The digital advertising ecosystem has often been portrayed with excessively complex diagrams featuring hundreds of logos and arrows indicating multiple flows and directions.
Yes, it is complicated — significantly more so than analog media — but it is not so foreign as to be unrecognizable to the trained marketer. Each additional capability merely adds new tools to help agencies, publishers, and marketers apply their skills more effectively.
As part of our Digital Simplified series we set out to, well, simplify the depiction of this valuable system with The IAB Arena. The resulting “Arena” illustration is designed to portray, from a marketer’s perspective, how advertising messages are delivered to consumers in the vibrant and ever-expanding ecosystem of digital advertising.
We just launched an interactive video of the Arena powered by Rapt Media, created for professionals and students of all levels to learn how the different players, parts and technology work together to create, sell, distribute and measure digital advertising. Users can easily navigate around the six Arena rings to select the parts of the ecosystem they’d like to learn more about. There is also an interactive diagram that explains the Arena at a higher level.
As all media is increasingly delivered in on-demand, digital formats, the concepts and businesses that form the rings of the IAB Digital Advertising Arena will apply throughout the industry.
In a very short while, television will include addressable advertising elements, and ads will be served by computer systems that track interaction with the ads rather than just reach. Functions and capabilities developed for what was then known as “digital” will just be “media.”
The IAB Arena serves as a roadmap to the future of how all advertising will ultimately reach and impact consumers. Smart marketers, agencies, and publishers that are investing today to ensure their teams are experts across the Arena will reap benefits far into the future.
View the IAB Arena and video: iab.net/iabarena
Learn about other Digital Advertising subjects with IAB’s Digital Simplified.
