AdTech Is Alive and Well: I’ll Have the Full Stack, Please

Reading The Information’s piece on Facebook’s reported re-introduction of the Atlas ad-serving technology, I wondered – Does the market really need six or more full stack adtech solutions?

Google is the undisputed leader in the field – it’s spent nearly ten years stitching its own technology into acquisitions like DoubleClick (the original ad server), AdMeld (supply side platform), AdWords (search), AdMobs (mobile), Teracent (targeting), Invite Media (demand side platform),  spider.io (anti-fraud), Adometry (attribution) and many others.

So why would anyone want to challenge Google’s dominance? Because if you’re a major Internet player, you can’t afford to hand Google all the leverage – both financial as well as data and insight. If you have hundreds of millions of logged in customers (all of whom create valuable data), you need to be able to understand their actions across multiple channels and offer those insights to your marketing clients. And that means you need to own your own ad stack.

This is why Facebook is building its own adtech stack. This is why Yahoo! and AOL are once again investing in their stacks. And this is why Twitter is building out a similar stack with MoPub (mobile), AdGrok (search), RestEngine (email marketing), Bluefin (video analytics), Trendr (social analytics), Gnip (analytics), Namo (native ads), TapCommerce (retargeting), and certainly more to come.

I think the most interesting one to watch in all this is Apple, which has a rather Microsoft-like approach to advertising – it’s in the game, big time, but seems uncertain of how it wants to play in the space. Apple has made significant purchases – Quattro (mobile) and Topsy (analytics) come to mind, but it hasn’t fully committed, and its data use policies and general philosophy are famously confusing to marketers.

And beyond Apple, there’s Amazon – which is quietly building out a full stack solution of its own. Oh, and there are several point-solution companies that are now public, or near-public, who want to play as well – AppNexus, Turn, Rubicon, and RocketFuel, which recently bought DMP X+1. Not to mention the consolidators – Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, IBM, even SAP – any of which may decide they want to get into the full stack game as well.

Given my point of view on what adtech really represents, I think the truth is no major Internet company can afford to outsource its ability to gather, process, leverage, and exploit real time information on the database of intentions. Adtech may be today’s poster child of stock market slumps, but I think the market is failing to understand adtech’s true value proposition. And that means more deals are on the way.