Advertising

Ben Thompson writes about the state of digital advertising.

…in digital advertising, it is exceptionally difficult to see anyone outside of Facebook and Google achieving meaningful growth… Everyone else will have an uphill battle to show why they are worth advertisers’ time.

I think this issue is the one that is forgotten more than any other in discussions of online advertising. Advertising competes for customer attention, but to build a powerful platform a company also has to compete for an advertiser’s attention. The process of building effective campaigns on a single platform is hard enough, asking an advertiser to understand and use many different platforms is a big ask.

All the online advertising platforms have their own tools, with their own reporting, and unique insights. Advertising effectively on one platform is not the same as advertising effectively on another. To run effective campaigns can be a full time job, so when one platform establishes dominance in their ad offerings it is hard to convince busy people to devote their attention to something that hasn’t proven itself.