It's not adtech people wanting to take web publishing's ad revenue away on their own initiative. Programmatic is here to stay and it's all INEVITABLE because of TECHNOLOGY and stuff. How about that Internet, disrupting the economy again? What can you do?

This is, of course, bullshit. The mess that web ads are in, where adtech destroys more value than it captures, is a matter of economic gamesmanship, not technological inevitability. Like all long-running varieties of bullshit, the adtech variety depends on different qualities to get past different people. It beats regular marketing people's filters by having just enough math in it to scare them. It gets past the technology people by appealing to one of the oldest, most deeply held IT biases: if it was hard to write, and technically elegant, it must be good. (Ever notice how so many tech people automatically say better ads instead of more targeted ads even when targeting reduces a medium's value?) Finally, the people with the best chance of detecting adtech bullshit—journalists who cover business and the web—are kept looking the wrong way by their own pride in the editorial/advertising firewall, which is ordinarily a good thing.

So what's the answer? Let's look at the chart.

Print is moving down and to the left. It'll be too small for analysts to bother tracking within a few years. Mobile is moving to the right, and a little up. All the web has to do is let mobile take over the bottom right corner, which it's on its way to doing, and move up and a little left to get out of the way and take print's old niche.

That depends on fixing third-party tracking, though. Maybe, if we can somehow get all the Thought Leaders to focus on native apps while the web quietly fixes its trackability issues, it'll be fixed before anyone knows it. Especially if publishers can give the audience a little nudge.