Killed by the Online Cure - Part 2 of 3: Optimization - Jeff Einstein

In part 1 of this series amp8211 Brand Safety amp8211 I described how the online display advertising industry has become a textbook example of polypharmacy what happens when drugs prescribed to treat one symptom create new symptoms that require additional drugs that create more new symptoms that all require more drugs Eventually the patient is killed by the cure and all postmortem accountability is obliterated Such is the case with online display advertising these days as we pile layer upon layer of highly sophisticated intermediary technologies like cord wood one on top of another and somehow expect the net effect to improve performance Not surprisingly performance has only declined while the costs of maintaining the industry39s drug habits increase with each new prescriptionLet me begin our discussion of optimization with a few quick questions Why would anyone invest millions or billions of dollars in intermediary optimization technologiesAnswer to improve performanceNext question WhyAnswer Because the model is failing and otherwise requires optimization to performFinal question Why do we continue to invest in prophylactic ad technologies when performance continues to decline and costs continue to escalate no matter what we doAnswer Because we39re insaneAfter a full decade of optimization efforts prefaced and accompanied by billions of investment dollars the evidence is utterly uncontestable Optimization technologies don39t improve performance increase costs across the board and eventually eliminate any semblance of accountability In the face of such persistent madness collective insanity defined as the condition that compels us to do the same thing over and over and somehow expect different results is the only sane conclusionOptimization technologies like all intermediary technologies in the adtech universe are failed concessions to the larger failures of a failed model amp8211 per Marshall McLuhan39s observation that all media systems pushed to extreme begin to operate in reverse Contrary to the tired observation of industry analysts who suggest that the failures of the online display industry are the result of too much ad inventory and too much audience fragmentation a byproduct of functionally limitless bandwidth the truth that emerges on the far side of complexity is far simpler and wholly consistent with Occam39s Razor The failures and collapse of online display advertising are inevitable byproducts of the wrong model at work and any and all attempts to optimize performance and pricing of the wrong model can and will only engender the exact opposite effects PeriodNext week in the third and final part of this series we39ll talk about data Stay tunedRead all the Einstein Brothers39 MediaBizBloggers commentaries at the Brothers EinsteinCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries

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Killed by the Online Cure - Part 2 of 3: Optimization - Jeff Einstein

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