Published July 27
Put enough crabs in a bucket and not one will escape, because every crab climbing toward the rim gets pulled back down by the others trying to do the exact same thing.
Ad tech’s version: get ad tech famous, and you haven’t escaped the bucket, you’ve just become visible enough for the other crabs to notice you’re getting close to the rim. Close enough to trigger all sorts of reactions. Competitors start copying your pitch. Holding companies begin building similar capabilities in-house. Bigger players attempt to acquire you before you get any closer to daylight.
The surface is familiar enough. A handful of DSPs, a couple of SSPs and some measurement and identity vendors. That’s usually about it, and there isn’t much room for new names as the surface isn’t very elastic. The average brand marketer can usually name maybe one or two vendors per category — if that. And “category” is already generous when most mental maps of ad tech begin and end with Google, Meta and the likes.
That’s unless you’re one of the really lucky ad tech vendors and find yourself in a “year of” category, which of course changes everything. Overnight fame, where suddenly everyone knows your acronym. Take agentic AI (an entirely random example): You’ve been in that space for years, largely invisible, but now you’re this year’s “it company” and you’re climbing fast. But it also means the entire ad tech industry is now speed-climbing toward this same prize: becoming the agentic AI company a CMO has actually heard of.
Does it always have to be the top though? Not necessarily, because ad tech has depth, and depth changes what visibility means. A company can be indispensable within one narrow layer of the ecosystem and still be almost invisible a few layers above it. The deeper you go, the more specialized the ecosystem becomes and the less likely those companies are to appear in any broad conversation about “the industry.”
Which is also why someone can spend years in ad tech and keep discovering categories that were there all along. Identity vendors nobody outside a specific implementation has heard of. Verification and curation layers stacked three deep. Clean rooms built around a single client relationship. Then there’s a new wave of AI-decisioning shops, each one somebody’s best-kept secret, each one load-bearing for a transaction you’ll never see.
The companies furthest down usually sell to the companies one level up, not to brands directly. A custom modeling company, for instance, sells to a DSP, which sells to an agency, which passes it on to a brand. The fame travels sideways through the supply chain and never quite reaches daylight. A vendor can power several platforms that a brand uses every day and still never register on that brand manager’s radar, because nothing about its business model requires otherwise.
And honestly, why would a brand marketer even bother? Half of what happens three layers down is way too technical to explain in a QBR, and the other half looks so interchangeable from above that it wouldn’t survive the trip upward anyway. Of course, vendors are working on products and angles that sound exciting internally, but to someone from the outside, they sound like, “What everyone else is saying.” Besides, memorizing the LUMAscape by heart was never part of the job description. That responsibility was deliberately handed off to in-house ad tech teams, agency trading desks, consultants and whoever gets paid to understand the stack. The brand’s job is the outcome, not the architecture behind it.
Ali Manning, founder of Chalice, put her finger on it recently during an episode of The Build podcast: “We’re ad tech famous, but we are not brand famous and even agency team famous. I go to a brand conference, and I am explaining not just what Chalice is, but what custom AI modeling is, what custom algorithms are. And so we still have to do that.”
Ad tech fame certainly beats no fame, but it’s limited within the ecosystem. It’s recognition from people who already speak your language, for solving problems they already understand. It creates partnership conversations, channel relationships and perhaps even an acquisition call.
None of that transfers automatically to a brand or boardroom where you’re starting from “what is a DSP.” And yet, everyone chases ad tech fame anyway, because those are the industry’s rooms filled with the people deciding partnerships, integrations, analyst and trade press coverage. They all live inside the bucket. And here, recognition matters because the people handing it out are often the same people shaping commercial opportunities, which (usually) can’t be said about the person signing the marketing budget.
And maybe the industry got a little too focused on its cozy ad tech room. Ian Whittaker, founder of Liberty Sky Advisors, called advertising a “self-absorbed industry that talks to itself more than it talks to the businesses paying for it.” Others call it an echo chamber. Whatever you call it, it isn’t a separate problem from the bucket. Like most incentive systems, it’s simply the bucket working as designed. An industry organized around sideways recognition has no structural reason to ever look up.
But somewhere above it all sits a CFO, hearing abstract Wall Street stories about AI-driven margin expansion, getting CMO reports on CPM and viewability, and asking what any of it did for the brand’s revenue. Nobody’s been climbing toward that question though. They’ve been busy climbing toward each other.
This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.
