A new era for Adtech?

At FastTrack we’ve spent the last 11 years partnering with AdTech and MarTech scaleups, bringing innovative technology to AsiaPacific.

To be honest, it’s recently felt like genuine innovation in AdTech has stalled. There’s been a distinct lack of differentiation in terms of offer, and a lot of fragmentation across the supply chain.

Demand side and supply side have not seamlessly connected, with the only real beneficiaries being the walled gardens who have taken the lion share of media budgets, and the AdNetworks who have taken most of the working media. Status quo has stifled innovation, and not been equitable for agencies nor publishers.

But change is in the air, and some of the most exciting developments are in programmatic, suggesting new ways to empower curation and simplify the supply path. And one of the most exciting platforms in this space is Equativ, who’s recent merger with ShareThrough caused such a buzz recently at Cannes Lions.

This feels like a very exciting development, as it promises to resolve some of the issues that have plagued programmatic over the years.

The problem with programmatic

Historically programmatic always involved compromises.

For brands it meant sacrificing control to gain reach and scale.

For media agencies it meant navigating an over-complicated and fragmented ecosystem of solutions. This entailed a dependence on walled gardens and blind trust in AdNetworks, often at the expense of brand-safety, user-experience and working-media performance.

For publishers, margins have been steadily eroded. The gap between the brand and consumers has widened with so many intermediaries getting involved. But still with intense pressure on publishers to perform.

Programmatic without compromise

But programmatic is evolving rapidly, and one of the most exciting platforms to demonstrate the new possibilities of curation is Equativ. Its recent merger with ShareThrough turns it into a best-of-both-world’s curation powerhouse, joining things up, simplifying the supply path and delivering benefits and more control to more parties in the ecosystem.

Equativ’s programmatic curation platform, while offering scale and real-time optimisation for campaign performance, brings brands and publishers back closer together, like they were before the walled gardens triumphed, and the supply path became opaque and dispersed across multiple intermediaries.

AI-empowered curation also promises to restore the careful control historically sacrificed when brands went programmatic. With the recently acquired capabilities of ShareThrough, campaign assets carefully created by the brand can be just as carefully enhanced for performance and relevance with the help of machine learning.

In short, a human-like curational care, delivered at digital scale.

Harmonising the digital ad ecosystem

We at FastTrack can understand why there was so much buzz about what Equativ’s merger with ShareThrough could mean for programmatic within the digital ad ecosystem.

By reducing the number of intermediaries, and providing more transparency through the supply path, there can be greater alignment of interests for all parties.

Publishers can optimise inventories for maximum brand impact, while gaining a greater share.

And brands can preserve their values through creative control and safe premium placements.

From being about compromise, programmatic can be about control and consistency where more parties benefit.

Ultimately it means offering a more equitable share of working media than is currently tied up in complexity and obscurity.

With such possibilities emerging it is indeed an exciting time to be in AdTech.