What is Business Development? An AdTech Perspective

This is the first chapter of “What is Business Development? An Ad Tech Perspective”, a series written for folks in the ad tech industry who are interested in BD, just starting out in BD, or have been working in BD for a couple of years. If you’re a seasoned BD professional, you may also find value in this series as well.

This is the introductory chapter where I share some background and context into the world of Advertising Technology (ad tech), and what it means to “do Biz Dev” in ad tech based on my experience. In future series, I’ll provide anecdotes and deep dives into specific topics such as setting goals for BD, how to assess a BD opportunity, setting yourself up for success in a new BD gig, and more.

This is based on my experience, my perspective, and is sourced from a number of BD professionals in the ad tech industry. If you’d like to share your feedback, discuss a specific topic, or would like me to write about a specific topic, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

What is Business Development?

The answer to the question of “What is Business Development?”, is different depending on a lot of different variables, such as who you ask, which department they work in, their industry, the type of company, the size of the company, etc. It’s very difficult to define BD with one broad stroke, and Scott Pollack does it very well. It’s the best, broad definition of BD, independent of all variables, that I’ve seen to date.

The thing that makes it so challenging to define is that there’s a large spectrum of responsibilities of the BD professional. Well-known professions like Finance, Marketing, Accounting, Sales, Product, Engineering, etc, are generally well-defined in terms of the expectations of the role they play inside an organization. These departments are core pillars of most organizations, and they’ve been around a really long time. There are entire colleges for Finance, Account, Engineering, certifications, and professional courses focused on these professions. However, emerging careers, such as Business Development, Data Science, Customer Success and others, are less defined. Business Development in particular, doesn’t have a standard framework that spans across industries, company size, and other variables. The jobs of tomorrow don’t exist today.

The variable that seems to have the most obvious impact on the responsibilities of the BD professional, is industry. In order to understand and define the role of Biz Dev at any company, you must look at it through an industry lens.

The Industry: Advertising Technology (Ad Tech)

I’ve worked in ad tech for nearly 10 years. Broadly speaking, ad tech represents the technologies and tools that enable the programmatic buying and selling of digital advertising.

Advertisers spent $283.35B on digital advertising in 2019, and eMarketer projects that global spending will exceed half a trillion dollars by 2023.

Digital advertising is a vast, complex, and ever-expanding industry, and ad tech is an ecosystem within that industry. If you’ve worked in Ad Tech for at least 2 years, you’ve probably seen something like this.

There are many ecosystems like this that live within digital advertising, such as search advertising, social media advertising, mobile advertising, measurement, analytics, buying tools, analytic tools, BI and more. New ecosystems are regularly created and discovered as the industry expands. A recent catalysts for change was mobile, where companies like Facebook and Google were first to evolve, and other players followed suite. The mobile revolution created new ad tech ecosystems for mobile advertising (MoPub, MyAppFree, Mobusi) mobile measurement and attribution (AppsFlyer, Adjust and Kochava), location-based data (PlaceIQ, Cuebiq, Factual), and more. One of the next catalysts for change is 5G and AR/VR, which will create dozens of new ecosystems.

This constant evolution creates an environment of intense competition, fragmentation, new opportunities, and a low barrier to entry-- all of which are ingredients for a thriving Business Development and Partnerships ecosystem.

Fragmentation Creates Opportunity, Opportunity Breeds Competition

In 2019, these are just some of the things that advertisers must engage im and consider when planning their digital advertising strategy:

• Search Advertising (SEO, PPC, content marketing, Google, Yahoo!, Bing)
• Social Media Advertising (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest)
• Mobile Advertising (Smartphones, tablets, e-readers, location-based tech)
• Martech (thousands of software platforms and SaaS system to plan, manage and measure)
• IoT (Amazon Dash, smart home devices, smart speakers)
• AI (Chatbots, Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant)
• AR/VR (Oculus, Snapchat Filters, Samsung Gear, Playstation VR)
• Attribution & Measurement (MOAT, Google DoubleClick for Advertisers, AppsFlyer, Adjust)
• Viewability (Ad Fraud: Integral Ad Science, comScore, Pixalate, Forensiq, DoubleVerify)
• Data Companies (1st party, 2nd party, 3rd party, Oracle, Acxiom, LiveRamp, Epsilon)

All of these fragmented ecosystems create opportunity, and opportunity breeds competition. Entrepreneurs, ad tech pioneers, and the Fortune 500s alike, race to claim market share when new opportunities present themselves. There’s always a consistent flow of new players, and eventually, these markets become saturated and the organizations that compete in these markets are forced to evolve.

Business Development in Ad Tech

The“Resource Pathways” framework was surfaced by Laurence Capron and Will Mitchell in their book: “Build, Borrow, or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma”, which states that company leaders must always consider all the different “pathways” for acquiring resources. The three pathways are Build (develop resources in-house), Borrow (develop resources externally via alliances/partnerships), and Buy (acquire resources via acquisition). The ad tech industry over indexes in the “Borrow” concept when looking to drive growth and evolve, and I’ll share a few anecdotes in a following chapter.

The Borrow methodology is what drives opportunities for BD and Partnership professionals to thrive in the ad tech industry.

As I mentioned, BD means different things based on a number of factors, with industry giving the most identity, so based on my experience, I’ve defined it here:

Business Development (in ad tech) identifies, proposes and executes new areas of business through new or existing win-win relationships, and to grow and optimize those relationships. In other words, BD focuses on driving company growth and evolution by creating programs and frameworks that enable organizations to invest in the “Borrow” methodology.

New Relationships (acquisition) and Existing Relationships (growth) are the core pillars of BD in ad tech:

• Acquisition: Prospecting, forming new relationships, market research, building (not designing) programs and executing partnerships that create value.
• Growth: Managing existing relationships, partners and programs. Create value by mining for new opportunities, proposing new programs for existing partners, and optimizing relationships. 

How an organization defines BD and its responsibilities may include either Acquisition, Growth, or both. It depends on what creates the most value for the organization at that time. How an organization defines value can be fluid, and evolves alongside the ecosystem and the organization.

Value
Just like BD, value can mean something different depending on a number of factors. Some companies, for example, may need to prioritize revenue inputs, such as lead gen, channel sales, resellers, etc. Others may lack the product and engineering resources to keep up with their competitors, so they form partnerships to enhance their product or service offering. Large software companies, such as Salesforce, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, manage a large marketplace of partners, which allows companies to build products and services on top of their platforms via APIs. In this case, you have a very large BD and Partnerships department, where you might have one person on the team focusing on managing the technical aspect of API integrations, another focused on researching new markets and building new programs, and another focused on managing relationship of the partners and growing their business.

However an organization decides to define the role of BD and the value they bring to the business, relationships are a core instrument of the BD professional.

Relationships
BD’s role in Ad Tech is to propose and execute new areas of business through win-win relationships, and manage the overall success of those relationships. Behind every business and every decision, there are people, and people make decisions on whether or not to do business with, or expand the business they do with you, based on the relationship they have with you. The ROI of a relationship is very difficult to measure, but strong relationships pay dividends in the form of information, consultation, navigation, introductions, direct revenue, leads, and more. Don’t cut corners around building and managing relationships as a BD professional working in ad tech.


Emerging careers such as Business Development are only broadly scoped and defined. BD means many different things to many different people based on many different factors. From my perspective, the role of BD in Ad Tech is to identify, propose and execute new areas of business through existing win-win relationships. BD professionals don’t sell products or services, they sell and manage mutual investments and opportunities.