How to Talk About Competitors
How you talk about competitors is a classic comms dilemma, and most companies get it wrong.
Not because they’re too aggressive, but because they’re too vague.
Founders and CEOs are generally reasonable people. They don’t like confrontation. So when I ask what’s wrong with the status quo and who’s responsible for underserving their customers, I usually hear abstractions: complexity, fragmentation, inertia.
All true. But no one rallies around a crusade against “fragmentation.” It’s a legitimate problem, but it’s not a story. The best stories are about heroes and villains. Hollywood has never made a movie where the villain is “fragmentation.”
The fix is simple: without usually naming competitors directly, you still need to identify a group of actors, or the villains in your narrative, who are holding your customers back from reaching their potential.
That villain might be adtech intermediaries, legacy verification incumbents, or data brokers. The point is clarity. People need someone, or something, to push back on.
Here are three guidelines for communicating about competitors.
1. Craft a narrative where competitors play the villain role
Every strong brand narrative answers a few core questions: Whom are we championing? What’s broken? Who benefits from that broken system? And how are we changing it?
tvScientific is a good example. The villain was a group of incumbent companies preserving the status quo of unaccountable advertising: DSPs optimized for reach and frequency instead of outcomes, and search and social platforms gaming last-click attribution, siphoning budget away from CTV, which maximizes incremental demand.
The narrative provides a clear explanation of who’s being harmed (advertisers), how (unaccountable advertising and gamified attribution), and what advertisers will gain when the system is fixed (measurable outcomes).
If you want people to root for you, you need to make the stakes legible.
2. Avoid denial
Two common mistakes:
First, pretending you’re friendly with everyone. The market doesn’t believe it, and it reads as evasive.
Second, claiming you have no competitors. That’s worse. It deprives you of the chance to show how you’re different and it makes it harder for customers to understand where you fit. Adtech is complicated. People need a map. That’s why the Lumascape exists.
This touches a broader truth: competitors are good because they signal demand. Almost no company has a true monopoly. The goal is to explain why you’re the best choice in your category for a specific audience with a specific problem.
3. Name competitors when you’re punching up and you can get specific
When is it appropriate to name names? Generally when two conditions are met:
You’re punching up at a much larger player (a high-status move).
You’re calling out a specific behavior that supports your narrative about how customers are being underserved.
Viant does this well. They openly critique Big Tech, especially Google and Amazon, because no one is rushing to defend them, and because it reinforces Viant’s narrative: platforms that work for advertisers, not walled gardens; AI-driven optimization, not attribution games; outcomes, not optics.
The goal is to identify villains that make people root for you: a David-versus-Goliath dynamic that clarifies why your approach is better.
In short
Embrace competitors. Integrate them into your narrative. Usually talk about them as a group, not by name, unless you’re punching up and it sharpens your story.
Hollywood doesn’t tell stories about abstract concepts. The best stories are about heroes and villains. Your company’s story should be, too.
