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The Super-Aggregators and the Russians
aggregation has been terrible for ad agencies for the same reason it has been bad for publishers: the more that advertising becomes centralized on Facebook and Google, whether on their sites or on programmatic exchanges, the fewer advertising dollars are available for the inventory that ad agencies used to abstract away for clients.
Ben Thompson • Market-Making on the Internet
The difference in margin between e-commerce and advertising has become a much bigger story than Amazon: everyone from Uber to Walmart to Instacart is pushing into ‘merchant media’, and hiring at scale:
Benedict Evans • TV, merchant media and the unbundling of advertising — Benedict Evans
An “aggregator” is a company which aggregates demand in a vertical and has three key features: 1) it has a direct relationship with its customers, 2) it has effectively zero marginal costs for serving users and 3) its costs to acquire customers fall over time. Level 1 aggregators acquire supply (Netflix). Level 2 aggregators don’t own their supply ... See more
Ben Thompson • Platforms, Ecosystems, and Aggregators
Ad networks, most notably Facebook and Google, provided solutions to advertisers’ buying problems. The main thing they provided was more data on consumers.