WireColumn: 'Without Service, the Best Technologies Might Be Worthless', by Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Global Product Marketing Manager, Weborama

A successful digital marketing strategy cannot rely only on technologies. Today buyers and sellers invest much more on technologies than on expertise and knowledge, assuming that implementing a solution will help them make the difference. This is such an unfortunate assessment which motivates me to share my point of view on how service is so important in the advertising technology industry.
Let’s make an analogy to illustrate how important it is not to neglect the service. Imagine you drive the fastest sport car there is, but you don’t know how to switch gears. It’s not because you have the best technology on the market that you will know how to use it to its full potential.
Who remembers the digital era at the end of the 90s? Everybody sold almost the same formats with channel or homepage sales packages, looking for a way to be perceived as the best agencies’ and advertisers’ partner through the services. By service, we literally mean an intangible commodity and, more precisely, a set of any time-consumable and perishable benefits. In the digital industry, where lots of profiles interact and coexist and where a technology dimension becomes more and more important, the services translated into expertise and support dedicated to customers with different purposes.
The agencies or advertisers account management had clearly become one of the strategic pillars to reinforce and retain relationships and gain market shares in a very competitive market. The main mission of the customer services team was to check daily campaign delivery, optimise performances and bring updated status reports to agencies or advertisers, according to their expectations. Consequently, this type of added value has helped give a clear meaning to the service concept.
I’m quite sure that if you asked a newbie who has recently jumped into the ad tech industry if something like that happened in the past, s/he would probably laugh, since the digital industry has drastically shifted.
Today, I think that there are two buzzwords to qualify what we are living in the ad tech industry: Automated and Programmatic … and all the main actors (older or newer) try to differentiate by talking about how their technology allows automated trading or programmatic buying seamlessly.
Behind these words, I would tend to say that these concepts are very exciting and very promising and that they envision a bright and innovative future. However, it would be wrong to believe that Programmatic Buying is all automatic and seamless. From the marketing digital strategy design to the execution, all actors at the different stages of the process must continue to bring their own expertise, because technology alone cannot deliver on expectations.
Indeed, since the end of the 2000s, we have seen new technologies appear such as Demand Side Platforms, Supply Side Platforms and Data Management Platforms, designed to automate many tasks that were, until then, performed by humans. All technology providers now claim that their solution is the best to increase sell-through rates, maximise revenue, reduce field costs and so on … but what about service? Obviously these new technologies have already demonstrated their added value mimicking financial trading models by optimising the flux between buyers and sellers. That said, we cannot disregard that they have brought complexity to an industry where people are not necessarily ready and trained to understand technicalities and mechanisms. Service has not quite followed this trend of innovation, however, and clients are often left alone wondering how to use their tools.
The ad technology in the 90s and today has shifted even if engineers and program managers have always been a part of this adventure.
At the end of the 90s till the mid-2000s, the collaboration between product managers and program managers on platform developments nurtured thoughts through competitor’s innovations or agencies/advertisers expectations and, based on the high-level strategy, built without considering other industries. It worked well, but maybe it would have been good to open the eyes and analyse more what companies from the top 50 advertisers did from an innovation perspective.
At the end of the 2000’s, the digital industry has become more mature and new companies appeared with ‘out of the box’ approaches, replicating the financial trading operations with the objective of bringing efficiency and maximising revenues.
Such an evolution has consequently impacted the people who have joined the digital industry at an early stage and weren’t hired with the competencies and skills required today. Even for a large majority, like myself, who have grown up within this amazing industry and has tried to constantly catch up with the advertising evolutions and shifts, we still need to benefit from customer services from partners with who we are working, because we move from a media approach to a financial approach. Today, I’m disappointed to see that the notion of service and support has become secondary. I am a hard believer that the successful equation for an ad tech company is a combination of technology (and expertise by extension) and service to its customers.
A concrete example to illustrate that is from a data management perspective. It’s not because you choose a data management platform based on X or Y criteria. It’s not because you put all your data inside and it’s not because your platform is connected to all third-party data providers and inventory sources that you will better know how to efficiently use your data.
Indeed, it’s with the support and the expertise of the technology provider that you will achieve your goals. Nobody can say that these new platforms automatically manage everything from A to Z. Ad technologies are highly technical and highly customisable. No single client has the same need, and service is needed to define the right strategy, deploy the right settings, provide consulting services and help client to maximise the capabilities of their platform.
The enthusiasm towards new technologies probably pushes people to constantly talk and think about technology itself. My strong belief is that history always repeats itself, and we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Just like 10 years ago, differentiation will come from the service layer that technology providers will bring as a full part of their offer.