Matchmaker, Matchmaker…

Matchmaker, Matchmaker make me a match! There is a new wave of technology waiting to explode onto the world. We’re already familiar with it to some degree, especially the hard core “geeks” who write all these programs that are rapidly taking over the world. Anyone that calls themselves a programmer cannot function without a good string “matching” function in their favorite text editer. In this case, “strings” of letters and characters  that can be found among thousands of lines of otherwise indecipherable code.  But you don’t have to be a programmer to exploit this particular technology. Every time you type into that simple Google search box the process begins. Behind that little white box is a “black box” of code, algorithms and mathematics to match your quest with information, images, videos, whatever, from all over the globe, 24 hours a day. But the most familiar applications of  match making are the good old dating sites…eHarmony, Match.com, OKCupid, Ourtime… all wildly successful for bringing hopeful A together with lonely B. Before these sites, if people couldn’t “match” up face to face (God forbid) then they had to rely on hours and hours of Craigslist “personals”. Even further back, during the technical Dark Ages before the Internet, this laborious task would have to be done scouring through local newspapers, if not local bars! The hit or miss of an SBM searching  for a WJW for some frisky RNR was a risky proposition at best! Now, however, the “Secret Sauce” these dating sites provide all but takes the risk out of it, provided of course your match isn’t using a 20 year old photograph taking during “better” days. Well you can’t remove all the risks!

The point is, the boom of matching technology is moving beyond bringing A and B together for love, romance and “other things”.  The “Secret Sauce” is actually based on deterministic mathematical proofs that can be programmed and predicted. Ironically, one such algorithm is known as the

“Stable Marriage” theorem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RSMLgy06Ew). This can explain some of the success of the dating sites. In other words, the”Secret Sauce” actually works! But these same algorithms need not be restricted to dating sites. Now we can match you with your new home or apartment (apartment.com) or even which hospital aspiring doctors should do their internships and residencies (nrmp.org). And even more infamously, Wall Street, where “programmatic trading” has been the cause of many a fortune won and many a fortune lost. But the newest and most rapidly changing frontier is, yes, you guessed it.. advertising! In my previous article on “programmatic advertising”  (http://sonyainc.net/wordpress/?p=379) I talked about the rising trend of letting computers do all the hard work of advertising on computers. Makes sense but computers are computers. They can only display ads not react to them. This is still the realm of humans and much to the relief of many humans who have built careers in advertising, computers aren’t ready to take over just yet. There still has to be a “human” factor added to the infamous, automated RTB (Real Time Bidding) that’s taking the industry by storm. That factor is the appeal of content being matched with the  pocket books of the advertiser. Some of this is automated, of course, that’s the point of programmatic advertising, but humans still have to make SOME choices. What networks to use, what kind of audience is being sought, how much money should be spent.  But so far, programmatic advertising seems more concerned with advertisers and publishers than about us, the consumer.

Lets step back a little bit. It is no coincidence, that a few of the same names that started out on Wall Street developing algorithms for programmatic trading have found themselves pioneering programmatic advertising but with one major difference. Financial markets are seen as “zero-sum”, i.e.,  if there is $10 on the table if that $10 goes to me it does not go to someone else. In other words, if I win, someone else loses. There’s been a lot of angst and worry inside the industry, especially among “traditional” advertising agencies that “programmatic” also means zero-sum. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. I see programmatic advertising as a powerfully synergetic force…almost frighteningly so. Put it this way, I am a publisher, I have “content/audience”… advertisers want to reach my audience through my content and I want those advertising dollars to fuel my content to build my audience. A win-win situation you say? Perhaps. But what about the poor consumer already inundated with thousands of ads, solicitations and annoying offers! Argh!
I’m Joe Consumer, what does “programmatic” mean to me? I do a quick search one day on an expensive watch just to see how expensive expensive can be. I have absolutely no intention of actually buying the thing (unless my startup is about to go IPO, of course). But for the next few days, whenever I’m on Twitter or Facebook or another digital “Ad” network which is flavored by someone’s “secret sauce”, I’m inundated by ads for Expensivo watches. How annoying and creepy! Until I realize I want to buy a writing stylus for my trusty Ipad which, by the way, are not sold by Apple. Darn…where do you buy these things? Hmm…let me do a quick search for “Ipad writing stylus”… All my options come up as usual, now I can take my pick… or not. What’s the rush… over the next few days, providing the “secret sauce” is working,  I only need to do what I usually do on Facebook, Twitter and what have you. Stylus ads start popping up all over the place.

In other words, ads aren’t so bad if they’re ads I actually want to see. Mind you, I still wouldn’t mind an “off” button, but even I have to admit I find ads for products I’m genuinely interested in much less annoying than the thousands I’m not. I’m also still no fan of boundless commercialism but as long as we live in a consumer society I don’t mind having my own choices as to  what I consume and just as importantly…where I can go to consume them.