Marketers and Tech Providers Share a Common Goal

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Ad-Lib.io’s Adit Abhyankar discusses the common pitfalls of the proof of concept method. Below, in his own words, he shares four questions to keep in mind when testing and adopting ad-tech solutions. The term “proof of concept” (POC) has been around since the late '60s when the scientific community first defined it as a development stage designed to test program feasibility. Since then, the POC has become an often-used technique in the tech sales process to win longer-term customer relationships via a test-and-learn approach. Much has been written, mostly for sales, on how to leverage this process to the best advantage. Despite that, 78% of the IT executives from the Global 2000 companies surveyed in a recent CIO Innovation Index said that less than 50% of the POCs they participate in result in production deployments. Why is this happening? Taking a closer look at the expectations I hear from businesses looking to evaluate new technology, the heart of the problem lies with matching the right goals to this early-stage proofing process. Too often, and especially for ad tech where the pilot includes capture of performance data, the knee-jerk measure of success is set solely on uplift, and at a magical percentage that seems like a significant-enough signal of business performance improvement. But the challenge for both sides lies in the question: “Improvement over what?” Frequently, these short, time-compressed POCs are conducted without any baseline against which to compare. Or, rather than share the current state of their performance with the vendor, businesses set an arbitrary, but significant enough, high water mark for uplift to simply remove risk from their investment decision. For ad tech, however, when so many factors can affect the outcome of a campaign, finding a previous baseline that serves as a true control case for the POC is almost impossible. And there is also the challenge of setting the POC duration. Sometimes a short POC makes sense, but sometimes you really need to give it a year to test valid performance impact. If the value of the solution also involves rethinking ways of working, more time may also be needed to understand the change management effort and adoption horizon. In the end, then, if the uplift result is just a matter of luck and/or a number that has no real comparison point, and the POC's duration is too short for the customer’s team to feel comfortable, the customer is left with an empty feeling about the future investment value, and the whole effort goes on pause. My suggestion—both for marketing organizations and the solution vendors looking to serve them—would be to get back to the term “feasibility” in a holistic way. Use the POC to understand if the solution and provider will meet the customer’s needs at full production scale. Based on my experience with POCs that worked, and some that didn’t, I would recommend adding four key questions to be mutually agreed upon as part of the evaluation: Scope: Did this solution accomplish the complete range of expected deliverables?Expertise: Did this vendor demonstrate the expected level of expertise and responsiveness during the POC? Did they assume their fair share of joint problem-solving?Communication: Will our two organizations develop the rapport and commitment to scale the deployment across disparate teams?Outcomes: Were there enough examples of success—not just in performance, but also ease-of-use and expanded capabilities—to indicate that performance at a larger scale and higher level was likely? Digital transformation is driving data and automation into every corner of daily business, so it is all the more important that the relationship between businesses and their technology providers be evaluated on more than just short-term, one-run test outcomes. To make the right vendor selection and build a solid foundation to drive long-term business results, my advice would be to make sure you have asked these questions before choosing the POC path: Is a POC really necessary and why?What are you “proving,” and is your vendor on the same page?Have you included qualitative as well as quantitative measures?Have you considered the demands of a full-scale implementation, and is this test best set up to evaluate that future state? The result will be a clearer, shared view between customer and solution provider, and it will speed the path to innovation and joint success for both parties.

Columnist Network

What Are You Really Proving With Your Proof of Concept?

Marketers and tech providers share a common goal: feasibility

Adit Abhyankar

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Adit Abhyankar