A veteran Google ad exec has advised publishers to cut the apron strings with programmatic or be dragged into a worsening quagmire.
Erez Levin says out loud what publishers have known forever; buyers have become addicted to vanity metrics and quality has been sold down the river.
He has had a front row seat to the value collapse. He worked at the epicentre of Google over 13 years connecting ad supply and demand to deliver $350 billion.
Now he’s out after seeing the industry become corrupted by bad actors, made for ads sites, and broken measurement that now risks killing the open web.
As a Xoogler (ex-Google) he’s respected across the industry as a truth-teller and a guy willing to say tough things to make the ad-funded open web work for everyone.
Who better then to have on the Future Media podcast with my co-host Alan Chapell.
Our chat goes far and wide, from where publishers went wrong joining programmatic: “It was a mistake - a slippery slope.”
To how Google thought the ad funded web would fix itself. “It got a lot worse.”
Why programmatic cut the value out of premium. “Google took differentiated premium media and made it undifferentiated.”
How advertisers are to blame for relying on vanity metrics: “They’re pretty much meaningless.”
And what publishers need to do: “Pull out of programmatic.”
“There was probably once some truth at the beginning about selling remnant, but it was a slippery slope,” he tells us.
“In hindsight, it’s easy to say that this was a trap, and the news industry shouldn’t have taken it.
“But the real question is whether the industry could have gotten any of the good without becoming part of this runaway disaster…”
But now he’s seeing green shoots of opportunity for premium publishing, but only if it takes steps now to put itself back in the path of advertising’s $1 trillion-plus flow.
Welcome to new subs from US media agency of the year Canvas Worldwide in Los Angeles representing Hyundai, McDonald’s and MGM among others, pay-TV giant Sky UK, Radio Canada, The Trade Desk in Denver, Colorado, omni-channel agency Aisle Rocket, and across town The Haus of Programmatic both in Chicago, sports streamer Kayo and Southern Cross Austereo in Sydney, and many more…
I’m also thrilled that Future Media has risen to become the 71st most-read newsletter in the news category on Substack. Share with your friends to join the movement…
Now, here’s Erez and the future of premium publisher advertising in a post-programmatic world…
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