The partnership is designed to provide marketers with a neutral, security-rich computing environment along with the ability to maintain ownership of their data through the IBM Cloud.
“It’s about bringing the power of Watson AI into the bidding process, essentially creating real, cognitive bidding in an advertising environment,” MediaMath Chief Marketing Officer Joanna O’Connell explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show.
A longtime veteran of the digital space, O’Connell ticks off the many attributes of digital marketing—from omni-channel touch points to real-time decisioning, machine learning from ad impressions to changing the way that siloed organizations can be customer-centric.
“But we have to be honest about the fact that there’s still so much more to do and it’s still not really what we want it to be,” O’Connell says. “It hasn’t fully realized the promise.”
Shortcomings include such infrastructure features as “pixals, header tags, waterfalls” and the like. “Would we have built it that way if we knew how big this industry was going to become, how material, how important? Probably not,” O’Connell says.
IBM and MediaMath say they have a shared worldview and the desire to take the next evolutionary steps together. Under the partnership, those steps are:
O’Connell talks about an infrastructure that’s open and extensible, totally secure and safe. And one that provides ad experiences that don’t alienate consumers.
“Imagine if a consumer didn’t only tolerate it but actually loved it. We want to be able to do that. So that’s really what we’re working on.”
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But video has become a quest for higher CPMs for many a publishers, and may finally be about to take off, according to startups aiming to help publishers produce clips more easily and cheaply.
Wibbitz is one of several companies using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to summarize publishers’ text stories and automatically produce videos for them using material from agencies like Reuters and Getty.
The aim is to help publishers produce news video to complement their articles.
“Video has become the driver in online monetization,” Zohar Dayan, Wibbitz CEO, tells Beet.TV in this video interview, which was produced and edited manually, by Beet.TV’s very human Andy Plesser. “Publishers are striving to get more of this video content.
“The system brings you at least 85% of the way there, enabling the editor with easy tools, to get that video to the 100% mark.”
What do publishers give up for video produced easier than ever? A share of revenue earned from 15-second pre-roll ads. Publishers including Hearst, Aol, USA Today have come aboard as customers. The likes of Time Inc, Huffington Post, MSN and The Week are using platforms by similar vendors.
In newsrooms, the key change is around who is responsible for making video. “They give the Wibbitz tool to their desk editors and not their video team,” Dayan says.
]]>“Every marketer, especially every B2C marketer, is going to make decision in the next five years about their first-party data,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
How brands choose to use consumer data – both their own and from other sources – to target ads became a hot topic in 2015.
Rocket Fuel, which began by applying artificial intelligence to rate ad inventory, partnered with DISH in October to allow its advertisers to use “moment scoring” to target ads programmatically. The technology has been used by whisky brand Glenfiddich.
Wootton explains: “There is computational power you need to score that impression. (Rocket Fuel) is the machine learning-powered optimisation engine, DISH is the marketplace that creates the supply in their hub.
With moment scoring up and running, what does Wootton’s first full year in the job look like?
“Last year was mostly about the integration (of X+1),” he says. “We’re doing a couple of bets as we go forward:
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2016 sponsored by Adobe.
]]>“Anybody in marketing needs to understand a bit about AI,” says PHD‘s worldwide CEO Mike Cooper. “It’s the next really big thing to happen for us.
“There are people saying AI will be as significant as the invention of electricity.”
In the book, PHD’s thinkers explain: “If only half of what these engineers are saying comes to fruition, then the way that we navigate our waking world is about to undergo the biggest transformation that any single generation has ever experienced.”
This year, the media agency has secured new work from Unilever and GSK around the world. Cooper says is differentiated by focusing on media planning, not execution.
He imagines a world in which advertising algorithms send messages to autonomous agents acting on behalf of busy users.
This video is part of a lead-up to CES presented by YuMe. For more segments, please visit this page.
]]>Omnicom’s PHD worldwide CEO Mike Cooper says the emergence of virtual personal assistants – intelligent digital agents that perform tasks for owners based on user input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from a variety of online sources – “is going to be completely game-changing for our business”.
“The next generation of Siri will interact with the apps on your phone, which starts to get quite interesting,” Cooper tells Beet.TV.
“Your VPA, if you miss your airplane, is going to make decisions on your behalf – it’s going to rebook the airline.”
Here’s where things start to get weird. More than trying to reach users with messages, brands will need to reach their virtual assistants instead, Cooper says.
“You need to market to algorithms rather than the frontal cortex of people’s brains.,” he says. “At a micro-decisioning level, you need to re-think how you deal with that process in order to market your goods or services.”
Consulting firm Frost & Sullivan has pegged intelligent assistants as a growth trend in 2016, as Facebook’s M and Baidu’s Duer join Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now.
Cooper isn’t expecting to see these developments at January’s upcoming CES show – better wait two more years, he reckons. But he is warning every ad agency to start thinking about the implications today.
We interviewed in London last week for our series “The Road to CES” — our preview of trends and topics to be discussed in January in Las Vegas. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. The series is sponsored by YuMe.
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