In my 1998 book Reconnecting with Customers in the Relationship Age, I wrote that the key to value creation in media and advertising would be “the degree to which sales organizations can facilitate processes that build direct and relevant relationships with customers in an era of increasingly automated exchanges.” At the time, online trading systems were still nascent, but the signals were clear: efficiency-driven technologies would transform how media was bought and sold. The future of the industry would hinge on whether companies leaned into commodity trading or value-based relationship building.
Commodity vs. Value: How the Advertising Industry Lost Its Way.
Nearly three decades later, the results are painfully visible. With the exception of sports, where scarcity, cultural relevance, and live-event urgency preserve value, most media sales organizations, brand marketers, and their agency partners chose the path of commoditization. Instead of developing capabilities that rewarded suppliers’ initiatives to innovate and build deeper marketing-based relationships, the industry defaulted to procurement-led systems that stripped advertising of its core function: brand building.
What emerged was not an ecosystem of trust, creativity, and long-term value, but an arms race of efficiency. Programmatic exchanges, demand-side platforms, and automated auctions optimized for the lowest CPMs and click-through rates, not for the long-term health of brands. The winners were intermediaries, trading systems, and procurement officers. The losers were advertisers, media companies, and ultimately, consumers.
The Failure of Media Sales Organizations
Media sales organizations had an opportunity to differentiate themselves not only by inventory but by the depth of relationship and value-added services they could deliver. Instead, most took the path of least resistance. They leaned on rate cards, automated insertion orders, and audience guarantees rather than investing in the consultative capabilities needed to help marketers build brands in an increasingly fragmented marketplace.
Sports is the notable exception. Sports media sales resisted full commoditization because the product itself retained a built-in scarcity, cultural primacy, and emotional connection. Live games, shared fan passion, and limited inventory insulated sports from the erosion seen elsewhere. Sports sales executives could still command a premium because they offered not just impressions, but an experience that could not be replicated or resold. The rest of the media landscape, however willingly surrendered itself to commoditized bidding systems that treated impressions as indistinguishable units of trade.
The Failure of Brand Marketers
Marketers themselves bear equal responsibility. Rather than protecting the long-term equity of their brands, too many turned to procurement departments as the ultimate arbiters of media value. Cost efficiency replaced customer intimacy as the north star. Procurement officers - rewarded for savings, not for growth - drove decision-making that reduced media to a spreadsheet cell.
In doing so, brand leaders ceded control over the very relationships that once defined successful advertising. Instead of fostering dialogue, trust, and shared objectives with media partners, they outsourced accountability to price-based auctions and intermediaries. The irony is striking: in the pursuit of efficiency, they hollowed out the differentiating power of advertising itself, accelerating the very commoditization they should have resisted.
The Failure of Agencies
Agencies, rather than resisting this collapse into commoditization, often aided and abetted it. Media agencies in particular adopted trading desks and programmatic platforms that prioritized scale and cost over differentiation and creativity. Agencies that once promised to be custodians of brand value instead became brokers of efficiency, chasing rebates, arbitrage, and margins from automated systems.
In the process, they weakened their own role as trusted advisors. By prioritizing transactional systems over relational value, agencies positioned themselves as interchangeable intermediaries, the very fate they had warned against when digital disruption first appeared on the horizon. Their failure was not technological adoption itself, but the failure to align technology with the deeper brand-building mission of advertising.
The Rise of Creators and Influencers
Into this vacuum stepped a new generation of individual creators and influencers. Their rise is not an accident; it is a direct response to the commoditization of legacy advertising. Where media sales organizations, marketers, and agencies failed to nurture authentic, trust-based relationships with consumers, creators filled the void.
Creators offer something procurement systems cannot: intimacy, authenticity, and cultural relevance. They speak directly to their communities, often at eye-level rather than from a pedestal. They command trust not through automation, but through human connection. While creators are not immune from their own forms of commoditization, their rise underscores a truth that the advertising establishment ignored: relationships - not just reach - are the currency of value.
Back to the Future
The irony of today’s landscape is that the warnings from 1998 remain as urgent as ever. I wrote then that the challenge for customers would be “to develop capabilities that encourage, support and reward their suppliers’ initiatives to develop and enter into marketing-based relationships.” That challenge remains unmet, and the cost of failure has been steep: weakened brand equity, the empowerment of procurement at the expense of creativity, and the disintermediation of agencies and media companies alike.
But the lesson is also clear: value is not lost forever. Sports media demonstrates the enduring power of scarcity and emotional connection. Creators demonstrate the power of authenticity and community. The future belongs to those who can reclaim advertising’s role as a driver of trust, meaning, and long-term brand value.
To do so will require courage from media organizations willing to invest in deeper consultative capabilities; from marketers willing to wrestle control back from procurement-led decision-making; and from agencies willing to stand as partners in brand-building rather than traders of impressions.
The automated exchanges that dominate our industry are not inherently destructive. They can be harnessed as tools for efficiency, but only if they are balanced by systems that prize value, not just cost. The choice today is the same as it was in 1998: commodity or value. The industry has already seen what happens when it chooses commodity. The next chapter depends on whether it has the will to rediscover value.