#67: Forensic AdTech SpaceScape v2.0
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Last week Quo Vadis shared our first SpaceScape on the Forensic AdTech marketplace. If you missed that post or if you’re new to Quo Vadis, you can get a feel for what it’s all about here.
These technologies are used by various supply chain actors (e.g. advertisers, agencies, DSPs, data providers, SSPs, and publishers) to “see” the difference between what they think is going on and what is really going on. It’s the difference between looking at a leaf with your eyes and looking at it under a microscope. With your eyes, the best you can can do is see in the veins. With a microscope, you see the mesophyll cells in action to figure out how it all works. It's knowledge vs. enlightenment.
Big Thanks for Your Feedback
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on v1.0 of the spacescape. We received a ton of really great insights and suggestions. We included several of them in v2.0 which we’ll cover today.
Coining the term “Forensic AdTech”
First and foremost, we need to give a big shout-out to Richard Kramer and Rocco Straus from Arete Research. These guys are OG’s of the term “Forensic AdTech.” The first usage of the term happened when they presented at Programmatic I/O NYC in September 2023. The term was subsequently discussed in an AdExchanger interview with Joshua Lowcock. Thanks for letting us know!
Updated SpaceScape v2.0
Boxing out technology companies into neat categories is not a perfect science. In the consulting world, consultants often rely on MECE to tackle ambiguous projects. MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive. All it means is that every item has a home and there are only so many homes.
CONSULTANT TIP: Read Barbara’s Minto’s epic book “The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking.” It’s all on there.
For example, get a deck of cards. There are 52 cards and four suits with 13 cards each. If you shuffle the cards, spread them out on a table, and categorize them, every card will fall into only one of four homes and each pile can be ordered from ace to king. That’s perfectly MECE. Alternatively, you can play Solitaire until you win and you’ll end up in the same perfectly MECE place.
Making industry landscapes is not a perfect science. Far from it. A given company often plays in more than one category. It’s kind of like quantum physics where an object can simultaneously be in two places at the same time.
The best one can do when categorizing tech companies is to try to understand what each company does and who it serves to make money. Our approach is to ask: “Is a particular company at least 50% dependent on a particular category?” If so, that’s where we put it. It’s an evolving process.
Take Overtone, for example, a really interesting new player entering the v2.0 SpaceScape. This company monitors articles (media) resulting in clean data that assists in targeting ads. Depending on buy-side usage, the data can also be used to meet social ESG goals. At the same time, consent management and privacy compliance align with the company’s mission. In this case, we classify Overtone in the Targeting Data bucket because that is ultimately what customers are buying to get a certain job done in a new way.
Another great example is The Media Trust and Boltive. On one hand, they play in Privacy Compliance Management yet they also offer Ad Security services. Given what we can surmise from a revenue model perspective, we placed both in Privacy Compliance Management.
It’s also worth calling out companies like Method Media Intelligence which is MRC-certified to monitor/measure invalid traffic, viewability, and brand safety. They are also one of the very first players to ingest and match DSP buy-side log data. Matching DSP pricing data with a direct tag-based measure of ad quality is very powerful because tells a story that only the bravest media managers want to hear.
Anyhow, we expect these category lines to blur over the next few years as M&A and industry consolidation kicks in across the Forensic AdTech scene. We’ll keep track of it the best we can.
Category Updates
Media Monitoring is a mixed category. We had feedback asking why media monitoring companies were included in the spacescape when many don’t do anything forensic at all. As Quo Vadis pointed out last week, we highlight these companies using a grey-hashed box to provide juxtaposing context. In other words, the rest of the forensic spacescape companies get certain jobs done (mesophyll cells) that media monitoring companies (leaves) typically do not do. That said, a small handful of media monitoring companies have forensic features in their DNA.
Consent Management & Privacy Compliance is now just Consent Management. Why? Just because consent is “managed” does not mean it is compliant. That’s the job of Data Compliance Management (f/k/a Privacy-Enhancing Tech)
Privacy-Enhancing Tech was changed to Data Compliance Management to better reflect the risk management for anyone in the supply that touches data — hopefully the compliant kind. The two key parties at risk are publishers that own user consent and advertisers that buy targeted ads to consented users (hopefully).
Targeting Data is now Hygenic Targeting Data. One thing is selling cookie-based data offerings like hundreds of data sellers from yesteryear do which is mostly obsolete given 3rd party cookie deprecation. It is quite another thing to sell “clean” hygiene data for targeting purposes be it contextual or user-based data. We think it’s important to make that distinction. If you have a better name for this category we’re open to suggestions.
New Company Additions
Protected Media (acquired by Flashtalking which is owned by Mediaocean) was added to Media Monitoring.
TrafficGuard (owned by Adveritas which trades on the Sydney Stock Exchange (ASX: AV1) was added to Media Monitoring.
mFilterIt was also added to Media Monitoring. This company is based in Gurgaon India and has 297 employees ranking 10th by employee count out of 71 companies.
Overtone, SirData, and Zefr were added to Hygenic Targeting Data. SirData was acquired by Proxistore in March 2023, a Belgian company specializing in location-based digital advertising.
Filament was added to Log Data, Supply Chain Analysis & Research
Exchain was added to Metadata Connectivity
Global Disinformation Index and Newsguard were added to Social (ESG)
Cedara was added to Environment (ESG).
Hiili was also added to Environment (ESG), it stands for “coal” in Finnish. This company started in a research lab in Madrid, Spain. They wrote an interesting paper called “CarbonTag: A Browser-Based Method for Approximating Energy Consumption of Online Ads.” Equally interesting is reading the 36 cited papers. Do that and you’ll be in the 99 percentile of knowledge when comes to cocktail party chatter about C02 emission in the digital ad space.
Recategorizations
GeoEdge was moved from Privacy-Enhancing Tech to Ad Security
Fou Analystic was moved from Log Data, Supply Chain Analysis & Research to Media Monitor Type 2.
New Logos
Fenestra, Scope3, and AdFidence have updated logos.
Other Shout-outs
AdWeek ran an interesting article about An Unlikely Hero of Advertising: the Data Protection Officer. It’s certainly worth a read.
Exchange ran a piece about Multilocal, a digital advertising curation company that announced the launch of its CarbonSmart solution to deliver high-performance, low-emission ad campaigns, validated by leading carbon intelligence platform Cedara.
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