M. Scott Havens is global head of digital at Bloomberg Media.
The current state of the digital advertising woes owe a great deal of ingratitude to
Hotwired.com’s launch of the first banner ad in 1994. Not that anyone else had a better idea at the time, but taking an old ad format — inspired by print and/or outdoor advertising — and migrating it to a new medium is never a good idea. Sure, there have been noble attempts at transforming digital advertising over the last 25 years — and countless examples of effective and impactful digital campaigns — but the industry has never quite recovered from that first banner unit.
While there are many reasons that the Duopoly has been successful at grabbing the lion’s share of the digital ad market (including: unrivaled scale and engagement, amazing access to and use of data on individuals and their behavior, and a powerful self-serve/programmatic/attributable delivery system), the platforms have been thriving because their ads work — people actually use them, people actually buy products because of them. And importantly, the ads don’t feel foreign to these platforms — they feel native.
When you consider how publishers might compete with the platforms going forward — without the scale, data, or sophisticated ad platforms — it seems likely it will take the same thoughtful and high-minded approach around advertising that we take now with our content. Publishers must understand our audience better than anyone, help our clients solve their problems, wrap in sophisticated first-party data, and ultimately deliver high-quality and effective cross-platform advertising experiences seamlessly woven into our great content — slugged appropriately, of course. Call it branded, native, sponsored content — or simply advertising — but there is no doubt that done well, the experience for users is better, the ads are more impactful, and perhaps publishers might reclaim some of the lost territory — or as importantly, avoid losing the future branding dollars that will flow from TV.
