A month after moving back to New York in the fall of 2023, I was pleased to announce that I would be joining Five Tier as their Marketing Director.

The platform, which was spun out of a wickedly successful agency born more than fifteen years ago, boasts one of the advertising industry's most intricate media purchasing and precision targeting technical suites. With programmatic access to over 750,000 physical displays around the world, alongside point-and-click CTV/OTT, Streaming Audio and Digital Display formats; following with previous career trends, this was a world I knew nothing about.

At our core, we specialize in supporting enterprise businesses efficiently allocate advertising capital. As those in our industry know far too well, multi-modal data gaps across profiling, targeting, attribution and re-engagement cycles can be deathly. Traditionally, advertising campaigns are executed in siloed environments with independent vendors, stifling the value of AdTech data.

Five Tier's core value proposition which I've been hired to bolster into a defensible product moat, is that we control the entire AdTech stack. By allowing data to move freely from target profiling to re-engagement across multiple concurrent formats is game changing. Financially, it also allows the flexibility for businesses to rapidly move pre-allocated capital across advertising formats, aligned with performance objectives.

With that being said, scaling AdTech platforms (especially those like ours with a heavy emphasis on managed-service) is notoriously hard. While demand for Digital Out of Home is trending upwards, U.S domestic inventory fill rates hover around 10%. Global rates are even lower. With further consideration, while there's reason to shoot for a point-and-click format to accelerate transaction deltas and provide a more user-friendly interface for media buyers, several core insights cannot be ignored.

Digital Out of Home inventory is siloed and Supply-Side Providers have legacy dedicated sales teams. Multi-vendor point-and-click platforms consolidating SSP inventory is naturally anti-competitive. With ≈ 90% daily inventory availability (U.S Domestic), this is an industry that has de-incentivized price transparency.

Once again data interoperability differentiates itself as the emerging currency of the AdTech economy.