We have met with a number of companies in the online ad market recently.  Every time I ask the entrepreneurs to chart how what they offer fits in with the networks, exchanges, data providers, ad servers, optimizers, agencies, etc.  Inevitably, every one draws themselves in the center with the other players revolving around them.  Also inevitably, the picture gets complicated rather quickly.

Then this morning, I had a conversation with a friend who is on the publisher side.  She was telling me about the 30+ vendors she is dealing with in trying to create a comprehensive experience that includes community, merchandising, e-commerce, video, content management, social network integration, etc.  She was essentially relaying a similar experience.  Vendors come in, make claims about how they pull together all the pieces, but in the end it is left to the publisher to actually figure out how to make it work.

It is easy to understand how we got here, at least at the 20,000 foot level.  On both sides there were big initial successes, e.g. Doubleclick for ad serving and Vignette for content management.  Those grew rapidly but left open lots of unsolved problems.  Startups came along to fill those holes building on top of or around the existing systems.  Attempts to integrate these solutions back into the “motherships” to form comprehensive offerings have largely failed (for reasons that make a blog post of their own).  So we are left with a hodgepodge of layered and generally poorly integrated systems resulting in poor usability and productivity.

What is less easy to figure out is how we will get out of here.  Part of the answer is better APIs and standards.  But even then from a publisher perspective you’d like to have someone who pulls it all together for you (unless you want to be in the technology business) and I don’t mean on a on-off project basis.  From an advertiser perspective the integrators ought to be the agencies, but it’s unclear to me that they have the capabilities.  So I have a feeling that it is going to stay too complicated for some time.