Stuart Colman is Managing Director, EMEA at Maxifier.

I am a big believer in trying to be the best I can be. I work hard, push myself, try new things and deliver something that is as good as I can make it – “better to try and fail than to never try at all”, and all that...

Whilst this is fine personally, professionally I work in an area of the digital industry (ad tech), where we seem to accept average as OK and are unwilling to challenge those who push average onto the market.

“Look at what we’ve achieved in the last three years though,” I hear you all cry. “How can you say we live in a world of average?”

I agree that if you compare the UK digital marketplace today to that of 2008 then, yes, we have invented lots of new technologies, found new things to buy and sell and given ourselves a huge pat on the back when we’ve invented yet another acronym for the latest ecosystem slide. However, at the core of what we do as an industry, have things really improved in the last three or four years?

Things I’m particularly talking about here are ad serving, creative execution and targeting. Ad serving is still dominated by a few players, and whilst this article isn’t about naming names, I ask the question – is DFP6/Premium that much different to the original DoubleClick product launched 10 years ago? Yes, it has a shinier UI and a few more buttons you can press, but has it tried to be the best it can be, challenged convention, pushed brave new things?

Creative execution – we may think how cool, hip and creative we are, but we’re still serving pre-sized, often flat, unimaginative 728x90 banners at the top of a page. To give the creative companies credit, they have tried to push new creative sizes and formats onto the industry, but as an industry, we have failed to embrace them, preferring instead to pump out the same old ad sizes, with the same old animation styles, and then complain when users ignore them and don’t engage or respond.

As for targeting, coming from someone who spent a long time in this sector of the market, as I’ve said before, we still don’t get it. The most ‘successful’ targeting in our industry is still the “you’ve been here and looked at this product, so I’m going to bombard you with ads for that product until some of you buy it and claim it as an example of how great I am an making people buy something”. It’s dull, blunt, doesn’t use the wealth of data we have about people (and not just audience data, but all the data we have around what, how, where, why and when) to truly understand what and how to present products to them. Frankly, it’s all a bit embarrassing.

Average, average, average.

Why, as an industry that sells itself on being forward thinking, creative and ‘at the edge’, do we accept being average? Honestly, I wish I knew. I wish I knew why publishers don’t look for newer, better, creative ways to get ads and content onto their platforms; why we don’t look to use creativity as a way to engage and immerse users to drive interaction and why we don’t try to understand our users better so we can communicate with them in a way that’s going to resonate and make a difference. I can hazard a few guesses – “I can’t say anything bad about DFP/Google – they might buy us, so I don’t want to upset them”; “I can’t change what creative formats I serve as the agency tell me it has to be a standard format and I don’t want to upset them in case they pull the budget”; “Everyone else is doing it this way, so I should too, just in case not doing it loses me money”.

Average, average, average.

We all know the opportunities are out there, because (despite my ramblings to the contrary) there are companies out there who are pushing the envelope on ad serving, who are try to come up with creative new ways of engaging and interacting with consumers and companies who are able to really start to understand consumers and what makes them tick. These are the companies we should be pushing to work with, investing time and effort into developing and holding up to the world as examples of what we’ve achieved over the last few years.

So come on industry – it’s a New Year and a new opportunity. Let’s be big believers in trying to be the best we can be. Work hard, push ourselves, try new things – “better to try and fail than to never try at all” and all that – and deliver something that is as good as we can make it.

No more Mr Average!