One word is all we need. Sort of like that scene in 'The Graduate' when the recent graduate's uncle tells him, "I have one word for you young man."
Only this time that word is not 'plastics.'
A lot of people went into advertising and public relations and marketing and a bunch of other communications-related fields because they hated high school math. And managed to avoid it in college. So when they got out they looked for a job that involved personality. Writing skills. Public speaking ability.
And that was not a bad call. Then.
And the thing is, finance used to be the same way. Providing your clients with 7% annual returns had pretty much been the norm for almost a century (except for that nasty patch in the 1930s). Commissions were fixed by law. Investments were sold over lunch. And golf. Or on the tennis court. Or even at poolside. No heavy lifting. Numbers? There were guys in a back office somewhere who could provide numbers if you were going to be anal retentive about it.
Until the end of the US's golden post-WWII reign ended in the late 1970s. And business became globally competitive. Suddenly, you really had to know stuff. Numbers were everywhere. And people really had to know what they meant, because that could be the difference between contentment and unbe-freaking-lievable wealth.
Technology just turbo-charged the process. By making the identification, manipulation, reorganization and investment of data more effective and efficient. It has also created new markets for new products and new services. And it has tied the whole together in a truly global web.
It hasnt stopped and it never will. Managers and clients will always want to know more because it will give them more power to sell more ideas and products and services to more people in more places. And no matter what business you are in, that is very much the point. JL
Andrew Nibley comments in Advertising Age:
If you want to see the future of the ad-tech industry, look to the history of the financial- services industry. Not so long ago, in the 1980s, financial markets were pretty much opaque. Very little information was shared openly and deals were largely based on cozy relationships between buyers and sellers.
Most deals were conducted by phone or by fax. Some deals were hatched at lunch with free-flowing wine. Country-club games like golf and tennis also provided backdrops for relationships that translated into strong trading partnerships.
Electronic financial information services began to change that by wiring up the various players in the market, providing them with data they never had before. It started with pricing data, where market participants began to share information with one another for the overall benefit and efficiency of the market.
Next, news and information that could move and influence those prices was layered on. Eventually, analytics that could help decipher and predict trends and patterns began to emerge on traders' terminals. Companies like Bloomberg and Reuters -- firms that developed financial news, analytics and transactional products --made a fortune.
Once the pricing data, news and analytics were in place, these terminals began to offer the ability for traders to conduct business with each other directly through these machines. The last piece to the puzzle was programmatic trading done by computers themselves. Today most of the trading in the financial markets is done by computers talking to computers, not humans trading with humans. These trading machines need data, third-party information and analytics to survive.
The entire revolutionary evolution of the financial-services industry took about 30 years.
Fast forward to today. The digital ad-tech industry is only starting to emerge from a decade of opaque, information-starved deal-making. A lot of the deals are still predicated on relationships. Media buyers are bribed with concert tickets, meals at fancy restaurants and other goodies. Real-time trading is still a tiny fraction of the market.
But in the last couple of years, data have started to become available on a large scale, even if fragmented and delivered by many different sources. It is safe to assume that eventually this data and other information will be aggregated and shared throughout the industry.
Analytics, particularly for things like yield management, are still in their infancy in the ad-tech industry, but are starting to take hold. Forecasting and spotting future trends will become critically important to buyers and sellers. Eventually, it is reasonable to expect that computers, driven by data, information and analytics, will be doing most, if not all, of the trading.
It may be too early to tell exactly who the Bloombergs and Reuters of the ad-tech industry will be, but if the history of the financial-services industry is any indication, the future of the ad-tech industry should not be too difficult to map. We've seen the movie before.
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