If you go to the Product Hunt advertising and marketing categories, you will find the top 10 most upvoted products are far from revolutionary.
Even if you look at the Stackie 2019 winner, the colorful Airstream’s marketing stack, HubSpot is the only tool across all the categories. A CRM, in the era when people are realizing that the CRM model is outdated.
Ad Tech and MarTech companies are playing safe. Google Ads’ new features are about improvements to the current platform, instead of trying something dramatically different.
One explanation is that the investment is shifting to AI-based automation, and most of the work is behind the scenes, not something that the user can see.
Marketing and advertising (as a form of telling a story and creating human connections) are far from being fully developed.
Eventually, new players will come up, and rather than focusing on solving privacy issues, or fully automating everything, they will focus on the user’s experience and how they can assist advertisers in creating better experiences for consumers.
