“We see a vast ecosystem that uses data and metrics in different ways, not just for currency,” she said in this interview with Beet. TV. “We think there will be many different ways to transact over time.”

Consumer data applications for advertisers include media attribution, conversion events, business outcomes, viewability and fraud prevention. For publishers, consumer data can help to get a better understanding of their audiences.

“If you’re taking the impressions that you’re serving, not only understanding the reach and frequency they might be delivering, but then also getting all the way to business outcomes, you’re able to create that transparency all the way to the bottom line,” Grammier said.

LiveRamp prioritizes authenticated, opt-in data from consenting consumers.

“When we think about responsible media at LiveRamp, we definitely start at the consumer. We to make sure we have their consent” to gather personal and authenticated data, she said. “You ask for their permission, and in that moment, you also capture the information that allows you to potentially to deliver the targeting to them.”

Connected TV platforms not only can glean viewership data from device identifiers and internet protocols (IPs), but also when they collect payment information.

“Most of the inventory is actually authenticated because we are charging for it. We are creating authentication moments,” she said. “The infrastructure, though, really wasn’t built to use that authenticated data originally.”

Advertisers have shifted their media spending to CTV and over-the-top platforms whose viewership provides incremental reach to linear TV.

“We see a lot of reach-maximizing strategies going on, and the consumers’ eyeballs have moved to the CTV platforms,” she said. “There will be a time when we’re all using that authenticated data, that consented data.”

If those are the three Ps of the practice known as supply path optimization (SPO), then here is another framework.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ashwini Karandikar, EVP, Media, Technology, Data of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As), sets out what she calls a “clean supply framework”.

Multi-pronged approach

“Cleaning up suppliers is not just a function of adding a tag to your brand safety tag or what-have-you,” she says. “It takes all parties to participate to ensure that what you are curating is suitable and clean for your brand.

In fact, Karandikar sets out four “pillars”:

• “Technology vendors: working with partners that will help you figure out which kind of supplies is sort of for your brand and which is not”
• “Publishers: are finally the owners of the supply and ensuring that they are curating it on your behalf, that they’re curating the supply on your behalf.”
• “Contracts: there are many legal frameworks that you can put in terms of the contracts, in terms of the type of media you want to buy.”
• “Education: lots of education across the board for everyone.”

Demand for supply optimization

SPO has risen as more ad buyers have wanted a better handle on the kinds of inventory they are really buying, and how.

It has also grown in importance as ethics and responsible behavior have risen on the agendas of not only publishers but, crucially, ad buyers.

In the past, Karandikar says, the notion of cleaning up supply was mainly restricted to programmatic media.

But now that more media have become digital media, applying SPO principles – in terms of how advertisers can plan, buy, optimise, analyse and go back and feed all this data back into their next planning cycle – is possible for all media types, Karandikar says.

“When we plan media on behalf of our clients, we don’t plan them in channel siloes. We plan across multiple screens, because that’s where media is being consumed,” Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at WPP-owned media agency Wavemaker, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “In addition to measuring the delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

Advertisers face a key challenge as technology giants like Google and Apple take steps to protect consumer privacy. Google delayed plans to stop supporting tracking cookies in its popular Chrome web browser, but the deadline still looms. Apple has given its customers more control over device identifiers they share with third-party apps and websites.

Advertisers also have to content with a variety of “walled garden” media environments that each have proprietary consumer data. It’s not always clear whether brands are reaching the different consumers as they use Facebook, Google or Amazon – or watch video on ad-supported streaming platforms like Hulu or Peacock.

Beekman said that she’s encouraged by work on data “clean rooms” that protect consumer privacy, while also opening up the possibility of measuring how advertising is reaching different audiences. She also is optimistic about using panel data to study purchase behavior among retailers in real time, and to change campaigns mid-flight.

“Some of the challenges are: how do we include the walled gardens when they sometimes prioritize not commingling their data with other platforms?” Beekman said. “It can be difficult with digital tracking when we think about the advancements that have been made for consumer privacy.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

But what if it could also move the needle on social responsibility?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM VP, Managing Partner, Global Head of Programmatic, explains how SPO is changing.

Socially-responsible SPO

SPO has risen as more ad buyers have wanted a better handle on the kinds of inventory they are really buying, and how.

But now it’s more than that.

“The idea of inclusion in social responsibility, understanding what properties our clients and GroupM is really supporting, is really at the forefront of our minds and has been for a bit,” Jaffe says.

He says the first step is to focus around  understanding all of the players within the path, their alignment and focus with buyer aims.

Multi-pronged effort

GroupM works with SSPs from the likes of Index Exchange, SpotX and PubMatic.

But SPO is evolving now to focus on more than just SSPs, Jaffe says, pointing to the importance of all three parties:

• DSP – “We kind of knew early on that the DSP always plays a critical role, but it’s just as important to kind of engage with everyone along that supply chain.”
• SSP – “Understanding what SSPs can bring to the table for buyers.”
• Publishers – “We have been exploring what we can do to kind of build closer relationships with our publishers”.

“If you go to more performance-savvy advertisers and performance-savvy customers, the questions are about understanding cross-screen exposures to business outcomes or KPIs that the marketer may need,” Louqman Parampath, vice president of product management – advertising, at streaming-device maker Roku, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV.

Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Parampath described the current condition of cross-screen measurement and the challenges of combining data sets from different sources.

“Most measurement partners don’t have all of these data assets and identity graph capabilities, and a methodology all buttoned up for a complete solution,” he said. “It is going to be an evolutionary improvement on how we measure, how we improve our capabilities – and how the ecosystem itself works with each other. These are different datasets, often not controlled by a single party.”

Strategic Alliance With Nielsen

Roku in March formed a strategic alliance with TV ratings company Nielsen aimed at improving media measurement and video advertising. Roku agreed to buy Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business that includes its video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies.

The partnership included a plan to integrate complementary Nielsen ad and content measurement products into the Roku platform and advance the Nielsen One cross-media measurement solution.

“It’s a step forward for traditional TV, and opens up new ad opportunities for other programmers/sell-side, but it also opens up all the data, targeting and measurement capabilities that marketers/buy-side has historically wanted,” Parampath said. “We can bring these addressable TV exposures into this cross-screen measurement solution.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

Responsible advertising “goes a step deeper, and it does get into a little bit of the idea of corporate responsibility and corporate welfare, and really making sure our workflows, our transactions are transparent,” Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a unit of WPP’s media agency GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

Making advertising work better for people is a key goal for GroupM’s media-buying framework called “Responsible Investment.” The idea is to create a healthier advertising ecosystem that advances brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.

As much as advertisers want to ensure they’re reaching consumers with relevant marketing messages, they need to be mindful of people’s demands for privacy and willingness to opt out of data sharing. Advertisers also help to create a positive media environment by supporting the production of quality programming.

“Yes, there are subscription models out there that do work and do create good content, but what a lot of people sometimes forget is that advertising does drive a lot of content production,” Fisher said. “It’s a responsibility for us to ensure not just that advertising is used to deliver a message, but also to deliver strong content and create that content.”

Shift in Viewing Habits

The pandemic led many people to spend more time at home and further embrace streaming services that let them time-shift programming and discover other content. The rapid growth in digital platforms led advertisers to shift from daypart-based media buying and planning to impression-based methods. Streaming has become a major complement to linear TV.

“That means that we as an agency needed to change our approach very quickly as well, understanding that when everybody is at home during the pandemic and wanting to watch primetime content at all hours, every hour of the day became a theoretical ‘prime’ hour,” Fisher said.

But, increasingly, the demands of recognizing diversity – and the profits that can come from doing so – are compelling them to understand distinct groups of people.

It is a practice called human-centered design. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jason Gaikowski, VMLY&R’s global lead for human-centered design and executive director for CX transformation, talks about it with 4As CEO Marla Kaplowitz.

Empathy unlocks understanding

“One of the real powers of human-centred design is it is fundamentally grounded in empathy, and it is fundamentally grounded in curiosity,” says Gaikowski, whose VMLY&R is a marketing agency owned by WPP.

“It lets you see the world differently. It lets you understand that your experience is biased. Just because it’s true for you, it doesn’t make it true.

“When you’re able to view the world with that fuller and more open perspective, it gets really easy and obvious to see that there are people who, they’re in unfortunate circumstance and systematic disadvantage.”

Understanding experiential benefit

Although human-centered design is all about understanding, well, humans, increasingly it is technology that is enabling that understanding.

Understanding consumers at this level is going to require a lot of data capture and the right kind of algorithmic detection.

“What’s next is companies understanding that empathy and humanity is actually a competitive differentiator and a competitive advantage,” Gaikowski adds.

He thinks companies will need to evolve from just considering product effectiveness to also considering the net benefit in a consumer’s life from her choice to add a brand to it.

“I think that we’re at the dawn of a complete redesign of how we think about what it means to be in a relationship with a customer,” Gaikowski says. “I don’t think that it’s so much customer relationship management, I think that we’re moving into a world of a partnership relationship with customers.”

Tech-driven insight

Gaikowski’s team has used the practice, for example, to build a Ranger Support Team for Ford after realizing some of its international vehicles were prone to breakdown.

And he says it has allowed another VMLY&R client, Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, to see how Miami’s majority Cuban and Latinx population has “an uncomfortable bias sometimes around trans, LGTBQ people”.

Gaikowski thinks artificial intelligence will be key to unlocking empathy and understanding.

“The kind of reconstructions that we can do with artificial intelligence, the insights that we can find via machine learning that then inspire something that was completely unimaginable even five years ago,” he says. “It’s perhaps the most creative time of my career.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.  This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page. 

The programmatic marketplace has evolved to give advertisers greater flexibility in their media buying, while also being mindful of the consumer experience. That include a reduced ad load, innovative ad units and other opportunities for brands to engage with viewers.

“In order to maintain and preserve a responsible ecosystem, particularly for programmatic, we must always consider the consumer,” Ashley Luongo, senior vice president of advanced TV and programmatic digital sales at NBCUniversal, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s about the on-demand access and meeting consumers where they are, but it’s also about the user experience and keeping that at the center.”

Different Ways to Buy Media

Marketers may have the misconception that the programmatic marketplace consists of the scatter market, without opportunities for placements adjacent to premium content. With private marketplaces (PMPs), programmatic guaranteed or insertion orders, advertisers can now buy ad time in the upfront or scatter market.

“That level of flexibility and activation-agnostic approach affords all partners the ability to transact in the way that best meets their business objectives,” Luongo said.

NBCUniversal has invested billions of dollars in technology and premium content that helps to ensure that advertisers have access to brand-safe premium content through the programmatic marketplace, Luongo said.

“It’s no longer a small slice of an investment that’s peeled or carved out. It’s very intentional, it’s very front and center,” Luongo said. “The opportunity is to leverage programmatic as the most intelligent and sophisticated way of buying available in the marketplace today.”

Digital media companies, advertisers and ad-tech companies have fretted that the loss of tracking  cookies and device identifiers is making audience targeting more difficult. Providers of ad-supported streaming video already work in a cookieless environment that’s mindful of the consumer experience.

“The lessons in a way that smart TV or CTV advertising is creating a standard that all digital advertising has to live up to,” Colin Petrie-Norris, chief executive of streaming video service Xumo, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. “The fact that is operating in a cookieless environment has very much direct bearing on how display and mobile and others work.”

Xumo has a responsibility to a variety of constituencies, including viewers, advertisers, electronics manufacturers and content providers, Petrie-Norris said to Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM. Xumo’s platform offers viewers with 220 live channels that have been vetted to ensure they are legitimate providers of video content.

“We have to treat their brand as if it was our own.  We have an obligation to them to make sure they get the scale, get the reach which advertisers enjoy; to use data to appropriately target users; and also to manage ad experience,” Petrie-Norris said. “We do a lot of work optimizing the ad experience, and making sure that we’re not overdoing the ads. It does work better when you can serve fewer ads which are more relevant. You can more engagement, more return users.”

Trusted Media Partners

Advertisers have grown more concerned about ad fraud amid discoveries of illegitimate CTV providers that spoof valid household internet addresses and generate fake viewership numbers. Petrie-Norris recommends that advertiser work with trusted partners and third-party verification providers to avoid this activity.

“The solution is: know who you’re buying from. Having a good guide who can take you through that is incredibly important for that,” he said. “The issues that the industry is faced with are on the decline relative to the scale emerging from the robust, reputable players.”

Comcast Integrations

Comcast last year acquired Xumo as part of a broader expansion into streaming video, which has become a popular way to see programming without a cable or satellite TV subscription. With Comcast’s backing, Xumo has plans to offer a broader range of programming.

“We are very encouraged by the future in front of us in terms of as we start to bring all of that muscle to bear in the space, we’re going to see very exciting things to come,” Petrie-Norris said. “We’ve earned a place in people’s living room during the pandemic, but now we have to show that we can continue to provide them and earn their time.”

Making advertising work better for people is at the heart of an effort by GroupM to promote a media-buying framework it calls “Responsible Investment.” The idea is to create a healthier advertising ecosystem that advances brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.

“The screen itself hasn’t lost consumption. The TV screen has been consumed more than ever before. Where we see a shift is how we buy it,” Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at GroupM’s Wavemaker, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “For us as an industry to get a lot better, we’ve got to create the mechanisms that allow us to plan appropriately in both scenarios.”

Extending media reach while limiting wasteful spending is still the goal, and marketers have ways to measure CTV viewability with internet addresses and automatic content recognition (ACR) data on smart TVs. Still, there remains a need to link impressions with outcomes.

“We also have to think about: what did that incremental reach do for my business? If I did reach new people, great. Did they grow the base from sales?” Rinaldi said. “Those two things have not come together yet, so we have to separate church and state for now.”

Amid these rapid changes in viewing habits, measurement companies and data providers are developing solutions to track consumer exposure to advertising. Rinaldi said there still will be challenges in bringing together viewing data from different sources.

“I don’t think we’re going to see ‘perfect’ in the next couple years. That’s one of the flaws we have as a marketplace right now. We’re waiting for that perfect scenario to be measured in every single screen that we touch,” he said.

Brands need to consider the needs of their campaigns, and what they hope to learn from their measurement methods, Rinaldi said.

“When we take that approach, we won’t create perfection, but we’ll at least create this learning agenda and test-and-learn scenario,” he said.

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

Browser cookie deprecation, plus limits on mobile identifiers imposed by Apple amongst others, are limiting traditional  targeting methods used by advertisers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, one ad agency executive says technology can come riding in to help.

Loss of signal

“Many marketers already made the choice to work with specific partners, lean on specific technologies, says Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at GropM’s Wavemaker.

“The burning questions we get today from marketers is more about the changes they have to make because of privacy.

“They see a massive pressure coming from all these changes related to privacy.”

“We’re going to lose lots of (audience) signals.”

After the identifier

The loss of those signals has emerged as the key advertiser challenge in 2020 and 2021.

One of the solutions mooted is a leaning toward first-party data, that which can be gathered from consumers with permission.

But, with some expecting the vast majority of iOS users, for example, not to opt in to tracking like location and app usage, finding users in the noise is getting more difficult.

Machines offer help

Hernoux sees a solution in artificial intelligence.

“The power of machine learning is really to build this layer of intelligence on top of a more limited amount of signals and translate that into something which is quite meaningful,” she says.

What kind of intelligence? That depends on the use case.

“It may be insight, it can be intelligence that is going to optimise media planning, but it can also be the predictive piece,” Hernoux claims.

“Everybody’s looking to really know where you need to put your media dollars to maximise the return on investment and contribute more to your bottom line.”

Europe ignited the new privacy era with its GDPR legislation, prompting California’s CCPA, deprecation of third-party cookies and other mobile identifiers and now a federal look at privacy policy.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, 4As EVP for government relations Alison Pepper says agencies are having to live with the new regulated environment – but they deserve a consistent approach.

No more self-regulation

“The advertising industry is really at an inflexion point when it comes to privacy right now,” she says.

Pepper thinks the last time such a moment hit advertising was around 2007 and 2008, when the industry got together and coalesced around self-regulatory principles for online behavioural advertising.

“I think we’re no longer in an environment where we can really truly rely on self-regulation to do what needs to happen to keep our industry thriving and vibrant,” she says.

‘Uniformity’ needed

So, more regulation is happening; most people accept that.

But Pepper is one of many advertising industry executives who are craving a consistent approach to that regulation, so that companies don’t have to operate in different ways for different states and countries.

She is speaking for the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Pepper’s words are a call on behalf of ad agencies for simplicity.

“We’re really going to have to regulate … at a national level so that we don’t see this bifurcation of different privacy regimes happen at the state level,” she says.

“Agencies have so many touchpoints into how they’re getting data and how they’re using data that I think agencies increasingly have a really strong interest in seeing one national standard. They really need uniformity.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page. 

“People are hearing what advertisers are needing in terms of cross-screen and cross-media measurement. What I would love, though, is if we could really bring it down to a level and speak every openly about what these solutions do and don’t solve for,” Jennifer Gardner, senior director of media for North America at household goods giant Unilever, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV.

Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Gardner offered her outlook for improving cross-screen measurement. She likens the development to past efforts to measure ad viewability and to eliminate ad fraud.

“The goal of viewability was to count first so that we could then look at attribution and the tie to business. I don’t think we’ve made it there. There’s still a lot to do in the attribution space,” she said. “There’s nobody else out there who wouldn’t want to be able to buy media in an outcomes-based world, but we know there are stepping stones to get there. That’s another place where we as an industry need to hold hands and get to.”

Unilever, whose brands include Dove soap, Lipton tea and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, is working with GroupM on test cases to improve cross-screen measurement before beginning a pilot program by the end of the year.

“When I want counting, I don’t want people grading their own homework,” Gardner said. “We trust, but verify. The role of third parties is critically important.”

Brand Safety and Suitability

The growth in platforms that distribute user-generated content, such as social media and video-sharing sites, has increased the possibility that advertising appears next to objectionable content. In response, marketers have become more aware of brand safety and suitability in their ad placements. They also want to be responsible mindful of data ethics and other measures that respect consumers.

“Just because a platform, a publisher, a media seller declares a piece of content eligible for monetization doesn’t mean that we as marketers or advertisers want to be showing up in and around that content,” Gardner said. “The end goal is good experience for the consumer. It only helps all of us in the industry to continue creating good experiences for consumers because then our advertising and marketing messages have a much greater chance of breaking through.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

For Marlo Skiko, it also marked another change. From being EVP ad ad agency Starcom, Skiko went brand-side at Ford Motor Company, as US and global head of media.

In this fireside interview with Mindshare North America CEO Amanda Richman for Beet.TV, Skiko says her time has been characterized by quests toward brand safety, ad-buying transparency and understanding of a diverse consumer set.

New audiences

“As we look for ‘where’s the growth going to come from?’, that leads us to audiences that we may have been courting,” Skiko says.

“But maybe we need to put some more effort there, and understanding that and what that leads us to, ‘Okay, who’s next? How are we most relevant for growth audiences for diverse audiences, for women, audiences that we’re saying we have some of, but these new products may help us engage in even better ways than we have already?'”

That drive is becoming more important. Ford US sales in June 2021 were 26.9% down on the prior year.

But the company is now pushing the pedal on a new generation of electric vehicles, with a Mustang all-electric and electric and hybrid versions of F-150 and Escape.

It’s the truck of our past, and our present. On May 19, it becomes the truck of our future.#F150Lightning #BuiltFordProud pic.twitter.com/I72ZVTc1oQ

— Ford Motor Company (@Ford) May 10, 2021

Resetting with laser focus

Skiko wants to ensure that she has adequate sight of where Ford is showing up.

Last year, she set a new series of expectations around ad transparency and brand safety, re-setting expectations of its partners in a more deliberate fashion.

“If we’re not defined in what our expectations are and we set what the accountability is, it’s really hard to lead that conversation” she says.

“In this past year, we became even more laser-focused and set very refined criteria where there can’t be a question. And we broke it down and had just a very methodical framework.

“Then we went to our partners and we had purposeful conversation … a two way dialogue that we lay out what’s really important to us and that we have a roadmap to get there.”

That roadmap will now be key in Ford understanding who, amongst a diverse customer set for a diverse vehicle line-up, it is reaching and how effectively.

.@mskiko, Head of U.S. & Global Media, @Ford, assumed her position in Jan. 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to spread.

What's one of @Ford's key takeaways of 2020 according to @mskiko? Don't think about women one-dimensionally.

Read more: https://t.co/bLnwd4EfJr pic.twitter.com/pCMhtVfu23

— SeeHer (@SeeHerOfficial) June 11, 2021

Working together

But Skiko doesn’t think Ford can, or should, make the journey alone.

The group is part of PRAM, the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, a diverse range of ad-interested groups trying to re-think the use of technology in light of software vendor changes.

“No one marketer can define this just on their agenda,” Skiko says.

She says she wants to answer a broad set of questions, like: “How are we being perceived? How are we showing up? And what do we need to do to be as clear and transparent to people when they come to us, no matter how they visit us?”

But, she says: “That takes all of us working together because it won’t just fall into place if we don’t connect those dots in the right ways. It really takes all of us together.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page. 

But what if it could recalibrate the creative works that make all that happen?

That is what is beginning to happen, as a new generation of AI-driven technology sets its sights on the creative process.

Creative ad-tech rising

In this video interview with Anush Prabhu, MediaCom’s US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell explains the new age of “creative advertising technology”.

O’Connell and her colleagues authored a report on the sector, which includes dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and similar tactics, in Q4 2020, covering companies like Adacado, Bannerflow, Celtra, Clinch, Flashtalking, Innovid, Jivox, RevJet, and SundaySky. She recently delivered this presentation on the topic.

O’Connell says it is made up of “companies that are solving for various parts through the creative process… everything from kind of ideation at the kind of beginning through to having things out in the wild”. And that creates two kinds of benefits:

Production – “Create 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 variations without paying a whole bunch of production people to do it manually. That saves money, that money can be reinvested in people or media or whatever.”

Performance – “Does it work better if I deliver a creative that’s more relevant or more timely or whatever, more resonant?”

Maturation through messiness

So, how big is creative advertising technology, and where will it go from here? Forrester’s O’Connell sees the category is an “awkward teenager”:

Immature stage: “We used technology as a substitute for good thinking.”

Awkward teenage years: “Where you’ve got the really cool kids that have leaned in and are doing the cool things, but it’s still sort of fringy.”

Mature: “Technology as an enabler of creativity, rather than technology as a substitute for creativity.”

AI for cultural understanding

The content of advertising could be revolutionized by technology, including artificial intelligence, some think.

MediaCom’s Prabhu says that includes “equalizing” for diversity. “Tthere is a new majority coming in that is more diverse, more in-tune with what we see America as,” he says. “Data is allowing us to get to know those audiences and talk to those audiences equally and in a better way.”

O’Connell says that is an appealing theory – but complexity will continue to make the reality difficult.

“You can do that in a very basic human way, but you can also do that using technology, using artificial intelligence to look for patterns in massive data sets that would help just generally point you in a better direction in terms of something like the zeitgeist,” she says. “But I don’t want to minimize actually how hard it really is.”

AI will come out of the shadows

Still, O’Connell predicts AI will show itself front-and-center in advertising, not just in the back-end.

“The thing about AI,” she says, “is that it is omnipresent in advertising, we just don’t know it – in everything from planning to optimization to creative (through) natural language processing and … machine learning.”

“(It will go from a) behind-the-scenes, important workhorse to something that starts to also feel like it’s front and center in terms of the consumer experience.

“And I think we’re going to see so much more there.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.  This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page. 

LOS ANGELES – Automated bidding for commercial time is becoming more predominant as advertisers demand more flexibility in their over-the-top (OTT) and connected (CTV) media buys. That shift comes as video publishers seek to monetize their growing audiences for higher-quality programming.

“The programmatic CTV landscape has changed dramatically just in a handful of years,” Nicole Scaglione, global vice president of OTT and CTV business at sell-side platform PubMatic, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we’re seeing now is more and more publishers emerging, more and more quality content coming into the programmatic marketplaces.”

PubMatic last year introduced OpenWrap OTT to provide header bidding for ad placements on CTV and OTT platforms. Header bidding an automated auction technology that lets publishers offer their ad inventories on several demand-side platforms (DSPs) and receive multiple bids simultaneously.

“We want to help publishers monetize every single possible impression in a CTV marketplace, and we know that one of the best, cleanest ways to do that is through a header product,” Scaglione said.

Source: eMarketer

Amid growing concerns about ad fraud, PubMatic extended its fraud-free guarantee to CTV platforms. The company also has taken steps to partner with third-party companies like Samba TV, which provides a multisource panel for advertising measurement.

“These are thoughtful, research-based solutions as we’re watching the CTV marketplace change and evolve over time and develop,” Scaglione said.

Publishers are looking for monetization solutions that are adaptable and forward-thinking, and provide support for different business needs, she said.

“Publishers are really busy developing great content and engaging with their audiences, and very few publishers have the luxury of being both content providers and also ad-tech platforms,” Scaglione said. “That’s our responsibility: to take that stress away from them, and be brilliant at the basics of monetization.”

“The reason the panel remains critical is because we need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The combination of using the panel data with the larger data set allows us to inform person-level assignment – and with that, the ability to view co-viewing as well.”

Digital video ad exposure is important for some of the more advanced campaign-related metrics, he said. Those measurements include how often viewers saw an ad, if at all, or were overexposed to it.

The information offers “the ability to understand reach and frequency, not from a traditional perspective where we had an estimated reach and a related calculated average frequency, but instead to actually understand what I would call the deterministic reach and frequency distribution curve,” he said.

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

In April, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), of which Liodice is CEO, issued a call seeking a consultant to conduct a study to help the organization understand how much actual spend is siphoned off in assorted fees.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Liodice and O’Connell use the language of military strategy to discuss the “information asymmetry” and “unknowables” at the heart of the industry.

‘Seat of our pants’

ANA’s interest was sparked by a report by ISBA, the trade body for UK advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and auditor PwC,  which found 15% of advertiser spend could not be attributed, whilst publishers receive only 51% of advertiser spend on average.

The figures were described as “mind-boggling” – especially several years after earlier industry reports first raised the problems around “ad tax” and transparency.

“The ad tech community is probably the least understood within the purview of brands and marketers,” Liodice says.

“It’s extraordinarily complex. There are billions of transactions that happen second by second, there are an incredible amount of handoffs and deals that take place between buyers and sellers, between SSPs and DSPs.

“The ad tech community knows a hell of a lot about what’s going on, they understand data flows, money flows – and the marketers pretty much do not. A lot of times, brands are flying by the seat of their pants.”

‘Almost opaque’

The problem, Liodice says, is “you don’t know what you don’t know”. He describes the “lack of information that we have to be able to make these decisions and optimise” as “almost opaque for us”.

That, in a programmatic world, is a far cry from history, when marketers had far more certainty about where fewer ads ran, in fewer destinations.

O’Connell and Liodice both hope a byproduct of the new focus on consumer privacy will be a cleaner, simpler and more transparent ad supply chain.

“Particularly now, as Google is deprecating its cookies and Apple is changing its IDFA policies, the marketers are essentially in the dark,” Liodice says.

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. 

It all boils down to a need to balance two key pillars – performance and responsibility – according to MediaMath chief partnerships officer Laurent Cordier.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Cordier talks about how those imperatives can come to the fore.

Performant and responsible

Cordier says there are two key considerations:

• “We should aim (to) make programmatic performing, make programmatic transparent, make programmatic valuable,” Cordier says.
• “The second side is, ‘What’s your responsibility, how do you see your responsibility or your role in continuing to favour or flourishing an open ecosystem?'”

He continues: “The role of the CMOs is critical.

“They’re the one who can influence their team about where to spend, and how important it is for any top brand in the world to continue to fuel the free, ad-supported web ecosystem with great dollars, with great money, with great advertising money.”

Do the math

In 2019, MediaMath launched a new initiative, Source, committing to:

• 100% “accountability” by the end of 2020, meaning “full visibility into supply path mechanics and costs”
• 100% “addressable” by the end of 2020, meaning “real humans that brands can reach”, versus mere targeting criteria.
• An extension to MediaMath’s partnership with White Ops, whose software identifies bots that defraud advertisers.

Source is MediaMath’s effort to bring together several hand-picked ad-tech vendors committed to accountability, addressability and AI.

Cordier is an 11-year Google veteran who joined MediaMath this April from HeadSpin, a video delivery company.

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page. 

As a sell-side platform (SSP) that represents publishers, PubMatic is a key part of the advertising supply chain. The media marketplace is undergoing a significant transformation as marketers look for ways to reach target audiences while respecting consumer privacy.

“We’re seeing activation of data shift to the supply side as it’s closer to the source, in many cases,” said Kyle Dozeman, chief revenue officer for the Americas at sell-side platform PubMatic, in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. “Our focus has been on building tools that allow publishers and data owners to directly connect their data to media, and share that with the brands that they work with.”

Dozeman recently shared his insights about the changing media ecosystem with Adam Gerber, global chief media officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM. The agency’s “Responsible Investment” framework aims to advance brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Supporting Diverse Publishers

A key challenge for marketers is finding ad inventory among smaller, independent publications that have relied on advertising revenue to finance their journalism. Dozeman said PubMatic has worked to help access that inventory.

“We use a lot of our partners in different parts of our business in ensuring material portions of our dollars are going to companies that have diverse leadership and strong foundations and principles around equity and inclusion,” he said. PubMatic “is leaning in with buyers who care about this, and helping them get more connected with diverse publishers.”

Environmental Sustainability

Dozeman and Gerber agreed that the digital advertising ecosystem needs to become more mindful about energy use. The computer servers that form the backbone of the digital ad marketplace consume significant amounts of energy.

“We are cognizant of that fact, and we’re going to start evaluating partners and our supply chain – and try to generate some good results,” Gerber said.

Supply Chain Transparency

Advertisers also are demanding greater transparency in the digital ad marketplace, not only to ensure they’re reaching the right audiences, but also to avoid losses to ad fraud. Dozeman said PubMatic is focused on quality publisher partners that are reliable.

“We know that brands need complete confidence,” Dozeman said. “Some vendors catch things that others don’t. We want to make sure we’re honoring whatever a brand uses for their source of truth.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the MD for solutions at WPP-owned Xaxis says the two different sides of the ad industry need to re-unite.

He says the key is finding ways to put creativity back at the centrality of ad ops, and scaling personal creative to programmatic scale.

Creative is under-played

“Creative in the programmatic space has always been underutilised, always been a little bit underappreciated,” Lin says.

He blames the separation on creative’s origins in linear media like TV and magazines, which led “creative agencies tend to be separate entities and separate disciplines from the media buying or the media planning entities”.

“In the programmatic industry, that creative activation is an afterthought because most of that creative again comes from the client’s creative agency,” Lin says. “So we’re essentially a lot of times taking or re-purposing what was already created by some agency who really have no connection to the media.”

Scaling creative

Lin wants to change that, so that clients to utilise and recognise the power of creative in the programmatic ecosystem.

But that’s going to involve combining distinct requirements from each side.

“What we really want to do as a company is make sure clients have really bespoke creative that speaks to the consumers in this environment, and also connect that to the data and to the media that they’re running with us,” Lin says.

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) can help the journey – the practice through which individual items within the creative can be customized for different recipients, leading to thousands of different variations.

That is a big increase from what Lin says is currently only “about three to about four creatives per campaign with clients”.

So technology is nevertheless going to be required to mix personal creative at scale.

Tools for responsibility

For Lin, it all adds up to the quest for “responsible media”, which he defines as: “Taking the trends that we have right now, but evolving them to the trends of the future, which means cookieless, which means more cohort-based optimizations and a huge emphasis on creative variations and creative optimization.”

Xaxis is using two tools to make that mix:

Copilot

Using signals like browser, location, time of day and the weather, “it enables us to create thousands of creative variations on the fly, it introduces thousands more different data inputs to which then our AI Copilot could actually optimise towards the output or the client’s outcome”.

Bid Grouper

“(It) takes cookieless cohorts of the best performing segments of inventory … like browser, creative, time of day, geo – and essentially optimises towards the best cohorts. So creative will only allow our AI and also other AIs to introduce a tonne of measurable aspects of the creative, like the click, how long someone hover on the ad, if they interacted with a video, how long they played a video.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.  This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page. 

“We want to make sure the consumer is at the center of this conversation,” said Karthik Rao, chief operating officer of TV ratings company Nielsen, in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Rao describes Nielsen’s plans to provide audience research that is meaningful to brands and their media partners.

Rao said Nielsen’s plans rest on three principles: resiliency, coverage and comparability.

“Resiliency foundationally is about adapting to…the massive changes in the privacy landscape,” he said, referring to stricter regulations to give people more control over their personal data. A resilient measurement system includes an identity capability that’s scalable and can be integrated seamlessly in a privacy-compliant way with Nielsen’s clientele.

The company also seeks to provide coverage that reflects the many ways consumers engage with content and advertising on different platforms. Comparability describes the goal of measuring deduplicated audiences.

Nielsen last year announced a plan to launch Nielsen One as a single, cross-media solution for more comparable and comprehensive metrics across platforms. The company will introduce the single measurement service in the fourth quarter of next year, as it seeks to transition the industry to cross-media metrics by the fall 2024 season.

Covid Disruptions

The coronavirus pandemic led companies to ensure the personal safety of their employees with work-from-home arrangements that limited physical interaction with others. Those steps to protect workers hindered Nielsen research that relies on personal interviews with members of its consumer panel.

“The panel ultimately fuels a lot of the measurement capabilities that we provide clients. We saw a little bit of erosion in the ratings,” Rao said. “More importantly than the actual erosion is the lack of clarity as to what is going to happen when we go back into homes.”

Standards for Single Currency

In developing Nielsen One as a single currency for measuring audiences, the company is seeking the insights from media buyers and sellers to avoid favoritism. Nielsen has partnered with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) to develop cross-media standards.

“We don’t want to try to help the industry this time by only listening to one constituency,” Rao said. “As part of our engagement program, we put together special committee groups…with representation from all constituencies. We want to get this right this time.”

Sweeney agreed that an identity solution is fundamental to media planning and buying, giving advertisers a way to harness their first-party data and information from other sources.

“Within this context, it starts with an identity. We come back to understanding who those individuals are that we, on behalf of marketing partners, want to reach,” he said. “It is about reach and frequency, but it’s also about the impact of that reach and frequency…Having a currency across all of these different touchpoints is also vital.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

“Profound change,” according to GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, McDonald interviews MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki on how the entire advertising industry can reboot itself for a new era.

From ‘hack’ to patchwork

Both McDonald and Zawadzki agreed cookies, the third-party usage of which is being deprecated, are a “20-year-old hack” on top of rudimentary browser technology, and are ill-suited to modern demands.

“If you thought that either last click or post-click post view was the right basis by which to manage a $500 billion industry on our way to a trillion dollars… is it going to work by asking people to touch their TV?,” Zawadzki said. “Highly unlikely.”

"The advertising ecosystem is begging for a redesign and it’s our job to give it one." Read more from our CPO, Anudit Vikram, on the urgent need for programmatic redesign, live now on @TheDrum: https://t.co/1g4eO3nZfO

— MediaMath (@mediamath) June 29, 2021

“We’re in a situation where we want to recreate addressability as defined by the humans behind the screens and speakers, which is good. But the way that we’re going to have to do it – we’ll have to become enterprise-open. It’ll have to be a portfolio of solutions.

“Those things will need to be selected, stitched in scale – it’s going to be deterministic solutions, probabilistic solutions, open solutions, proprietary solutions. You’re going to have to put these things together in a way that allows for orchestration across set screens and speakers.”

‘Go far, together’

Zawadzki said the new-look industry organization demands a more consensual, all-hands approach to redefinition. Previously, he suggested, self-interest ruled.

“People (have been) operating in silos in isolation… optimising for publisher yields, optimising for advertiser performance, optimising for intermediary profit growth,” he said.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

“You can’t solve the industry challenges in a silo.”

‘Look in the mirror’

Global Forum on Responsible Media – Watch the Program on Demand

Ultimately, the significant disruption happening in the ad industry can be beneficial, the MediaMath CEO said.

“It is a requirement that the industry reorganise itself around a new set of principles and work backwards from what it should look like and what it needs to look like.”

And GroupM CEO McDonald agreed. “Profound times require profound change,” he said.

“Profound change does have us have to sort of look in the mirror.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.

So why leave it to machines to find a solution?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, two executives discuss how artificial intelligence can come to the rescue of troubles in media and marketing:

• Randi Stipes, Chief Marketing Officer of IBM Watson Media and Weather
• Kieley Taylor, Global Head of Partnerships, Managing Partner, GroupM

AI = Added Inclusion

GroupM’s Taylor says she is using the tools to interrogate her agencies’ creative for inclusivity.

“There’s a tonne of opportunity … using AI to curb things like hate speech, to make sure that there is more inclusivity in the platform discourse,” she says.

“Personalization at scale sometimes was not as meaningful as it could be to people who are perhaps underrepresented.

“So we’re really looking holistically across both creative and media to make sure that there’s meaning on behalf of advertisers when they’re talking to diverse audiences in a more equitable and inclusive way.”

Boosting identification

IBM’s Stipes, who leads marketing for IBM Watson Advertising, says the industry has “only scratched the surface in terms of showcasing what AI can do”.

Clorox last year used AI and chatbots for customer service inquiries during the pandemic.

Stipes says AI can be useful in a world watching the looming deprecation of third-party cookie matching.

“AI can rapidly and continuously make sense of the privacy-friendly data inputs and then use that data to recognise patterns to make predictions without relying on cookies or other identifiers,” she says.

“DCO (dynamic creative optimization) has traditionally been all about preset, programmed rules, decision trees. With AI, though, what we’re really talking about is real-time continuous learning that allows brands to predict the creative that will actually drive consumer action.”

Influencer intel

IBM’s Stipes also says AI can help agencies and brands pick through the growing number of influencers open to marketer partnerships.

“You’ve got to pick the right spokesperson and that’s a pretty arduous task to go back and look at a potential influencer’s content maybe from a decade ago,” she says.

“So using AI actually can enable brands to do this in a way that’s scalable and make better decisions.”

Responsible data

As agencies lean into advanced data usage technologies, GroupM’s Taylor says it’s important to do so responsible.

“We agree with the industry consensus that fingerprinting’s creepy,” Taylor says.

“We got to this place and this lack of trust, not the consumers, (they) were right in feeling wary of that thing that they already bought following them around the internet.

“So things like the data ethics compass help us to make sure that we are being really thoughtful about what the data is. Just because we can (do things), doesn’t mean we should.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.  This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page. 

Companies are compelled to take a positive stance on a range of outward issues – but often find that benefits nevertheless flow back in.

As part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, advertising agency executives discussed what they are doing on that front:

• GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald
• 4As president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz
• Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart

From singular safety to multi-responsibility

“When we used to think about things like responsible media, we used to go straight to brand safety,” said Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart.

“But, more and more, the definition and the view of responsible media and the obligation that we have to consumers in the world is becoming much more progressive and much more encompassing.”

He said he is most excited about the “depth” represented by a responsible stance. Gerhart cites data ethics and privacy, media plan practices, carbon neutrality, journalism and minority communities.

“(We can make) carbon-neutral media plans that encourage media partners and owners to offset their own activities,” Gerhart said. “We are now creating things like a series of inclusion PMPs (private marketplaces) which is directly aimed at putting money back into the hands of underrepresented voices. It started with LGBTQ community, has moved into black communities, and now we’re doing the same from a responsible journalism perspective.”

Having a point of view

For 4As president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz, responsible media is “not something anyone should take lightly”.

“We actually launched media responsibility principles last September, building on the work of our advertiser protection bureau focused on brand safety and brand suitability,” she said. “It was about taking action to really put a point of view out there and say what does this mean in terms of promoting respect, making sure that we’re addressing hate speech?” The principles cover 10 areas.

“Words only go so far. Actions go the distance,” Kaplowitz adds. “We’ve seen some brands, some agencies, do that, but now I’m really seeing a collective focus on this. We still have a lot of work to do with misinformation and disinformation.”

Lead by following

GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald says brands and agencies should respond to what consumers are saying. His responsibility commitment covers five areas.

The first is authenticity, something McDonald says the pandemic has shown the importance of. “Your brand had better be authentic and it better be able to live in the moment and react and move in the moment,” he said.

Other commitments for GroupM include a “data ethics complex“, sustainability, brand safety and diversity and inclusion.

“In dynamic, profound, changing times, the partners that truly are living evolve or die realise that if you don’t dynamically change, you won’t keep up,” McDonald added. “The bold are going to actually have this proportionate outsized wins as a result of actually living their promises to their clients, their guests, their consumers.”