I feel that what "adtech" refers to varies from person to person. It's becoming one of those charged terms where whatever online advertising techniques the user doesn't like are "adtech", while the techniques they don't mind aren't.
If the infrastructure to select and distribute context-relevant ads is not "adtech", what is it?
The parent said adtech, not advertising. What we call adtech today is advertising plus tracking. The tracking part is what most people seem to have a problem with.
As someone who worked in AdTech and Advertising, AdTech is just the technology of automated identification of online visitors and the sale of that information. There's no need for a whole article, you can comprehend it from the term itself.
No, not even close. Some ads were mishandled and with the current political climate, brand safety is now a big topic. This cycle happens every few years when the marketing/agency/media buying talent turns over and as new tech develops. At the end of the day, it's just tech. You can use it well or use it poorly.
> Let's be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising.
What? Adtech is obviously not advertising. It's a name of an industry sector that provides technology to do digital advertising (which itself is a smaller subset of the marketing technology sector). There's also no such thing as "real" advertising unless we're now going to call certain types fake.
> Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection.
More nonsense. Generalizing a 12-figure industry that powers a large part of the economy because of one specific platform, type of ad buying and news event is not useful.
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Here's the reality:
Advertising (and moreso marketing) is all about finding the right consumers, capturing their attention, and converting that into some kind of action. Modern Adtech is primarily about that middle piece, capturing attention by distributing messaging to the right users at the right time and place. It's just plumbing. Technology that can be used for good or bad.
Also, all advertising is targeted whether it's a billboard or a banner on a website. Technology has allowed us to become much more specific through data and tracking but there are both good and bad examples of this.
When netflix shows you a recommendation for a show that you end up loving, that was a good ad. When you see an ad for shoes you've already bought, that's not so good. Either way it's technology that's being used with 1000s of other factors that produce that end result.
Does adtech have issues? Absolutely. 99% are because it's a global industry without any oversight or regulation. There is nothing that stops companies from running knowing fake ads, there are no fines when they run malware, there are no pushbacks when their JS tags ruin performance, and there is a fundamental mismatch in how media is bought through politics and personal connections compared to the sales and performance oriented outcome on which it is judged upon. These are human and business and industry problems that are neither created by nor will be solved through technology.
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