MediaMath’s O’Connell\u00a0lamented that, too often, ad\u00a0buying involves planning across multiple separate “fiefdoms” of publishers.\u00a0“That creates disjointed user experience,” she said, adding that, in this day and age: “What really makes it magical is when you have a unified view of each user as a human, not as a cookie or a device.”<\/p>\n

O’Connell said the industry is beginning to get a holistic view of consumers, even if it means piecing together different parts of an increasingly voluminous technology “stack”.<\/p>\n

One way to get unification is through consolidation. “The notion of a single platform, it\u2019s not going to happen,” said Videology’s Castree. “We\u2019re going to see consolidation in three waves” –\u00a0buy-ups of\u00a0“point solutions” (single-task tech vendors), aggregation of decisioning technologies and further interoperability.<\/p>\n

Who’ll buy? As the so-called “mar-tech” wave grows, Castree said: “I think you\u2019ll see the Oracles, IBMs and Salesforces start to really look at advertising technology.”<\/p>\n

Moderator\u00a0Ashley J. Swartz, the founder of Furious Corp, asked if acquirers would be the usual big beasts like Google and Facebook.<\/p>\n

Google’s own VanDerzee said: “It makes good theater to make it a zero-sum game, a battle of the titans. But the reality is, it\u2019s not a zero-sum game. There are so many opportunities for companies to provide tremendous value.\u00a0We\u2019re going to see a lot of different entrants to the marketplace.”<\/p>\n