Insider's View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Robert Brill

Robert Brill of BrillMedia.co brings more than 13 years of digital advertising experience to every conversation — spanning the birth of social media, the rise of programmatic, and the ongoing consolidation reshaping the industry. What follows is a wide-ranging discussion on the changes, challenges, and trends defining ad tech and martech today.

You can connect with Robert on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us about your background and expertise in the ad tech/martech industry?

I spent 13 years in the digital advertising space, starting with digital media strategy and then moving into digital activation. In 2010, when programmatic advertising became important to clients and the broader business, I took an active role in developing programmatic solutions.

My expertise is using demand-side platforms (DSPs) to buy advertising space and set up smart testing strategies, while simultaneously optimizing for performance and making sure the numbers tell a real business story. That means combining precise audience data points, relationships with over a hundred ecosystem partners, and smart algorithmic optimization for advertisers. My background in digital strategy also lets me offer clients a more holistic view of their marketing rather than just the programmatic piece.

2. What does BrillMedia do and how does it fit into the larger online advertising picture?

BrillMedia partners with multiple demand-side platforms and influencer-marketing platforms to activate digital media for clients. The goal is to make the same powerful digital marketing capabilities that large agencies offer available to small and mid-sized marketers.

On the enterprise side, large marketers often already have programmatic solutions in place, so a lot of that work involves refining existing relationships and helping them operate more efficiently with current partners. Bringing in an outside, unbiased perspective on pricing, optimization, workflow, and overarching media strategy tends to be valuable. And when a client needs a programmatic solution built from the ground up, that's on the table too.

3. What have been some of the biggest changes in online marketing and display advertising over the past 5–10 years?

The marketplace changes every three to six months — new solutions, new players, new opportunities. I was working with social media before the term really meant anything, then watched the evolution of MySpace and ultimately the dominance of Facebook.

I've also seen the rise of mobile. Every year for the last five years has been declared "the year of mobile." We are absolutely in a mobile era — and it's not going anywhere. In 2017, three-quarters of the $32 billion in programmatic spending was expected to run on mobile devices.

Watching ad networks emerge, compete with ad exchanges, and then get largely overtaken by the programmatic ecosystem has been a fascinating arc. Some players adapted well; others simply fell away.

Perhaps the most striking evolution, though, is the ability for large enterprise marketers to bring media buying in-house. That used to be reserved for the very largest advertisers with exceptional resources. Today, there are distinct and well-documented advantages to keeping that function internal rather than outsourcing it.

4. What are the biggest challenges large marketing organizations and agencies face right now?

The biggest challenge is the complexity and sophistication of the marketplace. Sophistication is genuinely fantastic — it gives every player the ability to build unique solutions. But the complexity makes it immensely confusing. There are still real challenges around baseline marketplace knowledge, terminology, purposeful obfuscation, viewability, fraudulent traffic, and brand safety. Each of those needs to be addressed, and every marketer has to develop their own enterprise-level approach to handling them.

With such a complex ecosystem, organizations are taking a much more hands-on approach to ad buying. Between agencies, advertisers, and outside partners, there's opportunity for obfuscation — and where there's confusion, there's often room for someone to profit from it. So it's critically important for large marketing organizations pursuing programmatic to deploy smart programmatic teams internally, even if they don't do all the trading directly in-house.

5. What trends do you see shaping ad tech and martech going into 2017?

Consolidation is front and centre. Adobe acquired TubeMogul, and Salesforce acquired Krux. Large companies — whether they're native to the ecosystem or coming in from outside — are scooping up solutions and building marketing stacks to compete with Google and Facebook. Facebook itself acquired Atlas to build out an ad server and, from there, an ad network.

The other major evolution is the shift from cookie-targeted or device-ID-targeted campaigns toward people-based marketing. Using lists of known past customers and interested parties, it's now possible to target very precise groups by connecting those lists to user IDs — email subscribers, previous buyers, people who requested more information. Facebook and Google already offer this capability, and more publishers will follow.

There's also a continuing push toward self-service tooling for smaller marketers — what amounts to a pursuit of market parity. Recently, Facebook made engagement targeting available more broadly, enabling campaign targeting that has been available in DSPs for years. Remarketing to users who viewed at least 50% of a video ad, for instance, had been available in TubeMogul for a long time before it reached a wider audience through self-service channels.

The net effect is a boom in self-service marketing options accessible to smaller operators. With roughly 30 million small business marketers out there, the opportunity to help that segment leverage these powerful targeting capabilities is substantial.