How to Break Through with an Adtech Narrative
Most adtech narratives are recycled iterations of industry gobbledygook. Outcomes + transparency + objectivity + premium supply. Some combination thereof. As a result, very few adtech companies are associated with a distinctive message. Instead, they’re lumped in with every other company in their category: one DSP or SSP among others.
Compounding this difficulty is that the so-called messaging experts often can’t tell CEOs how to differentiate. They have no formula. They think they’re Don Draper offering businesspeople something ineffable. Messaging is a strategic deliverable but it isn’t rocket science. Here are the three things your message must do:
1) Capitalize on your unique, believable differentiator.
2) Tell a story about the industry, not just your product.
3) Distill your story to an intelligible word or two.
Consider an adtech company that does this well: TripleLift’s positioning as the Creative SSP. Why is this smart positioning? It follows the three rules.
Capitalize on your unique, believable differentiator
TripleLift made a name for itself and landed an acquisition at a valuation of $1.4 billion by conquering the native advertising / display market. Winning that market hinged on unique creative formats. But the company faces a problem every other display-oriented DPSs/SSPs does, too: The display/native market is plateauing, if not declining. AI only compounds that problem. So, like so many other adtech companies, TripleLift needs to tell a story that will allow it to expand into other sectors (e.g. CTV) while capitalizing on its historical DNA: proprietary formats.
Hence: the Creative SSP. This positioning weaves a consistent thread across TripleLift’s historical, known market strength — making the positioning believable and intuitive — and its ambitions to expand across channels. Creative helped build TripleLift into a billion-dollar company; it will be pivotal to its ability to expand into other channels, too. Plus, while other adtech companies talk about creative, to my knowledge, no other has gone all the way in on creative as the differentiator in the SSP market.Unique, believable, aligned with business interests. Check.
Tell a story about the industry, not just your product
Positioning as the Creative SSP is one thing; effectively telling a story around that positioning in-market is another. But it’s very easy to see what that story would be, and TripleLift’s messaging (for example, on its site) is on the right track: “the creative SSP where creativity drives performance.”
We’re in the Outcomes Era. AppLovin is the prince of contemporary digital advertising; Google and Meta are the king and queen. Performance is paramount, and every adtech company wants to talk about outcomes to explain its role in where the industry is heading — and to make the case as to why advertisers might want to divert more than one of every three dollars from the walled gardens to other channels.
For TripleLift, creative becomes the right to win in the Outcomes Era. Everyone claims to drive outcomes; the question is how to do it. Their argument seems to be that superior creative is the value-add of SSPs; it is how they can be more than pipes, how they can drive the outcomes advertisers demand.
That’s more than a story about TripleLift's product. It’s a story about what makes an ad platform worthwhile today — creative as the lynchpin that separates winners from losers. Others may disagree with this argument or TripleLift’s right to claim it, but it’s a coherent story, and its impact extends far beyond TripleLift’s products while staying true to them.
Distill your story to an intelligible word or two
Performance TV. Autonomous advertising. Creative SSP. Great positioning can be boiled down to a word or two. Otherwise, no one can remember it.
Sometimes CEOs will try to clap back at their critics with 10- or 15-point blog posts or earnings calls. Surely, a week later, no one can remember more than three points. In most cases, they probably only remember one. A message is meaningless unless people hear it, remember it, and repeat it. Concision is critical to achieving that objective. As far as marketing is concerned, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it really doesn’t matter — it might as well not have fallen.
So, your story needs to be unique and believable. It needs to be about the industry, not your product. And it needs to be reducible to one to two words.
90% of adtech stories do not meet this bar. Anyone could say the company’s slogan (e.g. something about outcomes or signals). It’s not believable (wish-casting, not rooting the message in the company’s existing reputation). It’s too insular (no one cares). Or it’s too diffuse to be remembered.
Coming up with a differentiated message is simple; that does not mean it’s easy. If it were, everyone would nail it. But there’s a formula to get it right. Follow the formula, and see if you can come up with something better. The effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts (plus investor relations and recruitment) depends on it. So, if you’re operating at scale, it is not an exaggeration to say hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
