If the adtechNY conference floor of this past week is any indication, adtech is stuck in the doldrums. The most interesting vendors at the show wouldn’t even be considered traditional adtech but display and data: interactive large scale visualizations and pure analytics/BI platforms (which are starting to show promise on the promise of one dashboard; something we will cover in an upcoming post).
Despite the growth of the marketing technology industry aka martech (platforms for marketing automation, social media marketing and content marketing that focus on earned and owned media and not paid media/ads), there were only one or two martech vendors (including Canada’s own gShift). The show floor was smaller and vendor presences more scaled back than in past years. Adtech appears to be a maturing market nearing programmatic-plaitform-feature-hair-splitting, and much of the innovation focus and energy in marketing appears to have moved to martech. Even the programmatic vendors at the show had smaller presences than in the past.
Vendors at the show were nonetheless positive about the attendance and lead flow, saying large agencies and retailers were there having substantial conversations versus looking for the next big thing. For an industry that is significantly reliant on shiny-object syndrome, is this cause for concern or an evolution?
Is there life for adtech after programmatic beyond mere optimization? How does the lack of innovation correlate to the reality that many agencies are still struggling with the knowledge and tech required to easily launch and track measurable ad campaigns?
B2BNNÂ will be running interviews with some advertising and technology executives over the next couple of months on where adtech goes next.
In the meantime, the future is here, and we’d all like one of our walls replaced by this amazing display technology from Multitaction.
http://youtu.be/aHTrJ61BGek
Can I please have this for my cubicle? Thanks.
