Our best offer:

Lock in a year of Digiday+ for 35% less. Ends May 29.

SUBSCRIBE

The Non-Techie Guide to Ad Tech

Not long ago, the famed ad-tech landscape slide by Luma Partners’ Terry Kawaja came up in a conversation with an executive. He sighed. “I love Terry,” he told me. “He made a nice slide, but I just wish we’d stop talking about it.” There was an expletive too.

But the slide persists as an example of the ad-tech industry’s vibrancy and its complexity. You know it has staying power when it spawns spinoffs, which Kawaja did with equally complex slides for the mobile, social, video, gaming and other sectors. Unlike advertisers who can pass off this mess to their agencies to figure out, publishers are pretty much on their own to navigate the sea of alphabet soup in the world of DSPs, DMPs, AMPs all doing RTB. It’s pretty easy to get lost in the weeds.

There’s now an attempt by publisher tech platform Audience Amplify to simplify Kawaja’s original work by putting it into “plain English” for publishers. The effort takes some radical steps, such as recasting demand-side platforms as “build me great technology to boost marketing ROI.” DMPs and audience aggregators are morphed into “offer me more targeting options.” It’s reminiscent of the approach taken by the Help line of home remedies.

Seni Thomas, the chief executive of Audience Amplify, told me the project came out of finding in talking to publishers that “there are too many assumptions as to what the pain points are” among the many tech vendors out there.

Audience Amplify is using the recast chart to begin a project that will catalog the various publisher-side tools out there, as the Luma slide is heavily weighted toward the buy side, where most of the action has been. The idea of the database is to eventually become a sort of Yelp for publisher tools, according to Thomas, with the ability of fellow publishers to praise and call BS on some of the claims put out there by vendors.

More in Media

U.S. CPG manufacturers are sitting on excess capacity, which could be a boon for brands

Keychain’s, CPG Intelligence Report showed that one major theme companies are grappling with is significant overcapacity.

WTF is back button hijacking?

Google is cracking down on “back button hijacking,” which some publishers use to offset declining referral traffic and monetization pressure.

Why Amazon and YouTube pitched operating systems, not just TV inventory at this year’s upfront

Negotiations over identity, infrastructure, AI-driven buying take place as much as programing.