Many adtech companies’ number-one marketing challenge is commoditization (or differentiation). They offer essentially the same products as their competitors, especially in the eyes of their customers. So, convincing a customer to switch from a competitor is tough, which limits growth prospects, even for incumbents. And it’s even tougher if you’re a challenger.

DV and IAS also face this challenge, but their market, ad verification, is an extreme case. They are the two clear market leaders, and they are essentially carbon copies of one another.

This raises the question of what the ad verification leaders are to do from a marketing perspective. If one of the core responsibilities of marketing is to differentiate a company — and it is — how do you differentiate well-known players that are widely viewed as identical twins?

DV and IAS Are Unusually Undifferentiated

First I want to take stock of the problem and explain why I view DV and IAS as unusually undifferentiated because I’m sure anyone at those companies would protest that they are in fact more different than I claim. 

Bear in mind that I’m focusing on market perception. My concern is not primarily whether there are actual product differences that the engineers and product folks at DV and IAS could explain — it’s whether the market is aware of these differences and whether the companies are doing a good job currently at explaining them. I think it’s clear there’s a lot of room for improvement.

This is anecdotal and qualitative, but I asked the good folks on adtech / digital advertising Twitter to weigh in on the differences between DV and IAS. Here’s a sample of what the extremely online group of adtech discourse junkies (who are likely to be as aware as anyone else of company messaging) said:

No one weighed in to say DV and IAS are meaningfully different in terms of the products they offer. To the extent that there’s any difference, the perception appears to be that it’s primarily a question of the level of customer service each company provides — which, for the record, is indeed one way to win when you offer an undifferentiated product. In fact, when I interview adtech companies’ customers (e.g. agency, brand, or publisher professionals), they often cite service as the number-one differentiator between the company and its competitors. More adtech companies should lean into this in their marketing if superior service is really a part of their strategy. But everyone at least pays lip service to providing good service, so it’s a difficult wedge to drive between yourself and a rival.

An r/adops thread reveals a similar impression of DV and IAS’ similarities. While Redditors made gestures to one company’s tech or services falling behind that of the other, there is no systematic or independently verifiable claim about how one company’s offerings differ from the other’s. Moreover, the prevailing mood surrounding the verification leaders appears to be frustration about the need to do business with them despite their shortcomings. In other words, many seem to view DV and IAS as both a commodity and a tax.

If vibes, social threads, and anecdotes don’t suffice, consider the companies’ websites and earnings calls, where they get the chance to drive industry perception about how they differ. DV’s homepage offers generalities about trust and innovation — not an attempt at differentiation, unspecific to the category, and a departure from their perception in-market. On its homepage, IAS touts “actionable data to drive superior results,” an idiom they appear to be invested in, as CEO Lisa Utzschneider used the exact same turn of phrase in the company’s most recent earnings call. A message should do three things: tell you what the company does and for whom, how it differs from competitors, and why the mission matters. “Actionable data to drive superior results” doesn’t satisfyingly accomplish any of those three things.

When you take a look at their earnings calls (a longer-form and admittedly more representative picture of how each company is trying to present itself), some different investments and emphases emerge. IAS underscores its deepfake and MFA detection tools; neither word appears in the DV earnings call. DV is integrating Scibids AI, which it acquired last year, into its core value proposition as a company that helps advertisers root out waste and increase media efficiency, both through measurement and campaign optimization. IAS, meanwhile, mentions AI only once. These are legitimate potential differentiators on which the companies may want to insist, especially DV given the froth surrounding AI. 

However, even if the two companies actually do have significantly different products along the AI, MFA, or deepfake fault lines (only the first of which seems to me to constitute a potentially major difference), those differences only underscore my core argument. If DV and IAS really are different, their customers, prospects, and those who influence them need to know that.

And that’s a job for marketing.

How to Market Undifferentiated Companies (or Commodities)

As I see it, there are four ways to win with marketing:

1. Own narrative white space or create/dominate a category (think Scope3’s leadership position in sustainability in advertising; they’ve become synonymous with this relatively nascent category)

2. Share unique data and insights that help people do their jobs better or move the industry conversation (Adalytics is a prime example)

3. Lead the discussion with expert analysis (Ari Paparo and Eric Seufert are the leading two examples)

4. Be more prolific, present, and personable than your competitors (Matt Barash and Adtech God are two individuals who’ve done this very well, and executives can deploy the same strategy on behalf of their companies)

Only one of these ways to win with marketing is actually predicated on having a meaningfully differentiated product or positioning: the first option. If they want to take that route, IAS and DV would need to find overlap between what their executives and product folks view as the strengths of the company and, more importantly, what their customers view as its strengths. This is the path to devising a message that capitalizes on your existing differentiators while speaking to where you’re going (with Scibids, for example, in DV’s case). Of course, this requires what is usually a two-to-three-month process and a lot of debate among executives and marketers. Attempts to differentiate a company via messaging generally fail not because the inputs (executive perspective, customer perspective, and talented storytellers) are a mystery but because the company waters down the message via consensus and is too timid to go all in on a single bold differentiator. 

Fortunately for DV and IAS (and any other companies in highly commoditized categories), the remaining three ways to win with marketing aren’t necessarily tied to product differentiation. Both companies have extremely valuable and large datasets they could likely use to tell stories about industry trends — and I’m aware that DV is already doing this (IAS may be doing the same). Both also have dozens of highly talented employees with a deep understanding of the industry who could use their bully pulpits as executives of large, well-known companies to share insights on industry issues. And, by virtue of that existing influence (and what should be relatively large marketing budgets by adtech standards), both could also dominate the online discourse, which would go a long way toward humanizing the companies while providing a platform for them to amplify their announcements and complementary marketing initiatives.

In other words, there’s no obvious reason why DV and IAS can’t differentiate themselves and better compete on the basis of marketing. Everyone trades in “actionable insights,” “trust,” and “innovation.” Moving beyond these safe corporate platitudes toward a bold, clear, differentiated message is a question of vision, conviction, and action.