Three Areas that Must Be Balanced with Growth to Support a Sustainable Ads Ecosystem

POV by Hannah Pavalow, ThinkMedium Client Advisor

I have been hashing out ThinkMedium’s POV statements with Dennis Buchheim and Alex Roucourt and I wanted to share some of the thought process. All three of us have developed strong personal missions related to ads, and the goal of this exercise was to push ourselves on why “privacy, safety, and efficiency” instead of the dozens of other possible focus areas (e.g., creative, video, brand vs. DR, effectiveness). As always, interested in thoughts and feedback.

Our theory:
What’s changed around us — The hypergrowth of digital ads enabled ecosystem participants to optimize exclusively for their own goals, with the pie getting bigger and everybody winning; this, however, led to a state where the individual strategies at the extremes have begun to impact the experience of other ecosystem participants negatively. Examples of the disruption with the past equilibrium are users leaving platforms, advertisers moving budgets, and publishers shifting away from ad-supported monetization models. And if you buy this theory, then the question becomes, what do we need to do differently to continue to have an ad-supported/free internet?

Behavior we collectively need to change — Ultimately, we need to shift from a “growth only” mentality to a more collaborative approach that allows participants to achieve their own goals under the constraints of their partners’ and customers’ needs. And when we began to look at the needs of participants (Users, Advertisers, Publishers, and Agencies), privacy, safety, and efficiency were the topics that cut across all three. Each of them being critical conditions for creating a sustainable ads ecosystem given our current state. Particularly when you consider each holistically, like looking at environmental efficiency in addition to business, or brand safety and personal safety.

Link to final framework that was shared on the site: https://lnkd.in/eaUfmWDB