By Paul Evans, Founder and Chief Positioning Engineer, V2RSION
Amazon has announced that the Amazon Ads Agent is replacing its DSP. Writing in their newsletter recently, Brian O’Kelley and Anne Coghlan placed the new product in a category they call the Universal Buying Platform: one that can help an advertiser ‘put their money to work on any surface’. Aperiam Ventures has then mapped something very similar, which it calls Unified Media Platforms: AI software that plans and buys media across channels and learns from measurement as it goes.
Both describe a real change in how media gets bought, and I agree with both the intent, the analysis and the innovation this represents. But as someone who has developed positioning for more AdTech and Media businesses than anyone else, my problem with these category names lies with the framing and context that it implies. A category name tells buyers who to compare you with and what value to expect from you, and ‘universal’ and ‘unified’ act to the contrary from their inception.
Where category sits in positioning
I define positioning as the strategic capability that translates what a business has decided to become into the context that enables customers to choose it. In my work, that context has six parts: the urgent customer problem being solved, the unique value created, how that value is delivered, the category, the competitors and alternatives being chosen against, and the target customers making the decision. I treat them like a strategic graphic equaliser. Every business sits at a different level on each one, and its positioning should reflect where the weight falls.
Category is an incredibly important choice in any positioning work. For some clients, it’s the lever we pull to define their differentiation. Once it is chosen, you have largely decided who you are compared with, why customers should consider you. It also brings in the wider drivers and barriers of that market, that are addressed through the positioning language to help contextualise difference and value for buyers.
A test for any category
You may be reading this and thinking that this is “just” about naming – something superficial. Wrong. A strong category names a value the company can prove and competitors struggle to claim, so the comparison happens in context that plays to its advantage. A weak one describes scope and features, meaning what the product does. Scope fits every competitor as well as it fits you, so buyers expect products that are broadly the same. Analysts and investors need labels that group companies so a market can be mapped, but a label that is good for grouping companies is rarely good for getting one of them chosen.
Compliant and digitalAudience
Compliant, recently acquired by pubX, is the second client business I’ve worked with to be bought after I developed and delivered its positioning. It was competing in verification, a crowded market where vendors describe themselves in similar terms. We chose Data Integrity as its category because it named something Compliant could prove and own. Jamie Barnard and his team committed to it fully, to the point of building a Data Integrity Index into the product and through GTM partnerships with leading industry bodies like the WFA.
Two years on, pubX is building Compliant’s data integrity signals into the decisions its AI agents make when they buy media. Agentic buying has made the category worth more now than when we chose it. As Barnard said when the deal was announced, the signals ‘sit in the decision itself, so an agent weighs them before it buys’, and that is what gives a CMO ‘the confidence to trust pubX’s agents’.
digitalAudience, acquired by Zeta Global, got there by a different route. Its lead investor, FirstPartyCapital, helped position it as Data Infrastructure to reflect that the company had already built onboarding into the major buying platforms and walled gardens. Data Infrastructure is a broader term than Data Integrity, but it was framed for a specific decision-maker, the acquirer, who already knew it had a gap to fill. In both cases the category framing was specific enough to communicate their value and difference expectations buyers might expect.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Having defined the Universal Buying Platform through Amazon as an illustration, O’Kelley and Coghlan apply the same sentence to WPP Open. By the end of their newsletter, they claim that any company which turns advertising spend into sales qualifies to sit within the UBP category: ‘Amazon, Salesforce, Publicis, OpenAI, Shopify, whoever’. A category frame that works for a retailer, a holding company, a CRM vendor and an AI lab is already setting its incumbents up to fail.
Aperiam’s map has the same weakness. More than two dozen vendors sit in one box under one description, from Pacvue, which grew up in retail media, to Omneky, which generates creative. They solve different problems for different buyers, and the name hides that. For any of them, joining the category means accepting a comparison on breadth with Amazon and the holding groups. O’Kelley and Coghlan concede that anyone setting out to become a UBP is ‘playing against the biggest companies in the world’. A category defined as doing everything everywhere all at once tells prospective buyers everything and nothing.
What the label leaves out
The frustrating part is that the thinking and product ingredients that sit underneath the ambiguity of the category naming are really interesting. O’Kelley and Coghlan describe the buyer’s data moving out to the media surface, where in programmatic the inventory comes to the bidder. They point to the large share of media that is not and will not be programmatic, including creators, sponsorship, linear, audio and outdoor. Aperiam’s best line sits in the small print of its map, which talks about ‘feedback from measurement retraining the buying layer’.
And this is the point. Any vendor that chooses to be classified as “universal” or “unified” better have some shit hot positioning to help pull them apart from everyone else. Those that don’t – those that can’t define the differentiated value that their business can truthfully claim over the category set – will find themselves competing on relationships and price.
