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Myles Younger will be speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference on May 16-17 in Las Vegas. Click here to register.
Ad tech and cloud tech are converging.
It’s an inevitable trend, says Myles Younger, head of innovation and insights at U of Digital, speaking on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Up until relatively recently, the tech market writ large and public clouds – think Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – lived “essentially independent existences,” Younger says.
But they’ve begun to overlap, driven by ecosystem-wide changes, particularly an increased focus on privacy, that are having a massive impact on how advertisers do business.
For example, Intelligent Tracking Prevention on Safari and Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework have caused conversion tracking to move server side.
“When something gets pushed ‘server side,’” Younger says, “that means somebody somewhere now needs to spin up some servers, manage them, connect them and run them.”
And that somebody is not going to be the advertiser. Don’t expect brands to set up their own on-prem cloud infrastructure en masse – that’s what public cloud technology is for.
The question is: How much of ad tech will get eaten by cloud platforms? It’s tough to say, but it’s clear that ad tech companies will have to change how they differentiate beyond the number of queries per second they can handle.
AWS offers cloud solutions specifically for advertising and marketing, and what used to be a specialized service – image recognition, for instance – is something Amazon (or Google or Microsoft for that matter) could easily offer as a feature.
Brands will have a message for the ad tech point solutions of the world, and it’ll be this:
“You can no longer just exist off in your own self-serving little silo,” Younger says. “You have to integrate into this bigger infrastructure picture we’re building for ourselves on platforms like AWS, GCP [Google Cloud Platform] and Azure.”
Also in this episode: How artificial intelligence is transforming the shopping experience, why Snowflake is snuggling up to ad tech and mar tech, the art of board game design and an exposition on “meat sacks” as a term for referring to humans (as Younger is wont to do).
