Self-serve ads and the rise of DIY advertising

"Today’s CMOs need to operate on a much quicker test-place-analyze-optimize cycle, know which of the thousands of marketing technology solutions can give them an advantage, rebalance their media mix frequently, and juggle vendors, agencies, and services providers with the skill of a top performer at Cirque du Soleil."

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The distribution channels that underpinned the rise of today’s Internet giants have dried up. Google, Facebook, and Amazon serve as a triopoly that dominates online advertising. The three accounted for 90% of US digital advertising in 2020, up from 80% in 2019. The arbitrage that once existed on these platforms has more or less disappeared and CPMs... See more

We are getting closer to a consumer-controlled world, and every company that spends money on advertising will be forced to find a new way to do business.

Media companies found themselves increasingly subject to the whims of the platforms’ algorithms and business models. They replicated a Packaged Goods Media model on top of the platforms, and discovered – shocker! – that they no longer owned the audiences they were trying to sell to marketers. Instead, they had to buy audience from the platforms, an... See more

We’ve seen tectonic shifts in the advertising world: customer acquisition costs for brands are getting prohibitively expensive, forcing brands to consider alternatives to the Google-Facebook duopoly.