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Business or Tech

August 4th, 2007

Most people I know fall rather squarely on either the “business side” (marketing, sales, account management) or the “tech side” (engineer, support, product management, etc.). If you’re in doubt, there’s a rather simple test that almost always works to identify who is who. Imagine this situation, an ad is shown on a website. The advertiser is “Cingular”, the publisher is the New York Times. There are two brokers involved in this transaction, ad-networks ValueClick and Advertising.com. Advertising.com has a direct relationship with the New York Times and daisy-chains the impression to ValueClick which works directly with Cingular. Each party is using their own tracking system.

I can draw this in two different ways:

business_or_tech1.GIF

The difference here is very subtle. Which one do you think is correct? #1 or #2? If you were at a white board explaining this situation to someone how would you draw it? Think about it for a second before reading on.

In my experience, those who pick #1 are tech-inclined whereas picking #2 indicates an inclination towards the business side of things. Why? Pretty simple actually. This ad-impression can be thought of in two ways, a series of financial transactions between four business entities OR a series of HTTP redirects. Technically the impression starts when the user visits the New York Times and flows towards the advertiser via a series of ad tags to Ad.com, then Valueclick and finally Cingular. Financially the money starts with Cingular and flows first to ValueClick, then Ad.com and finally to the New York Times.

A tech person tends to follow the flow of the ad-call whereas a business person tends to follow the money. When I first started in online advertising I would only draw #1 on a white board, but since have learned to change the way I draw things depending on who I’m talking to.

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Posted by Mike Filed in online advertising
4 Comments »

  • http://www.johndemayo.com John DeMayo

    I’d start with the user initiating a request to NYT and then proceed with #1.

  • http://www.davebarousse.com Dave B

    Very cool Mike. I chose #1 :)

  • http://advertising.hittpublishingdirect.com/ Justin Hitt

    Yes, I guess it would really matter who you were talking with. I’m very technical but picked #2 because I read … Cingular advertised with ValueClick who syndicates through Ad.com and was displayed on NYTimes.

    But if I was explaining the technical aspect (i.e. latency or page integration), then I’d say … NYTimes displays advertising from Ad.com which in this case displayed an ad from Cingular through a ValueClick account.

    Supporting the on-line advertising process, we need to be aware of both, whether technical or in the site administration. Just discovered your blog today, great work.

    Best,

    Justin

  • http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/06/04/a-nice-online-ad-101-post/ Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » A Nice Online-Ad 101 Post

    [...] I will point out that Ian is clearly on the tech side of the fence though — he draws the industry as a flow of impressions from publishers to advertisers, whereas most media focused folks will think of the reverse — money flowing from the advertiser to the publisher. If you have no clue what I”m talking about, check out my old post: Business or Tech. [...]