Confessions of a digital media vet: ‘Digital industry ghettoizes itself’

You’re talking media owners or media agencies?
Both. With this drive to efficiency, which basically means cost cutting, there has become such a dependence on ad technology — some of which is amazing, lots of which isn’t.

Publishers have to make money to survive.
Of course, but they’ve let this happen. They actively share all their content on Facebook. Anyone that’s worked with those major platforms knows that once you’ve become dependent on them, the terms suddenly change. They’re not daft. A huge part of newspaper revenue used to be around advertisers promoting discounts on their products, and they were hugely dependent on newspapers. And so what did newspapers do? They pushed up the prices. Facebook and Google are only doing the same thing. Why is anyone surprised by that?

The buy side also likes big numbers.
I used to run an ad network and our two best-performing ad placements were so far below the fold you couldn’t see them. And that made me think, OK, so it’s not genuine. Though statistically, they’re the best-performing placements.

So what was driving that, fraud?
No, it was just the tech. It could have been driven by the retargeting networks we used perhaps. Logic would determine though that the two ad placements at the foot of a website were not a great place to be seen.

So that’s an example of the “big number” not really meaning much?
Yes, I don’t think it’s about the big number. And yet, by far the vast majority of money in the digital landscape is predicated on the big number. But what is it really? There’s a reason the TV market is having a bit of a boom at the moment. And broadcasters like ITV, which everyone thought was dead five years ago, in particular, are thriving. Because it’s a simple process. You can go to ITV with a campaign kit and out it goes. The problem with the digital industry is it can’t get out of its own way. It ghettoizes itself so much.

Is that because digital media still has an inferiority complex with traditional media?
No, it’s a superiority complex. That age-old quote is: If you’re the cleverest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Well, in digital media, the majority of people are desperate to be the cleverest person in the room. The whole industry could do with regaining a bit more humility on both a personal and a corporate level.

You mentioned media agencies also over-prioritizing efficiencies? 
Agencies have driven efficiency by building up their own programmatic trading desks, which I totally understand. If you can create a world where you don’t need 10 people to do one task but can use tech instead, I totally buy into that. But we have lost our way a bit. The focus is now on media agencies trying to replicate the position some of the media owners are in.

By creating more content, like a publisher would.
We’ve all started talking about editorial stuff as “content,” like it’s this transferable thing. And I’m as guilty of it as anyone. My favorite comedian, Stewart Lee, nailed it recently when he named his new show “Content Creator.” Not all creative programming is created equal. For newspapers and publishers to say it’s the fault of Google and Facebook, well, it’s not. If the Guardian had managed to put the Independent out of business by doing a better job than them, they would think that’s great. It’s just that the world has shifted, and they have to adapt to new competitors. And no one is stopping Facebook despite their best claims.