Advertising leaders are challenging the industry to rethink how partnerships are built, warning too many companies are racing to create competing technologies instead of collaborating to solve shared problems.
The message was made loud and clear during a StackAdapt-hosted lunch session at Cairns Crocodiles, which brought together Audience Group’s Aimee Gossage, Brand Collective’s Ashley Grey and InfoSum’s Richard Knott.
Throughout the conversation, ‘Frenemies, Frameworks & the Future’, hosted by StackAdapt’s Chris Scudder, panelists stressed the industry has become fragmented, due to businesses building overlapping products and platforms instead of solving challenges collectively.
Speaking to the audience, Brand Collective’s head of performance marketing Ashley Grey said “we have all entered a rat race”.
“We’re all trying to solve a common goal, we’re all doing it in our own way, and we’re all trying to sell very similar things, but we aren’t working together.”
Grey said the pace of innovation had become counterproductive, with businesses ultimately prioritising speed and competition instead.
Grey added many companies are “under pressure to commercialise products” regardless of whether they genuinely solved client problems.
“There’s a lot of pressure on people I’m talking to because their businesses are building a lot of tech, and they need to sell them in,” she said.
Another issue holding partnerships back, according to Audience Group’s head of investment Aimee Gossage, is fragmented systems.
“Measurement is definitely broken into silos,” she told the crowd.
Gossage said some ad tech partners were beginning to improve collaboration by surfacing solutions proactively, rather than forcing agencies to navigate disconnected sales processes and overlapping products.
“That means you don’t have to respond to 52 different people to try and find the right solution.”
The panel also explored how partnerships need to evolve beyond short-term commercial wins and become more flexible, long-term relationships.
Grey, who recently moved brand-side after more than a decade in agencies, said successful partnerships “increasingly rely on curiosity and communication” rather than simply selling products.
“The biggest thing for me is curiosity that stands on not making assumptions,” she said.
She also challenged agencies, publishers and tech vendors to spend more time understanding how brands actually define success internally.
“What does incremental growth actually mean for your brand?” she said. “Because often what you think is not what your CEO thinks.”
Grey also said she was surprised more partners were not “proactively embedding themselves within brands to better understand operational challenges and opportunities”.
“No one has really gone, ‘Ash, can I come in and sit down with you for a day? I want to dig into your business. I want to see where your gaps are’,” she said. “We depend on that education, that curiosity.”
InfoSum’s Richard Knott warned against companies making assumptions about large organisations before properly understanding what they need.
“Bad partnerships are ones where there’s lots of presumption and assumption,” he said. “The good ones listen to what you’re doing and therefore change what they’re pitching, based upon that.”
He added too many vendors were building products in isolation, only approaching clients once significant money had already been spent.
“We had this just a few weeks ago, where the vendor pitched something to us and it simply didn’t fit what we’re doing,” he said.
“They said, ‘Well, we spent a million dollars building this’.”
Knott added that proper discovery processes were still missing from large parts of the ad tech ecosystem.
“I think that’s missing a little bit at the moment with ad tech versus mar tech,” he said. “That ability to run a proper discovery, get a real understanding about your client or your potential client, then actually activate on that.”
The discussion also highlighted the growing momentum of independent agencies within the media landscape, with Gossage arguing indies are increasingly gaining traction because of their agility and ability to make decisions quickly.
“The rise of the indies, people are standing up and taking notice,” she said. “I think it’s our ability to pivot quickly and make those decisions quickly.”
She also argued independent agencies were increasingly collaborating more effectively through industry groups and partnerships.
“It’s really putting the power in the people,” she said.
The session also explored the challenge of audience access and fragmentation across connected TV and digital ecosystems, with Gossage arguing agencies increasingly need differentiated ways to access audiences at scale.
“It comes down to access, being able to access audiences in different capacities.”
