How Adtech Companies Successfully Court Brands And Agencies

Paul Knegten is a fractional CMO and a strategist for Sharp Pen clients. He was previously CMO at Outbrain and Beeswax as well as VP of marketing at MediaMath and Dapper.

JZ: A very common problem adtech companies come to us with is that no one knows them. If you want adtech people to know you — investors, potential acquirers, talent — that's a very easy problem to solve. You go to Twitter.

PK: Yes, if you’re marketing to other adtech companies. But the adtech cliché is you have a big event and everyone there is a DSP, SSP or publisher, but there are no brands or agencies. So, I've always seen the challenge of adtech marketing as being: how do you get brands to care about you? Or agencies. And, in most cases, you have to pick one to focus on.

Companies like MediaMath and Criteo went all in on brands instead of agencies. The Trade Desk took the agency route — they played the Invite Media playbook of becoming the platform of record for as many media buying teams and 25-year-old media planners as possible. It’s exceedingly rare to see adtech companies successfully navigate both audiences with their inherent conflicts until they’re at such massive scale that they have unique leverage. So, I usually try to figure out which one the company wants to be for.

So you’ve picked either brands or agencies; how do you actually reach them? Say you’re marketing to brands directly: you have to find a way to leverage the goodwill you’ve built with your existing brand customers to influence their peers. There’s really no other way to to do it — there’s a lot said about how the CMO needs to stop going on stage in this post-zero-interest-rate-policy world, but who do you think put them there? It’s the people who sell to them who are creating opportunities for them to shine like that.

MediaMath in its heyday was very successful in making the marketer the star of the conversation by, for example, putting our customers or prospects on stage. And then we would use that as content to show other brands that their competitors are working with MediaMath. So, that's kind of the playbook.

You're not going to get brands or agencies easily. You're not going to get them by running ads. You're not going to get them via email marketing or anything cute like that. It’s not a growth marketing question. It’s really in-person, showing up, leading a conversation on something interesting and making your existing customers your ambassadors.

JZ: Yeah, in terms of building credibility, if you want to reach adtech people, Twitter is the best bang for your buck. If you want to reach brands and agencies, PR is still the best option for the top of the funnel. Being in AdWeek for example. Content on LinkedIn and Twitter can also help build that credibility and those relationships. Down funnel, it’s events and 1:1 networking. I think the tactics and channels are similar for brands and agencies.

PK: PR helps. It gives you a sheen of credibility if you can send press coverage to prospects. If you have an existing relationship with a particular brand and they're a prospect of yours and they're not buying from you yet, being in AdWeek, being in AdExchanger, is great fodder. If they didn't see it, your sales team ought to send it to them or your newsletter ought to include it. You use that stuff as a reason to reach out to them. Agencies in particular read the trades, especially AdWeek.

As for content, brands are going to tune everything out except the stuff that truly teaches them something. A few years ago, Apple forced everybody to use what they call SKAd network, where basically mobile attribution was broken and there was no more IDFA. Former Beeswax CEO Ari Paparo created a really helpful chart. Which use cases are still going to work, which aren't, and what questions are lingering? Every single media buyer or anyone involved in marketing at a brand that cares about buying media is going to look at that, they're going to want to download that, they're going to put their PII in a lead capture form and get that. If you can teach them something truly valuable, you will reach brands that way. But it can't be self-serving. That chart was only tangentially related to our sales pitch.

JZ: You're taking a particularly complex topic that is top of mind for them, putting on your digital advertising thought leader hat, and helping them understand it. You're going to where the conversation is.

PK: Exactly. The problem is, I think most adtech companies aren't even at the point where they ask themselves these questions. Most adtech companies get stuck at, well, “How much ROI am I going to get from this next month?” And I think that's just the wrong way to look at it.

JZ: You're never going to build an audience or credibility if that's your point of view — because you’re not doing enough to build trust before doing the lower-funnel tactics like reaching out directly. Ultimately, the best playbook involves these two different types of marketing activities working hand in hand. It's the PR and the content that are building credibility, third-party validation. You reach out, they google you, they see you're in AdWeek, they know you're legit. And then it's the events and the one-to-one networking that's going to close the deal.

PK: How many years did it take Ari to get to a point where people cared enough to read the chart he's putting up? Because I could have done that chart, and nobody would have cared. I mean, maybe it would have been neat, but they would have been like, who the hell are you? That’s the impact of long-term brand building.

JZ: I love that you say that because I think that is a really misunderstood dimension of marketing. Two different people can post the exact same tweet. One person will get 100 reactions and a lot of attention from buyers and the other person will get crickets. So, that's the answer to why you need to do this over the course of, frankly, years, even if it's not generating results in the first quarter or two.

PK: People are comfortable with the understanding that a startup is going to take years to mature. The sweat equity they're building, they understand that takes years. The brand equity they're building, they don't understand that that takes years. They're looking for something to grow sales tomorrow.

Here’s why that’s a problem. We’re in a pretty mature market where tactics have a hard time cutting through. If you just want to do events, okay, great. But guess what? Everybody's at the same events. And if you’re starting out, you have less money to grab attention with sponsorships and speaking slots. So, if you're not going to invest in people knowing who the heck you are before you show up there, you're just another shmo who's talking to them about third-party data.

JZ: I think part of the problem is that with all the lower-funnel tactics, it's obvious what you're doing. They know, and they don't want to hear it. So, you have to do that middle- and upper-funnel credibility and relationship building, because if you don't, it's just very hard to get people to bite.

PK: Part of the challenge is people get the wrong message in the early days of a successful startup. They convert a decent number of early adopters, but the mainstream clients they need are not going to roll the dice. So, you hit your limit quickly of people who are willing to give your no-name company they’ve never heard of a chance.

I think this sticking point is where those years of building credibility in a market make all the difference. That credibility is going to be what allows you to transcend the early adopters and the people who are ready to buy right now and unlock steady pipeline over a long period. And those early adopters become your brand ambassadors to tell the mainstream adopters the stuff works.

The same thing applies to companies who face the challenge of a large part of their target market being locked in with a competitor and therefore needing to get over a hurdle to switch. Let’s assume a large share of your target customers are working with a competitor. What do you have to offer them? It has to be a long-term strategy because most of them will not be open to switching right now. So, the investment you need to be making is in long-term awareness, credibility, and relationships. That's where the capital ought to go.

JZ: I think that’s a good note to end on. Build that credibility. It’s how you’ll attract the lion’s share of the market that isn’t ready for a cold email or event approach today.