Last week in this space I suggested that one unintended outcome of our decade-long dance with programmatic buying was the dark, dangerous alternative world we'd brought into being. Borrowing an analogy from the Netflix series Stranger Things, call it "The Programmatic Upside Down," rife with fraud, bots, hate speech, fake news and every other means of foul beastie.
In a speech last week in Los Angeles, I suggested that while an uncritical devotion to "tech for the sake of tech" had opened the breach to this world, it was people who would help close it. Here, then, are the four types of people we should endeavor to find, groom, hire and deploy in the programmatic world of the next five years.
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The Activator. Ironically, those who plan and build programmatic stacks and strategies can be too closed in their thinking and too slow to act on new insights and improvements. The Activator is the executive who can not only explain why, but why now. He or she can create urgency around meaningful change and development from the outside - who can lay waste to the kind of group think and inertia that assure many a programmatic strategy will bear poisoned fruit.
The Fixer. The role of The Fixer is also to disrupt the destructively myopic processes and decision making of the group. Except he or she works from the inside out. The Fixer is willing to call out the bad outcome the group might not be considering...to ask the hard question. Blessed with a good strategic mind and highly-evolved pattern recognition, The Fixer can help the group abandon the path that leads into The Programmatic Upside Down.
The White Hat. A few years ago, Chief Privacy Officers were all the rage. Perhaps the next five years we'll see the emergence of the Chief Hygienist....The White Hat. An unwavering advocate of transparency and quality, The White Hat invites scrutiny from meaningful third parties and holds the organization to the highest standards.
The Integrator. For most of its existence, programmatic has run along its own parallel track alongside creative solutions and direct sales. Clearly those tracks are starting to cross now, which leads us to the need for The Integrator. He or she will be the one who plans and sells programmatic solutions as part of a larger marketing, creative and business mix. The question will no longer be "how much should we spend programmatically?" but rather "how will programmatic solutions help us scale and deliver all of our unique benefits to marketers?"
Your organizations - publisher, agency, marketer, tech provider - will call these archetypes by scores of different titles. But know that you need them...now and for the rest of your existence. They are what stand between you and technology run amok.
Read my original article on 212NYC's new thought leadership newsletter, The Scryer.
