I'm writing today's post from Row 2 at the LUMA Digital Media Summit in New York. For those unfamiliar, LUMA is the investment banking firm that produces the "LUMAscape" charts that aim to make sense of the confusing nature ad technology and distribution (and has run many of the significant M&A deals in our world.) The first topic called out for the day by CEO/emcee Terry Kawaja was "The Digital Duopoly: Open vs. Closed." There are lots of implications here for anyone selling ad services, technology, data or services in digital marketing.
The details are horrendously complicated, but the core concept is surprisingly simple: Will the data-driven, multi-touch marketing funnel be an open ecosystem or will it be controlled by a couple of parties - Facebook and Google - who are constructing closed technology and service stacks? Will marketing look like the Euro-zone or will it be dominated by a couple of large, highly controlled economies?
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Tim Armstrong appeared this morning via video hook-up talking about how the AOL/Verizon deal was about creating the world's largest open platform, while Brian O'Kelley of AppNexus claims that AppNexus will be the wide open platform that allows all the players to play well together. Dave Jakubowski, head of ad tech at Facebook, gamely assured the audience that Facebook was all about giving publishers choices about how to monetize their content. Ay yi yi!
This may seem like one of those "Clash of the Titans" moments when we little people accept that we have no control. . I make no moral or value judgments about open and closed, but every day there are lots of little decisions that get made every day that matter a lot. Do we use Facebook, YouTube or neither for distribution and monetization of our video assets? Do we double down on DoubleClick, Atlas or neither as our display serving solution? What active decisions do we make about who gets access to our first party data and what business rules do we put in place to govern those relationships.
Since the days of Netscape vs. Microsoft, we've been predicting that two big players would ultimately own everything. Today those players look like Facebook and Google. But we've also seen a continuous cycle of consolidation leading into the next cycle of openness and on and on. Open. Close. Repeat.
I always like to say that great companies all have one thing in common. They make active choices. And you and your company have active choices to make in the weeks and months ahead. Open? Closed? Good luck with that.
