Business Development Theater

Adtech has built an entire ecosystem of partnerships designed to generate press releases. Here is a three-question diagnostic for telling the real deals from the alibi ones.

Most mornings I read LinkedIn over coffee. And lately I keep running into the same experience, a headline about a major new partnership, two recognizable logos, language about expanding reach or unlocking new data or strengthening supply relationships. It sounds meaningful. Then I read past the headline and realize there is nothing there. No revenue mechanism anyone is willing to name. No change in how either business actually operates. No clear answer to the question of why this deal exists beyond the fact that it can be announced.

This is not an accident. At some point in adtech, business development stopped being a function that drives commercial outcomes and started being a function that produces the appearance of momentum.

The press release became the deliverable. The partnership became the alibi.

Here is how it happened.

Look at how BD teams are measured and you will find the root of it. OKRs that read like activity logs: attend every major conference, maintain a pipeline of twenty active conversations, grow data coverage, sign a new partner by end of quarter. These sound like progress. They produce calendar density and a long list of signed agreements that nobody can connect to revenue. The team looks busy. The org feels like it is moving. The deals sit in a deck and get referenced in QBRs and quietly go nowhere.

Compare that to an OKR that reads: sign a new premium CTV publisher through a direct connection that expands first party data coverage by 20% and results in an increase of revenue by $1M by Q3. That OKR requires someone to be accountable for something real. It has a mechanism, a number, and a deadline. It cannot be satisfied by a press release because the press release is not the outcome. The revenue is the outcome.

The shift from the second kind of OKR to the first kind is when BD became theater. And the industry let it happen because activity based measurement is easier to defend in a review than outcome based measurement is. Nobody gets fired for signing twenty partners. People get fired for signing five partners that were supposed to generate $5M and didn't. So the incentive runs toward volume and away from accountability, and the press release economy is what you get on the other side of that trade.

The three-question diagnostic:

I developed this framework while attempting to write my own book on business development, and I have used it to evaluate BD pipelines across several organizations. If you cannot answer all three questions about a deal you are working, you are not doing business development. You are doing business development theater.

Question One: Which strategic objective does this deal serve? Name it specifically.

Not "strengthen our supply-side relationships." That is not a strategic objective, it is a category. The specific version sounds like, "Access premium CTV inventory from broadcast affiliated publishers at sub $20 CPM for direct response advertisers." If you cannot name the objective at that level of specificity, you do not have a strategic objective. You have a rationale that was assembled after the conversation started, to justify a deal that was interesting before anyone asked what it was for.

Question two: What OKR does this deal contribute to? Name the specific, measurable outcome.

If the answer is "It builds the relationship," that is an alibi OKR. Relationships are inputs. Revenue, data coverage, inventory access, cost reduction, those are outcomes. A real deal connects to a real number that someone is being held to. If you cannot draw that line, the deal does not belong in the pipeline. It belongs in a different category: relationship support, market intelligence, competitive awareness. Those are legitimate activities, but they are not business development.

Question three: What did you learn in discovery that made you confident the deal would deliver? Name the assumption you tested, how you tested it, and what you found.

This is the question that catches alibi deals at the moment they are created rather than after they fail. Most BD theater gets created in the discovery phase, or more accurately, in the absence of one. The conversation goes well, there is obvious strategic overlap on the surface, someone says "we should do something together," and both sides start working toward a solution of partnership without anyone stopping to test whether the thing being announced will actually work or create value. The integration is assumed. The data quality is assumed. The demand is assumed. The discovery conversation that would have surfaced those assumptions never happens. The worst is, Client ABC asked for this 6 months ago, and we really need it to unlock revenue. How much revenue? I dont know, it’s hard to say.

If the answer to this question is "we did not really do discovery," the alibi was created in that gap. Everything built on top of it is theater.

If any deal in your current portfolio fails this diagnostic, you already know what it is.

The harder question is whether you are willing to say so out loud. BD pipelines have a gravitational pull toward continuation. Deals that have been in motion for six months feel expensive to kill even when the answers to these three questions are clearly empty. The relationship exists. The counterpart is expecting the announcement. The press release is drafted. Killing it feels like losing something, even when what you are actually killing is a commitment to outcomes you were never going to hit.

That discomfort is the theater working exactly as designed. It makes continuation feel like the responsible choice and accountability feel like the disruptive one. Real business development runs the logic the other way: the deal that cannot answer these three questions is the liability, and removing it from the pipeline is the responsible call.

The bar in adtech for what counts as a meaningful partnership announcement has been so low for so long that most practitioners have stopped noticing. The press release goes out, the trade publication covers it, the quarter gets checked off, and nobody asks the question that matters: did this change anything? In most cases, the honest answer is no. And the industry will keep producing that answer until BD teams start being held to a different one.

Curious how other BD and partnerships leaders are handling this internally: are outcome-based OKRs gaining traction in your organizations, or is the activity-based model still the default? Reply or drop a comment.