Some lessons from good ad tech marketing

This week I bring up some atypical examples of how ad tech companies have done highly effective B2B marketing. And we talk to Symitri, which is the new incarnation of TrustX, but now with PET.

The Vendor Interview: Symitri

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Podcast: Tim Rowe from OOHInsider

Some lessons from good ad tech marketing

I’ve really been enjoying Joe Zappa’s newsletter on messaging and differentiation in ad tech marketing. Since I’ve been doing this for … cough …twenty years … cough … I thought I might chime in with some examples I’ve seen of differentiated marketing in this crowded market.

Here’s an ad for Joe’s newsletter, even though he’s not paying me for this:

PointRoll: Aligning marketing to buyer behavior

I first cut my teeth in this business as the product manager for an unholy rich media product called DART Motif. In addition to having virtually everything wrong with it, we also had the problem of competing with a very savvy and aggressive start-up, PointRoll.

The rich media business has certain dynamics that made it challenging to generate consistent sales:

• Agency media people were the primary buyers, and they were challenging to get in front of.

• Rich media as a category did not engender loyalty, and there was limited switching costs for an agency or brand to change vendors.

• One of the primary ways buyers thought of which vendor to use was by ad formats. Vendors would constantly be in a race to invent new ad concepts like “push downs” or “floaters”, etc.

So the strategic marketing problem was to get the ideas of new formats in front of fickle, low-involvement agency people and convince them to meet with your sales team. How did PointRoll do it? By giving each of its formats a cute mascot then bombing the agencies with swag for those characters. Behold, the Fat Boy.

PointRoll developed a menagerie of cartoon characters for their ad formats, starting with The FatBoy (expandable ads), TomBoy (polite downloads), and the extremely racist and unfortunate TowelBoy (pre-expanded/pushdown). And then they absolutely went batshit on the swag budget. My sales team would go into agency cubicles festooned with Fatboy posters, doodads, and action figures (buy one on eBay). Customers would ask us in RFPs and calls whether we had FatBoys. They totally dominated the market with this approach blending creativity and smart use of marketing dollars.

Atlas: CTV investments a decade ahead of time

Another competitor that absolutely got into my craw was Aquantive’s Atlas, a buy-side ad server that was the main rival of DoubleClick’s DFA (now GCM). I was the product lead for DFA, and we were winning share from Atlas based on a more robust product offering and bundles with related products.

Who was the decision maker for a buy-side ad server? Generally, a senior media executive at an agency. And what’s the most important thing to a person like that (other than an under-the-table rebate)? Innovation. The executives at agencies absolutely love to be on the cutting edge as thought leaders and innovators.

We’re back in the mid-200Os when there is virtually no online video, less than 50% of households in the US have broadband, and the traditional TV model is doing great. Against that background Atlas decides to put all of its chips into the future of connected TV. Atlas announces a bunch of splashy partnerships and tests to serve ads into what were then called “VOD” and “IPTV” environments and goes on the speaking circuit talking about how all of this is the future.

My boss at the time, David Rosenblatt, remarked “it’s like if the Italian navy tried to land a rocket on the moon.” But tell that to our agency contacts, who would grill us (really me) for hours about our lack of a TV strategy, our lack of innovation, etc.

Even though we had a much more compelling product Atlas’ forward-looking TV story gave them an edge because their understood their ICP’s needs.

AppNexus: The ‘aura of inevitability’

The early days of programmatic advertising was a chaotic gold rush with DSPs and SSPs jockeying to position themselves in a rapidly changing environment. It was a crowded environment and many vendors were able to raise venture capital to fund marketing and PR and it wasn’t clear who would be the leader of this fast-growing sector.

Within this maelstrom, AppNexus stood out and was hard to classify. The company had three unique assets to leverage:

1. Brian O’Kelly was a celebrity in the industry for inventing the ad exchange at Right Media.

2. Unlike almost all competitors, AppNexus operated on both the buy- and sell-side, giving it greater scale.

3. The company had a unique relationship with Microsoft, which came along with an outsized fundraise ($65 million).

Brian’s insight was that within the chaos of the market, there was a natural, instinctual desire for people to look for an emerging champion. The strategy he articulated was for AppNexus to have the “Aura of Inevitability.” The goal was to become the actual leader of programmatic by convincing everyone that it was inevitable they would become the leader.

How do you convince people you are the leader of an emerging industry? Probably the most effective technique was to put on expensive in-person “summits” that featured a who’s-who of industry players. This has become a standard practice in the business, but at the time the AppNexus Summit was one of the most impactful and differentiated conferences on the circuit.

The other technique (that was certainly a double-edged sword) was avoiding the use of any of the standard terminology that would work to pigeon hole the company. You would never see the words “DSP”, “SSP”, or even “Exchange” on any AppNexus collateral, even if the company’s features did those things and competed with those point solutions.

And part of the marketing was over-spending on visible symbols of “inevitableness” like having large trade booths, and New York offices with an indoor basketball court.

AppNexus had big ambitions, and they intentionally and performatively made those ambitions clear to everyone around them.

Thanks for the anecdotes, how does this help me?

If there’s one point to make here, it is that strategy should determine marketing and communication tactics. Strategy is based on a full understanding of your the market, your buyers, and the competitors, with an eye on how you can meaningfully differentiate your brand. From that understanding can come creative approaches, that might not typically be in the B2B marketing playbook.

Reading list

• Independent journalist Janko Roettgers dropped the scoop that TTD is building a TV operating system (link)

• Long, gossipy story from Insider about Netflix’s ads leadership, the hunt to replace Peter Naylor, and the conflict between programmatic and direct / product and sales (link)

• IAB + MRC collaborating for attention measurement (link)

• The deck DoubleClick used to sell to Google (link)

• Aditude has acquired Hashtag labs (link, Marketecture interview)