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The AppNexus Accelerate fund might seem out-of-step now. Some investment cash may even start flowing a little less freely. There will likely be increased due diligence around those that do not seem to offer a sustainable business strategy. There will inevitably be a swathe of investors nervously assessing the recent Peer 39 exit. This further strengthens AppNexus’ own stack play - but also flies in the face of what has just happened to Peer 39. AppNexus appears to have launched this fund to help finance developers looking to build apps on and around the AppNexus eco-system.

It would seem this initiative is all about feature plays.

It ultimately streamlines the buying process, reduces friction, makes it easier to spend money in digital and let’s not forget, also facilitates meaningful exits for the feature players.Īn interesting recent development in relation to all this has been the launch of the AppNexus investment fund, AppNexus Accelerate. Is this a sign of things to come? Consolidation is no bad thing. It was initially a provider of 3rd party data. They have become acutely aware that one relatively cool nice-to-have feature is not going to sustain itself.Ī good recent example of this was BlueKai who have become (by their own admission, admittedly) the “end to end data stack for the CMO”. It’s important from a revenue sustainability perspective and also from a general long term strategic play, helping answer that perennial industry problem: “how do we offer a counter-weight to the mighty Google solution”?īusinesses that were once just a feature company have started to assemble products (coupled with their own smaller M&A activity) to become "mini stacks". The word ‘stack’ although overused to describe a business’ product road map, is becomingly an increasingly important strategy. If that was the case, it would need to be approximating a mini-targeting stack - maybe dynamic creative solution with some real-time trading functionality. It might not be the entire stack, like Google, but it certainly needs to be more than just a targeting feature. They ultimately want partners who can offer that all-singing, all-dancing "stack". Agencies are global businesses who often execute a global/local strategy with regards to its partners and operations. It is fair to suggest that major demand players, particularly from the agency side, want partners with significant scale.

And it may be starting to appear that they are right. Ever since the LumaScape beauty parade landed on vendor’s sales decks everywhere, many sage observers have put forward the argument that the industry doesn’t have enough of a market to sustain the vast numbers of intermediaries. This is not to say that Peer 39 was or wasn’t aware of its own challenges it's merely a fact that some have been over-indulging on the ad tech hype (including some industry publications, I might add).Ī reason why there has been a lot of reaction to this exit in particular is because it has given many the opportunity to say, “I told you so”. But others remain blinkered about the challenges of being a feature versus a business. Some have become more realistic around the sustainability of over-invested companies, in a relatively small part of the industry.

News of the recent Peer 39 exit could well serve as a wakeup call to ad tech land. The PostView is a new column written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.