100 Visions and Parallax

Since January, I've been on the road on an advertising industry listening tour: holding 100 meetings to listen (and share the trends I'm seeing) with industry CEOs and other leaders. The purpose of the tour has been to get a complete 360 degree view, as an independent who isn't full time on anyone's payroll, of our industry during this time of major market change.

A Status Update of the Tour

I'm now 76 meetings in. I've met with CEOs and other leading execs at all but one of the major holding companies, several prominent independent agencies, dozens of publishers, major brands, and most leading ad tech (and adjacent) companies.

A mentor of mine once gave me the sage advice that "When you're dying of thirst is not when to first start thinking about digging a well."

For the last 25 years, I've been digging my well in this industry. I've focused on helping others regardless of whether or not there's something in it for me - good business karma, I call it. I've been blessed to see that the well is indeed full of water. And am thankful that my listening tour has been so embraced - and that people are sharing with me so much of their views on this dynamic market.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to start sharing my insights here on LinkedIn.

Coherency, Alignment, and Parallax

The CEO of a major US agency recently asked me how I can coherently stitch together 75 (to date) different views of the industry. The answer: I can't. They aren't unified. That's not because any of the thought-and-operational leaders I've spoken to are wrong. It's because they have a particular perspective.

If I'm a publisher, I have a publisher perspective. If I'm at an agency, I have that perspective. I can try to put myself in others' shoes, but really... it's just an educated guess what they see. I don't live it every day. So I develop a point of view on the industry based on where I'm coming from. And even if I step slightly to the left or right of that viewing spot... it's not enough of a change to give me perspective.

In astronomy, they call the effect parallax. How one object viewed from two separate places looks different compared to the background because of the difference in perspective. But without parallax, we would know next to nothing about our universe. Parallax means that by viewing something from multiple places, we get a more three-dimensional view of it. We can triangulate its distance. We can learn about parts of it that we couldn't see from a single observation point.

A Three-Dimensional View

So no, I cannot stitch together a hundred points of view into one. What I can do, however, is factor in all the perspectives and get a true three-dimensional view of where the industry is heading. This full view of the market shows that publishers generally see this as their chance to regain power and clout in the buying process, yet they aren't taking into account the realities of agencies' need for scalability in buying. It shows that agencies will be just fine in the coming shift, but that the way they buy will have to change for them to remain relevant. It shows that technology companies that have been built on a rickety foundation of cookies are scrambling for solutions... with most grasping for the nearest idea, rather than thinking about how to re-tool and re-invent a market.

I'm excited by all these different perspectives - both the ones that are inclusive and broad and the ones that are more focused on the here and now and not what comes next. But that 3D model of the industry has made one thing clear: the cookiepocalypse is clearly just the start of a massive change, rather than an end point. And we, as an industry, have an opportunity right now to reinvent the way this industry functions and how marketers reach consumers. But only as long as we create something new and don't try and grasp onto replacing the old (which will put us in a giant game of whack-a-mole with the browsers and regulators).

This first post is to set the stage: to talk a little about the journey... and then in the next article, I will dig into some of the actual trends and share what I've heard from each perspective.

Thank You

Thank you again to all those industry luminaries and thought leaders who have taken the time to share their visions, talk through trends, and give me the gift of parallax.

If you're interested in sharing your POV to inform what I'm hearing, please feel free to reach out. If you found these insights valuable, please share it to your own contacts, as well.

About the Listening Tour

Since January, I've been on an advertising industry listening tour: holding 100 meetings - in person and virtual - to listen (and share the trends I'm seeing) with industry CEOs and other leaders. The purpose of the Tour has been to get a complete 360-degree view, as an independent who isn't full time on anyone's payroll, of our industry during this time of major market change.

About the Author

Andrew Kraft is one of #thesame300 who show up to every ad industry conference. Currently an independent consultant on a listening tour of the industry, Andrew was most recently CRO and COO of Maven, a publisher technology provider and parent company of TheStreet.com and Sports Illustrated's print and digital publications. Prior to that, Andrew was the "jack of all trades" member of the executive team at AppNexus (purchased in 2019 by Xandr, a division of AT&T), where he served in a variety of leadership roles operating elements of the business through times of rapid growth over a seven-year span. For four years prior to that, Andrew led the publisher business at Collective from its early days through three years of growth after serving for three years as the head of revenue and member services during the early days of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. He started his career as an engineer in the early days of Sapient after dropping out of MIT senior year to help power the birth of the web. He lives in New Jersey (where he can be most regularly seen at Newark Airport Terminal C wearing his signature #travelsocks) with his wife and four children. Oh, and he curls. Yes, really. The game on ice.