As the online ad technology industry consolidates, it is becoming tougher for startups to stand out among the giants. The 500-pound gorillas like Google and Microsoft keep integrating in new technologies and selling themselves as a one-stop shop to ad agencies, publishers, and brand marketers. But a group of ad tech startups is in the process of creating a counterweight to all the consolidation by establishing a consortium for sharing data and agreeing on standard ways to interoperate.
Details are still spare on the yet-to-be announced group, but here is what I’ve been able to find out from industry sources. It will be called the Consortium for Accountable Advertising. The four founding members are Cross Commerce Media (Stephen and Heidi Messer’s ad startup) , Clickable, MediaMath, and TARGUSinfo. They are actively recruiting other ad tech companies to join the consortium.
Companies that join agree to allow their customers to share data. So much of ad tech these days is taking impression data or response rates and combining it with other data to better target ads or analyze how existing campaigns are doing. If an ad agency wants to start using MediaMath, they should be able to take all of their data from past campaign’s from Clickable and pour it into MediaMath’s engine, and vice versa.
Companies which choose to join the consortium are essentially removing barriers to entry and customer lock-in, but in return they are making it easier for customers to choose best-of-breed services. Google’s one-stop-shop might not be as appealing if it becomes easier to mix and match technologies from different ad startups in a simple way. Also, as the industry inevitably continues to consolidate, companies in the consortium will be one step ahead because in a sense they will be pre-integrated. But will it be enough to slow down the gorillas which just seem to keep gaining more and more market share?
Image by txkimmers
Cross Commerce Media (CCM) operates Collective[i]™, a cloud-based analytics platform that unifies a company’s marketing data from disparate sources so that marketers can access and analyze data in real time and in a single place. Unlike dashboards that merely aggregate data, Collective[i]™ standardizes data from existing analytics tools, making it possible to create custom analyses that integrate multiple sources. For the first time, marketers are in control of their data and can measure the collective impact of all their...
Clickable is the all-in-one solution for online advertising. In one elegant experience, Clickable maximizes online investment by connecting and optimizing digital channels with the social graph. With Clickable’s award-winning Pro advertising tool and dedicated search and social advertising experts, marketers can radically reduce the time and complexity of managing multiple ad formats and networks, such as Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. Through American Express OPEN, Clickable also provides leading online advertising and reputation-management tools including SearchManager and...
Headquartered in New York, MediaMath was founded in 2007 and is a leader in the demand side platform category (Forrester Wave, Q4 2011). The company buys billions of highly targeted ads per month on behalf of dozens of agencies, including all the major agency holding companies. Major brands include American Express, Kellogg’s, Prudential and Kayak. The MediaMath buying platform, TerminalOne, provides advertising agencies and brands with the technology and back office services to trade across all leading digital advertising...
With the right knowledge at the right moment, our On-Demand Insight® helps Fortune 500 to successful start-up companies increase revenue, improve audience targeting, create better customer experiences, boost conversion rates, raise customer lifetime values and produce savings from new efficiencies. TARGUSinfo sets the industry bar for data accuracy, currency and coverage — providing on-demand solutions that help organizations identify, verify, score and locate the customers and prospects with whom they interact. Millions of times every day, organizations rely on our insight...
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