16 Most Popular Ad Tech & MarTech Articles of 2016
2016 was a busy year for the Ad Tech and MarTech industries — acquisitions and mergers, new players entering the market, and no shortage of innovation across the board.
It was also a year that generated a lot of sharp thinking and practical writing across these spaces. Below is a curated roundup of the 16 most widely read articles covering Ad Tech and MarTech themes from that year — eight from each side of the industry.
Most Popular Ad Tech Posts of 2016
1. Why You Need a Data Management Platform (DMP)
In an effort to increase marketing ROI, marketers, advertisers, and agencies have expanded the number of campaigns running across multiple channels. The result, too often, is poor ROI driven by low engagement.
The underlying fix isn't reaching more people — it's reaching more of the right people. That's precisely the problem a DMP is designed to solve.
2. What is First-Party Data Onboarding and How Does it Work?
For years, the industry leaned heavily on third-party data, layering it on top of first-party information to identify customer behaviours and extend reach. The third-party data was never as accurate or valuable, but it served a purpose.
That calculus has shifted. Marketers and advertisers have come to recognize that the real payoff lies in first-party data — and according to a study from Econsultancy and Signal, advertiser use of first-party data is set to rise substantially given the competitive advantages it provides.
3. What is Header Bidding and How Does it Work?
In the early days of online advertising, buying ad space on a publisher's site meant calling their sales team directly. That direct relationship hasn't disappeared, but technology has layered speed, efficiency, and scale on top of it in ways that would have been unrecognizable to those early buyers and sellers.
As the number of technology platforms has grown, so has the number of processes underpinning media transactions. Header bidding is one of those processes — and by 2016, it was gaining significant traction in the ad-tech world.
4. The Benefits of a First-Party Cookie Approach in Online Advertising
There's been considerable debate within the industry about the long-term future of third-party cookies. Some argue they'll always have a place in the ecosystem; others contend they're on a path toward obsolescence, pushed out by ad blockers or by new cross-device tracking technologies that would make them redundant.
Wherever one lands on that debate, the practical case for publishers, advertisers, and ad tech platforms to adopt first-party cookie approaches has become increasingly clear.
5. Advantages and Disadvantages of Programmatic Direct for Publishers
It goes by several names — "automated guaranteed," "automated direct," "automated reserved," or simply "programmatic direct." But whatever the label, the direct demand-supply buying model accounts for a majority of programmatic ad spend — a fact that often surprises people given how much of the industry conversation centres on real-time bidding.
6. Real-Time Bidding & Programmatic: One and the Same?
Ad tech has developed a vocabulary all its own. Pay-per-click, demand-side platform (DSP), ad exchange — the terminology expands constantly. But two terms became genuine buzzwords over recent years: programmatic and real-time bidding (RTB).
They're closely connected and frequently used in tandem, but they are not synonymous. Understanding the distinction is foundational to making sense of how modern digital advertising actually works.
7. How Does Ad Blocking Work and What Can Publishers Do About It?
Ad blockers have created real anxiety across the industry — and for publishers especially, that anxiety is well founded. The rapid rise in ad blocking software adoption poses a genuine structural threat to ad-supported publishing. That said, there are concrete steps both publishers and advertisers can take to counter the trend rather than simply absorbing the impact.
8. Ad Tech Targeting Methods: The Ultimate Guide
Before launching a campaign, marketers need a clear-eyed view of which targeting methods actually fit their objectives. Behavioural targeting? Demographic targeting? A combination? The worst outcome is an expensive campaign aimed squarely at the wrong audience.
Ad tech has handed brands a wide array of targeting tools — the challenge is knowing how to define your audience precisely and how to acquire the data required to aim a campaign effectively.
Most Popular MarTech Posts of 2016
1. Game Theory Attribution: The Model You've Probably Never Heard Of
How do online marketers assign credit to the different channels in a customer's conversion path? Last-click attribution? First-click? Both models are widely used and both are fundamentally flawed — they distribute credit based on position rather than actual influence.
Game theory attribution takes a different approach: it assigns credit to channels based on their measurable contribution to a conversion rather than where they happened to sit in the funnel. In 2016, it remained a largely underappreciated method outside specialist circles.
2. What is Cross-Device Attribution and What's So Hard About It?
Cross-channel attribution — tracking which touch points a consumer encountered across different channels before converting — is achievable with the right implementation. Cross-device attribution is another matter.
When consumers interact with a brand on a laptop, then a smartphone, then a tablet, connecting those interactions into a coherent journey becomes significantly harder. That cross-device customer journey represents one of the most persistent measurement challenges in digital marketing.
3. Insider's View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A With Scott Brinker
Scott Brinker has become one of the most recognized voices in marketing technology. His annual Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic is a landmark publication in the field, and the MarTech conference series he helps organize draws practitioners from across the industry.
This interview explored his perspective on the current state of the MarTech ecosystem and where it's headed.
4. Innovation Drives MarTech Growth
Marketing has, arguably more than any other business sector, thrived on technical innovation since the dawn of the internet age — producing the sprawling, fast-growing ecosystem the industry navigates today.
Neeraj Agrawal of Battery Ventures — whose portfolio includes Marketo, Optimizely, Tealium, and Bazaarvoice — offered a compelling explanation for why that growth has been so feverish, drawing on his vantage point as one of MarTech's most active venture investors.
5. Getting a Grip on the MarTech Ecosystem
The Marketing Technology ecosystem had never been larger or more complex than it was heading into 2016. The numbers tell the story: over 1,800 vendors spread across 43 different categories — and still growing.
For any CMO trying to build a coherent marketing stack, the sheer breadth of platforms and solutions on offer is enough to cause decision paralysis. Understanding the shape of the ecosystem is a prerequisite to navigating it sensibly.
6. Why Modern Marketers Need to Be More Tech-Savvy
Technology has changed how most professionals do their jobs, and marketing is no exception. The digital age has fundamentally altered the speed, relevancy, and reach of campaigns, pushing marketers toward a higher baseline of technical fluency.
Using CRM platforms to analyze customer data, building content strategies around SEO — these are table stakes now. Being genuinely tech-savvy in the modern marketing environment means something more substantial than knowing how to operate a given application.
7. Marketing Automation: More Popular Than Ever?
The 19th-century merchant John Wanamaker is famously quoted as saying: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The observation is well over a century old, but the underlying problem hasn't gone away.
Money — and time, which amounts to much the same thing — continues to be lost across the marketing funnel. Marketing automation platforms have risen to the top of many practitioners' technology wish lists precisely because of their capacity to reduce that waste, compressing the time cost of processes that would otherwise be handled manually.
8. What Exactly is MarTech?
Marketing technology — MarTech — is one of the fastest-growing segments in technology. It's a term many practitioners have heard and begun to explore. But understanding it at a surface level isn't the same as understanding it fully, and the distinction matters more as the ecosystem grows in complexity.