Adtech’s AI Narrative Problem

Adtech public market performance has been rocky. The conventional explanation involves macro headwinds, advertiser caution, and AI disruption. While all true, there's a less discussed factor that I'd put near the top of the list: a narrative vacuum.

Many of the most prominent public adtech companies don't have a compelling answer to the most important question buyers, investors, and partners are asking right now: What does advertising look like in five years, and why are you the one leading us there?

This is a generational question that demands a generational answer. Yet most adtech companies are responding with product announcements, org chart updates, and quarterly guidance. All useful, but none of it amounts to a narrative.

The diagnosis

When investors can't articulate what you stand for, they discount you. When buyers can't remember your big idea, they commoditize you. Over time, those perceptions harden into market reality. 

If the industry press is covering your category and your name isn’t synonymous with its future, the narrative advantage shifts to the company that is defining where the space is headed.

In the AI era, the single biggest transformation advertising has seen since the launch of the ad exchange, every brand, agency, and publisher is reevaluating their entire stack. They're looking for luminaries who can point them in the right direction. 

Companies that present a clear, compelling vision of AI’s role in the future of advertising will be able to redraw the map in their favor. Those who don’t tell a compelling story about advertising’s future — and their central role in forging it — will be marginalized.

What a sweeping advertising narrative looks like

Two adtech companies that stand out to me as having gotten this narrative problem right are Viant and tvScientific. Their stories are reducible to a couple of words each: autonomous advertising and performance TV, respectively. (Both are Sharp Pen clients.) 

Viant has bet its identity in the AI era on autonomous advertising, the idea that AI agents will automate the entire process: creative, media planning, media buying and decisioning, measurement and optimization. Compare that to the dominant “human in the loop” narrative. Viant’s provocative take is that the “human in the loop” narrative is a false middle ground. Even skilled humans can’t compete with an always-on agent processing virtually unlimited data. They view their role as bringing the industry to that promised land.

tvScientific has done the same thing with performance TV (or catapulting TV into the Outcomes Era). They contend that advertising has long been unaccountable, and that is precisely why most of the media industry’s lunch has been eaten by Google, Meta, and Amazon. To compete, the open internet broadly conceived, starting with TV, must offer measurable results that appeal to performance advertisers.

Again, these are narratives about how the entire industry must change — and how the company telling that story is leading the charge.

The opportunity is still open, but not for long

The window to define the AI era of advertising won't be open forever. Once the conventional wisdom calcifies, it becomes exponentially harder and more expensive to displace those associations. (Think about TTD’s lead in the DSP category or LiveRamp’s in identity / data collaboration; once you have a solid lead and own a category in your customers’ minds, it’s hard to be dislodged.)

Right now, for many adtech categories, the map is genuinely blank. That's a gift.

But claiming territory on a blank map requires a CEO willing to plant a flag publicly, repeatedly, and across every channel at their disposal. Not once at a conference or a quarterly earnings call, but consistently and with conviction. The message has to be reinforced until your big idea is inseparable from your name. 

The companies that build that association right now will have a durable advantage that no feature update can erode. The companies that don't will spend the next decade explaining why their products are actually quite differentiated, to an audience that has already made up its mind.

The narrative crisis is an invitation, and the floor is open.