The Vicious Cycle Plaguing AdTech and MarTech Vendors

Despite the efficiencies, automation, and scale that advertising and marketing technology bring to the online world, there's no shortage of problems in these industries. Ad fraud, a lack of transparency around fees and commissions, and GDPR compliance are just a few of the external pressures vendors contend with today.

AdTech and MarTech vendors and agencies also face a distinct set of internal challenges:

AdTech and MarTech vendors: Maintaining a competitive edge and consistently delivering value to clients.

Agencies: Reducing commissions paid to vendors and intermediaries, eliminating fees tied to white-labelled platforms, gaining transparency into media-buying processes, and retaining control and ownership of their data.

In conversations with company leaders across the industry — from CEOs to VPs of Technology — a familiar pattern keeps emerging. Whatever their unique circumstances, virtually all of them cycle through the same set of compounding problems when it comes to their technology.

1. Too Many Client Requests, Too Few Hours in the Day

It doesn't matter what stage a product is at in its lifecycle — there will always be an apparently unlimited supply of new feature requests and change proposals from clients. As a platform matures and the company behind it grows, the volume of those requests only increases, particularly once the vendor starts attracting large, high-paying clients.

The hard truth is that no amount of venture funding or equity capital buys more hours in the day. It can, however, pay for development resources to build the features clients are asking for and develop new tools to broaden the product offering.

Unfortunately, that's often where the second problem surfaces.

2. Not Enough Resources to Expand the Core Product or Build New Features

Whether the goal is to build requested features, expand the underlying technology, or develop entirely new tools, assembling the right development capacity is a genuine challenge.

On top of that sits the ongoing burden of platform maintenance — performance monitoring, ensuring compatibility with the latest API versions, and so on — which can easily consume approximately half of available development resources before a single new feature is even scoped.

When vendors and agencies look to increase their development capacity, the options they typically explore are:

• Engaging a body-leasing or generic software development firm
• Hiring developers directly

Both options can seem like sensible solutions in the moment. In practice, they frequently introduce a new set of complications — which leads directly to the third problem.

3. A Shortage of Developers Who Actually Know AdTech and MarTech

Once additional development resources are secured, a stark realization often follows quickly: the developers don't really know what they're working with.

Designing, building, and maintaining advertising and marketing technology is not like other areas of software development. There is a long and steep learning curve involved in understanding the complex inner workings of AdTech and MarTech platforms. Developers typically need years to build a strong command of this domain, and bringing in inexperienced or unskilled developers carries serious consequences.

It's not uncommon for vendors to arrive at a specialist with an existing platform built by an inexperienced team — one where the code and overall architecture are so unmanageable, with processes so far outside industry standards, that the only viable path forward is to scrap the whole thing and rebuild from scratch.

As the saying goes: "if you think it's expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur."

So, What's the Solution?

There's no single answer, because every business operates in a different context. For some, adding one or two developers with genuine AdTech or MarTech experience is sufficient. Others need an entire dedicated team.

What's consistent across the board: if a vendor or agency needs to expand its development capacity, it pays to vet for domain knowledge before anything else. A reasonable litmus test — three-letter acronyms like DSP, SSP, DMP, and CDP should not be foreign concepts to anyone brought on to build these platforms.