Welcome to “Insider Voice,” a new blog series that brings you in depth insights straight from the frontlines of media and advertising innovation.
In this fast-paced industry, staying ahead of the curve isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. That’s why we’re tapping into our greatest asset: the brilliant minds of our team members who live and breathe the complexities of our evolving landscape and are deeply embedded in the daily challenges and opportunities faced by media companies and advertisers.
Each post in this series will feature a different voice from our organization, offering you a mosaic of expertise that spans various aspects of the media and advertising world.
Striking the Balance: Custom vs. Standard
Tech executives often consider “build or buy” when they need a new tech capability. For media companies with digital advertising, content delivery and subscriptions across channels and locations, it’s no surprise that nearly every company has picked “build” more than once in the past to get the customized tech they needed to deliver unique value to advertisers and audiences.
No two tech companies are the same. Many are the product of M&A through the years and have legacies in everything from local broadcast to national linear to radio and print media. Layers of digital, streaming and many other specialized businesses simply can’t be supported by a generic software solution. Bringing together elements such as proposal building, ad serving, pricing, and reporting are simply too complex to push through a standardized process.
However, at some point, tech customization can end up backing media companies into a corner. A custom solution can require heavy internal resources to manage and update regularly. Other tech solutions change over time and may not be compatible with something proprietary. Scale can be a problem, especially for solutions relying on owned hardware or something for one part of the business or a specific region. And custom solutions can introduce a lot of specialized processes that require employee training and support.
Striking The Balance Between Customization and Standardization
There can be a number of reasons to scale back on the level of customization of a project. Rather than build a solution that delivers exactly what they want for their business at that moment, they can accept a more standardized solution that’s not as perfect of a fit but provides something that will work better within their larger business strategy. Often getting to “perfect” isn’t worth it. There are always trade-offs to consider, including:
Companies need to ask themselves if customization is actually over-customization.
Often, customized solutions aren’t fully developed and owned in-house which means other partners are part of the project. Customization can happen as part of a relationship with one or more software companies that have the ability to develop specialized capabilities on top of their core tech. In some cases, customization requires deep collaboration across different companies and teams, which can be risky for everyone if one of the companies changes course in the middle of a multi-year project. Consider the case where there is M&A that derails a custom project that’s halfway completed. Perhaps the new CFO shuts it down or decides not to fund ongoing support.
Another common scenario is the case where a custom solution works within a single channel or region but isn’t able to be scaled to fit other parts of the business. Individual countries with different data regulations, languages or technology standards. Even different processes around things like media planning in different parts of the business could be difficult for a custom solution to accommodate, which makes the expense of development difficult to justify if it ends up isolating a market from the rest of the business or limiting the ability to streamline processes and data across the entire organization.
Making The Right Choice
To make the right choice, media companies need to weigh the pros and cons across these tradeoffs and more. We work with media companies to help them determine the right amount of customization based on business priorities today and potential changes in the future.
Often, other things can be changed around the technology to fit the company into a more standardized solution. For example, we have found that it can be more cost effective and faster for media companies to update their internal ad operations processes to fit a prebuilt template than to build a custom instance that works with their original process.
Similarly, we have worked with media companies that updated their product catalog and pricing menu to work in a unified cloud database rather than piece together a custom solution that allowed it to continue to live in disparate systems, which would be less efficient and less scalable.
Looking at the requirements from different angles and determining the true desired outcome can often lead to a breakthrough that gives companies an even better solution than what they had originally envisioned, streamlining and unifying over complicated processes, data and technology in a way that will work well into the future.
