The Problem With Grids
Ok so you need to choose an adserver/tag manager/analytics tool/DMP/whatever.
But there are just so many, each with their own smarmy sales people, glossy one pagers and confusing feature lists.
In these sorts of situations the usual approach people take is to put together a grid of questions, send them around to potential vendors and then put them side to side before going with the cheapest making a decision.
The problem with these grids and the questions within them though is that they are nearly always framed in a way that the vendor answering them feels they have to find a way to answer in the positive, like this:
Do you integrate with X tool? – We integrate with 150+ different technology providers and have a dedicated tool integration team on hand to assist as required.
So that’s a “no” but you can look at doing it, maybe??
To illustrate further try this. Yes folks this is an interactive post! All together now say “groan!” I can’t hear you!
It’s Euro 2016 and you, yes you, have been put in charge of sourcing the footballs for the tournament. You have a choice of 4 different suppliers. A “helpful” grid has been compiled for you to help you choose the right one.
You must now choose which supplier to go with by clicking on the relevant link below. Your first click will be counted as your answer, feel free to look at the others afterwards though.
Hopefully you made the right choice!
The lesson here is to avoid grids or at least grids and questions like the above. Also try to avoid “scoring” or giving points to vendors based on some arbitrary system or personal bias, things are so much more complicated than a star rating.
Try to come up with a needs statement that outlines what you need to have and would like to have:
We need to be able to count people downloading our app back to our social campaigns running with X and Y. This tracking needs to be on both a post impression and post click basis. We would like to be able to take the device IDs of users who download our app and don’t sign in to it using DSP Z.
Focus on the differences between partners. Don’t be afraid to ask for specific details, implementation plans/timelines, demos, etc.
Remember it’s not all about the money, money, money.