Awesome Map Of The Digital Display Advertising Tech Marketplace

I'd like to thank investment banker Terrence Kawaja from GCA Savvian for doing what nobody else has been able to do: draw up a birds-eye view of the whole display advertising technology landscape.  What a scene!  Vertical ad networks!  Yield Optimizers! Verifiers!   Agency-side Ad Servers!  Publisher-side Ad Aervers! Infrastructure companies!  Who sells to whom?  Who belongs together, and who doesn't?  Who supplies what?

These and other questions were handled during Kawaja's presentation to the Interactive Advertisers' Bureau this week.  With so many developments in this industry, just corralling the players into coherent groups is an incredible task and only the first step.  In Anna Marie Virzi's piece at ClickZ, this slide is only the tip of the iceberg of knowledge.  Kawaja brought up a few points that we'll be discussing here in the future, all exciting and all shedding light on this crazy business space:

While showing how complex the sector is, it's an easy-to-digest who's who of major players in more than a dozen ad tech categories. These include agency-owned media buying platforms; third-party media buying services also known as demand-side platforms; companies that specialize in creative optimization, data optimization, data aggregation, ad verification; ad exchanges; and ad networks.

Kawaja offered these predictions about the future of businesses tied to online display advertising:

• "Life gets tough for ad agencies," he said, referring to agencies that do not have in-house media-buying optimization technologies. "These guys are relying on DSP technology companies to provide one of the most critical aspects of their value-add to their clients," he said. "Everyone has to defend their position of the table."


• Look for Google to play a bigger role in online display advertising. Since spending $3.1 billion to acquire DoubleClick in 2007, Google will want a positive return on its investment. "[Google] is virtually in every single component of the [online advertising] ecosystem. Not only that, they have unified billing," he said

(Full disclosure: for completeness, we added some companies to Kawaja's slide as presented here.)

Comments

[Paul Burani]

Yeah, Kawaja's definitely left us with a valuable asset here... and years from now it will be an interesting time capsule, since it ought to be fair to assume there's going to be a lot of consolidating among the names shown in the diagram.

Thanks for taking the liberty of adding names; we also posted a text version of this graphic to make it easier to click through to the respective sites: http://www.webliquidgroup.com/blog/online-word-of-mouth/display-advertising-technology-landscape/