Back in the days when I joined IAB, eleven years ago now, there were rumblings, a kind of meme if you will, about those companies that were capturing the largest share, in many views too large a share, of digital ad revenue at the time. It seems almost quaint to cite their names…AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s consumer display advertising business. No one thought they would be displaced. No one could have guessed they’d end up comingled, nearly as one, under Verizon as Oath, or that from under their shadow, two then-emerging players would rise (the Google and Facebook we know today).

Media has always had its titans. At any moment they’re unimaginably assailable, and yet it is a business in which winning is never permanent. While it may seem there are players taking a larger share of advertisers’ loyalty than somehow is “right,” the advertising revenue they capture is primarily driven by careful and conscious choices made by marketers following consumers, who instantaneously vote with their time and attention, willing to abandon any platform when a new one comes along that meets their needs better.

I’m no longer at IAB, but ever since I have been involved in media, for a very long time, there have been dominant players. When I was a young man, there was no more prestigious place to work than Condé Nast, whose stable of glossies from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to Gourmet and Vogue set our common thinking and choices in what smelled good and looked good. Hearst was another giant in print magazines, with its Cosmo, run by the tiny but daring Helen Gurley Brown, and Esquire, for the thoughtful, fashion-conscious man. They survive, and many even thrive today in the digital world, but they do not dominate young people’s experience of the world as they once did.

Since its inception as an advertising medium, TV has attracted the most eyeballs and, still today, the most brand advertising dollars. The networks were thought to be unchallengeable in their dominance. Lately, one of the most fascinating shows to watch has been the slow disruption of the trio of tri-lettered ABC-CBS-NBC acronyms as the newest one, OTT, sets a conglomeration of tiny logos, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, in our hands and laps.

Consumers *Are* the Remote Control

It’s odd how little we remember to remember the history of media, even though a turbulent reshuffling of the top players has taken place so recently.

It is not the industry in charge, but rather consumers, who shift where they choose to spend their time. Indeed, despite the current success of Google and Facebook, the ever-hungry Amazon was the second fastest growing advertising company last year, as Geoff Ramsey, co-founder and chief innovation officer for eMarketer, said in a Digiday report from the AdExchanger’s Industry Preview earlier this year. The fastest grower? Snapchat. Things happen so quickly in digital we have whiplash just trying to keep up, as we saw when Snapchat stock tumbled $1.3 billion in value in one day after Kylie Jenner wondered in a tweet “…who opens Snapchat anymore?” Later she walked that back a bit, but it speaks to the precarious state of any media brand in the new world where consumers, or just about anyone, can bite back. (And just the other day, Snap saw five percent of its stock value go missing after Rihanna posted her objections to an ad that appeared on the product.) Ramsey was also quoted as estimating that this year Amazon’s advertising business should increase 42 percent from the prior year. More recently, Digiday reported that Amazon is working with agencies on new attribution tests on something it calls “the total wallet perspective” and seeking to spotlight for marketers its ability to match online to offline conversion.

We can’t see out five years from now, but neither could Netscape.

Advertising dollars, at the simplest level, are led by how consumers choose to spend their time across all media — online, TV, radio… No other metric, no other quality, matters as much. How to measure all that has gotten messy (which we’ll address in future posts), but we should focus on fixing how to measure that better, and across media.

Getting Beyond Zero-Sum Thinking

As certain doomsday voices in the industry call for everything from break-up to government control, there is likely little difference from the concerns of a decade ago about the AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft Advertising trifecta. There are gripers about players that are thought to be taking more than their “fair share.” A new meme, if you will, that’s a “plus ça change, plus c’est la même” meme. As we saw nearly a dozen years ago, once again, it’s a fundamentally flawed assertion, in a free and dynamic, ever-innovating marketplace in which buyers can switch off investments as easily as pressing a button, and consumers lead the way with one seemingly fickle, though self-interested, decision after another. Who wins and who loses isn’t even a linear equation. Advertising isn’t a zero-sum game anymore, if it ever was, given the ubiquity of revenue sharing between interdependent competitors.

It’s not just the new tech giants that are seeing the possibilities of a challenge to the present two strongest players. Publishers like Bloomberg see yet another possible disruption on the horizon.

In this industry of endless, merciless churn, it’s important to climb up and out of the day-to-day morass to see this big picture, to understand what’s really going on and coming up. In this space, I hope to take the conversation straight on, talk with many industry leaders, and try to get at what we mean when we say the latest buzzwords like “transparency” and “duopoly.” I am inspired by the opportunity to question assumptions and root around in the less well-lit spaces. Join me on my mission to add transparency to the industry. Where do you want more transparency? With what points do you disagree? I welcome the discussion.

David Doty was most recently EVP & CMO of IAB, which he joined in 2007 after seven years at Booz Allen Hamilton. He has lived and breathed media, for better or worse, since back when he wrote for and edited magazines and books at such then-powerhouse print publishers as Condé Nast, Hearst, American Express Publishing, and Zagat’s. Today, Doty consults with The 614 Group, digital ad tech companies, and digital publishers including Google. His views are his own.