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. 

Whilst it may seem easier to manage that direct, there is a school of thought that it is actually going to make things rather complicated.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jeremy Hlavacek, chief revenue officer of IBM Watson Advertising, explains why – and what the answer may be.

Making transparency visible

Hlavacek says it is vital to ensure “transparency” in the ad supply chain. But he acknowledges people in the industry are confused about what that means – anything from algorithmic “black boxes” to ad margin taken by partners.

He advocates a two-step response:

1. “Make sure you have first-party data relationships. Connected to all this is consumer privacy and making sure that consumers understand how their data is being used and that it’s being used in a reasonable and really increasingly legally compliant way as states and governments develop more and more laws in this area.”
2. “The next thing that’s going to happen, logically, is that you will have many large data sets that are in disparate places, collected in different ways. There will be a number of different first-party data sets that are going to need to be sorted out and analysed by marketers.”

First-party overwhelm

That’s when things are going to get hard to manage, Hlavacek reckons.

“We’re moving to a first-party data model where you’re going to have data coming in a consumer privacy safe way, but it’s going to come from a lot of sources,” he says.

“It’s going to come from publishers. It’s going to come from ad tech companies. It’s going to come from marketers.

“So, you’re bringing together all these data streams from a variety of different places. They’re all going to be about the same consumer, about me or you, but they’re going to need to be rationalised and organised.”

AI to the rescue?

Artificial intelligence can help, Hlavacek says.

What is AI really? More specifically, machine learning – as a key pillar of AI – involves algorithms, trained on data sets to identify patterns, predicting future events from similar streams of input data.

In particular, AI can make meaning of large unstructured data sets.

As AI gets used, however, it will be important that consumers have sight of what is happening.

“I have a lot of sympathy for consumers who are trying to figure it out,” says IBM’s Hlavacek. “We want them to understand the value exchange, that those advertising experiences ultimately create the open internet and create free content.”

A growing number of marketers are coming to that conclusion.

In Beet.tv’s Responsible Media Global Forum with GroupM and the 4As, plus with IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and Pubmatic, a series of guest speakers wrestled with balancing the new capabilities with a drive for simplicity.

Opacity begets complexity

ANA CEO Bob Liodice said a major problem is “information asymmetry”, the “increasing level of opacity” over advertising data.

“This is very different from where we were 10 years ago, when we had such a relatively simple landscape,” he said.

“Marketers are receiving relatively less and less information for which to be able to make responsible media investment decisions. We have less to make those calls and less to be able to analyse the impact of those results.”

Uniformity can create simplicity

4A’s EVP for government relations Alison Pepper said agencies are having to live with the new regulated environment – but they deserve a consistent approach.

“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 said. “I think we are at an inflexion point.

“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. 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.”

Progress is happening

IBM Watson Advertising revenue head Jeremy Hlavacek said improvements are coming.

“It’s clearly time for improvement and reinvention. I’m encouraged by the increased transparency that we’re demonstrating on our platforms,” he said.

“And I’m encouraged by how we can take this ecosystem to the next level and have it be both data-driven and intelligent, but also consumer-friendly and privacy-safe.”

Inclusion imperative

GroupM global head of programmatic Max Jaffe said agencies are also having to ensure responsible media buying in this complex environment.

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

“Understanding how (players’) alignment and what their focus is on these types of issues and topics is really important.”

Cleaning supply high on agenda

The considerations keep coming, however, as 4A’s chief operating officer Ashwini Karandikar says the drive to guarantee the provenance of ad inventory remains important.

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

“At this point, there is so much programmatic guaranteed buyers that are already in place across all media types, across television, across audio, across just standard digital properties that are applying these same principles in terms of how you plan, buy, optimise, analyse, and go back and feed all this data back into your next planning cycle is possible for all media types.”

Performance & responsibility

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

“We should aim (to) make programmatic performing, make programmatic transparent, make programmatic valuable,” Cordier said.

“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?'”

But, increasingly, artificial intelligence algorithms are proving they can restore the primacy of ad creative.

That is what a host of industry executives discussed when they gathered on June 23 for the Global Forum on Responsible Media,

This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the creativity/technology  advertising track presented by IBM Watson Advertising.

1. Dynamic creative rising

The New Majority: MediaCom’s Prabhu Aims To Make Advertising Addressable

Dynamic creative versioning is allowing advertisers to deliver a diverse range of re-mixed ad creatives for consumers. But Anush Prabhu – US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, for MediaCom – says companies need to lean on software for something that is becoming too complex for humans, in two areas:

• Production: Prabhu’s MediaCom is tapping tools like WPP Open and Flashtalking to produce creative in many versions connected to foundational insights.
• Optimization: Then he wants to understand which versions are working. “There are so many variations within those messages, whether it’s the right colour, do we have people in it?,” he asks. “How much of the product should be seen? All those aspects get even more complex when you add the different audience variations.”

2. Machines help scale creative palette

AI Helps Brands Re-Focus On Creative: IBM’s Redmond

Robert Redmond thinks he has the answer – if producing a plethora of different ad creatives for a burgeoning range of audience types if complex for humans, call on the machines to help.

Specifically, machine learning like that offered by Redmon’s IBM is increasingly being called on to anticipate and remix the optimum ad creatives for different viewers.

“We teach an algorithm how to predict which individual assets to combine at real time to be most relevant for that consumer,” says Redmond, whose IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions.

“We’re going to see more and more uses of technology and creativity together in very powerful ways to do this type of work.”

3. Context is back, with a fresh new look

‘Data Artistry’ Unlocks Context & Cohorts: Mindshare’s Clayton’s Post-Cookie Dreams

Creative-focused technology is important because there is a growing sentiment that ad creative, in the programmatic era, has been overlooked in favor of super-targeting alone.

But it also comes as ad buyers look for solutions in the era after third-party cookies and digital identifiers. And that is seeing the re-emergence of contextual targeting.

“Context has always been considered this old-school thing of the past,” says  Sean Clayton, executive director, solutions officer at WPP’s Mindshare. “But, really, as you start understanding that people move in waves, they move in larger cohorts, the ability to start executing against those cohorts is actually pretty exciting, especially when you can look within the programmatic ecosystem.”

4. Restoring signal in an age of noise

Machine learning can help advertisers in the new world, despite declining usefulness of traditional identifiers, says Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at GropM’s Wavemaker.

“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.

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

5. Piloting data signals

Xiao Lin of Xaxis wants to make sure clients have really bespoke creative that speaks to consumers. But he, too, wants to lean on technology to get there.

The GroupM division uses a tool called Copilot that uses signals like browser, location, time of day and the weather “to create thousands of creative variations on the fly”, Lin says: “It introduces thousands more different data inputs to which then our AI Copilot could actually optimise towards the output or the client’s outcome.”

But, for one man, that overlooks the latent promise of data to improve the initial awareness at the point brands first meet audiences.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Robert Redmond, IBM Design Principal, Head of AI Ad Product Design, says machine learning now offers the ability for brands to re-focus on creative awareness-raising executions.

Rebooting the power of creative

“Over the course of the past decade, creative has kind of fallen back a little bit,” Redmond says.

“All too often, especially in the display space, we see it just becomes kind of like a little punch of message that really has no effectiveness to it.”

Instead, Redmond says, there is an opportunity to reboot “how our relationship with the humans that we refer to as consumers is crafted”.

“What it is that makes the consumer tick, not in a post-campaign, reports-and-insights sort of way but, rather, at the moment that we greet them, at the moment we reach them?”

Machine learning for creative effectiveness

Remond hopes technology launched by IBM last year can help.

Launched in January 2020, IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator, Accelerator, assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions. Accelerator technology applies to digital display ads, and as of a few months ago, also video and OTT spots.

That adds up to automatic, dynamic creative assembly of ads.

AI is Building Ad Creatives On The Fly: IBM’s Olesnevich explains

“Within Accelerator, we’re trying to understand the groups of people who are interacting with the advertising and to create cohorts on the fly based on indistinguishable patterns that we might not see when creating a segment or targeting them,” Redmond explains.

“We teach an algorithm how to predict which individual assets to combine at real time to be most relevant for that consumer.

“We’re going to see more and more uses of technology and creativity together in very powerful ways to do this type of work.”

Dynamic creative assembles

Dynamic creative was already rising in prominence in the couple of years prior to the pandemic, as some ad buyers sought to assemble optimal ads for the right audience using raw components of underlying creative.

Now ad-tech vendors are also suggesting DCO could be one way they can practice the kind of agility necessary to respond to profound and sudden change.

IBM’s Redmond says he wants to see “gains in actually pushing people down the (marketing) funnel”.

But, if he gets his way, it is AI that will help fill that funnel.

The Global Forum will be streamed on the GroupM LinkedIn feed from 1 to 5 pm EDT on 6/23.  The program is made possible with the support of IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and PubMatic. To stay informed of the Forum details and agenda use the hashtag #ResponsibleMedia and visit beet.tv/media-future.

But, whilst many of the methods for achieving DCO rely on simple rules laid down by marketers, what if algorithms could assemble the creative for you?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, David Olesnevich, head of product at IBM Watson Advertising, explains how AI-backed algorithms can now automatically re-assemble ad creative based on a range of input and effectiveness data.

Robo-creative

The development relies on Advertising Accelerator, an IBM product which uses the company’s Watson cognitive engine to make predictions about the most effective composition of ad creative.

In April, IBM announced Xandr customers can use Xandr’s Invest demand-side platform (DSP) to pilot the use of Accelerator for over-the-top TV (OTT) ad buying.

“The brand has assets that are available,” says Olesnevich. “Maybe they created those assets and used them for linear and are thinking about how they can really activate those assets in CTV and OTT.

“We’ve got a very quick and efficient ad builder that we have assembled. And we take that, assemble some cards, some clips, some calls to action, create a number of different ad variants and creative treatments and then we have those available for deployments when the buy happens.”

Machine-driven optimization

How the ads get built is fascinating. Advertising Accelerator leverages smarts from Watson, whose own footprint in the media business has become significant, to continuously monitor performance and other datapoints for the optimum creative reconstruction.

“When that buying is happening, the AI behind the scenes is learning,” Olesnevich says. “It’s starting from the campaign responses, the actions that are taken.

“And it’s building a model to tell the algorithm which ad creative to deliver at the right time to the right device.

“As the campaign moves on and on … it predicts the right creative to serve … across different device types and give you different experiences based on where you are in your day and what you’ve responded to in the past.”

Buying cues

Olesnevich says Advertising Accelerator also uses data signals like:

• campaign data
• device type
• weather
• time of day

And it monitors for performance outcomes from actions including:

• views
• site actions
• app downloads

Olesnevich says Xandr has been a long-standing IBM partner. “They have an active client base who’s looking to expand into Xandr’s growing video business – they’re growing exponentially on their side and their clients want more of it,” he says.

• As a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, retailers and not Mondelēz own the data about its customers.
• The looming deprecation of digital identifiers like third-party cookies posed an additional problem.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mondelēz’s global marketing data lead Michael Lampert explains how the giant tackled the problems with a strategy dubbed “empathy at scale”.

Getting to know you

“We don’t own any of the data, we have to create partnerships and capture it ourselves,” Lampert says.

So Lampert’s company began a quest to acquire consumer data – from the consumers themselves.

“What I’m trying to do is ensure that all of the campaigns we have globally for Mondelez across all of our brands – from Oreo to Sour Patch Kids to Triscuits to Ritz Crackers – have a component of data capture and data activation added,” Lampert adds

“We’re trying to make sure that data has an equal seat at the table, just like comms planning or creative or media, so that everything we do seeks to acquire data and then activate data so that we can deliver the brand experiences that we want based on what consumers are telling us.”

Custom commerce for data

Case in point – OreoID. Last year, Mondelēz launched a personalized-commerce initiative, allowing customers to customize the colour of their Oreo biscuit creme color, or even add a photo, text and custom sprinkles.

Oreo lovers can build their own Oreo creations in time for the holidays through an online experience called OREOiD. https://t.co/U725Xdsd6K

— Ad Age (@adage) November 14, 2020

Even Lady Gaga got in on the act.

The packaging alone almost made me buy these. Well done, Marketing design team for Oreo and/or Lady Gaga. pic.twitter.com/X3EL7l88h1

— Sugar Dumplin (@racquibaby) March 26, 2021

But, for Lampert, it was all about capturing data on Oreo’s other, less-famous fans.

“From my point of view, it is a way for us to capture data from people who are raising their hand and engaging with the brand,” he says.

“The value of that data that we’re capturing can then lead to a long-term ROI positive value exchange that just builds off the relationship that the consumer has said they wanted with the brand.

“And now, because of the technology infrastructure and the partnerships that we’ve spent the last three years building, we now have the ability to activate across the data that we acquire.”

Cookies after cookies

It is, if you like, a way of advertising cookies, the snacks, without relying on cookies, the rudimentary ad-targeting capability.

But Lampert says the deprecation of third-party cookies is not a threat to Mondelēz. It prepared itself for that day a long time ago.

“We’re out of the third-party data business,” he says. “We were preparing for what Google decided to do many years ago. So the shift from third-party data to first party data is something that Mondelez was preparing for over the past three years.”

All of which is the more impressive since data about Mondelēz’s customers was traditionally the preserve of retailers.

“Consumers are telling us so much, and with what they’re giving us comes great responsibility, and the value exchange that they expect from us is very different from what they expected in the past,” Lampert adds.

“Consumers expect their engagement to be delivered a value message that really makes a difference to them.”

You are watching “Break the Cycle,” a leadership series brought to you by IBM Watson Advertising and Beet.TV. For more videos, please visit this page.

That’s the view of Jeremy Hlavacek, chief revenue officer of IBM Watson Advertising.

The division of IBM leverages the company’s Watson intelligence engine on advertising use cases.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hlavacek explains how AI could make a step-change.

AI = Ad Infrastructure?

“A number of players in the ecosystem – ad-tech companies, publishers, marketers – they’re starting to understand how AI can help them predict what actions their consumers are going to take when they don’t have all the data that they’re used to having,” he says.

“AI is a new category of advertising and it’s really going to change everything that we do, much of the way programmatic changed everything that close to a decade ago happened in the digital space.”

A great day for @WatsonAds! Fantastic sessions at #aw2020 and huge steps forward with product partnerships at Magnite, Xandr, LiveRamp, Beeswax, Nielsen, Influential. Great client and agency partnerships with State Farm ® and Eight…https://t.co/VRIeoOSMkK https://t.co/AhJXTJSk05

— Jeremy Hlavacek (@jhlava) October 5, 2020

So, what is AI really?

More specifically, machine learning – as a key pillar of AI – involves algorithms, trained on data sets to identify patterns, predicting future events from similar streams of input data.

“It’s the ability to continuously learn, predict outcomes, be flexible in challenging situations,” Hlavacek adds.

“Whether that’s a pandemic or even just a change in consumer behaviour, having real-time learning allows a marketer to adjust on the fly and not having to stop campaigns and recalibrate.”

But Hlavacek says IBM needs to “educate” the ecosystem for the new world of AI ads.

AI’s new tricks

During Advertising Week 2020 in October, IBM Watson Advertising announced several new products, as well as a number of partnerships.

IBM has got pick-up for the features in ad-tech platforms from Xandr/AT&T, Magnite, Nielsen, MediaMath, LiveRamp and Beeswax, meaning AI capability will really be available in some of the most common buying and other ad-tech infrastructure.

1. Extensions for IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator

Launched in January, Advertising Accelerator, powered by Watson, assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions. Now it will encompass OTT and video.

“We found in our kind of research that customers are still not getting the right message from advertisers, even with all of the targeting data that’s available,” Hlavacek says. “Accelerator does that using AI capabilities from natural language processing, image recognition, all of those kind of things in the AI toolbox.”

2. IBM Watson Advertising Attribution

IBM is launching an ad attribution software in beta over the next few months.

“This is a long-standing issue for marketers about how to understand which media is working for which campaigns, and we have a really good solution that we’re bringing to market later in Q4 and into ’21 for attribution,” Hlavacek says.

3. IBM Watson Advertising Predictive Audiences

IBM wants to use prediction to create audience segments, “progressing beyond ‘look-alike’ to ‘do-alike’ segments”.

“We actually use AI and data ingestion to forecast or predict which audiences are going to be most receptive to a marketer’s message,” Hlavacek tells Beet.TV.

IBM isn’t just operator of Watson, the AI engine being used to make advertising more efficient – it is also a big ad buyer in its own right.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Richard Brandolino, Head of Marketing Innovation and Programmatic Media at the company, explains how that confluence prompted IBM to try fixing digital ad supply chain issues like fraud and lack of transparency.

Solving invisibility

“As we started really getting into the programmatic universe, we discovered, like a lot of other people, that we didn’t really have the visibility we wanted into the supply chain as a whole,” Brandolino says.

“We were reading the reports in the market, we were reading the commentary from folks who were talking about the challenges that they were seeing.

“As we started peeling that back, we found that some of the biggest problems were the things that were not disclosable.”

Triple-charging

It is now four years since a hard-hitting ANA report, K2, blew the lid off practices in which US advertising agencies were accused of keeping up to 20% of clients’ media budgets for themselves after engaging in “pervasive” kick-backs and rebates.

That report kicked off more industry transparency about, well, lack of transparency – including large-scale efforts to shine a spotlight on how a series of “ad-tech taxes” along the ad-tech vendor chain are continuing to mean haziness and over-spend.

AI, Advertising & The Identity Era: IBM’s Bachstein

Despite the passage of time and effort, this year a PwC/ISBA report again made sobering reading, showing  out-of-control and overly-complex supply chains, with 15% of advertiser spend unattributed for after a procession of platform fees.

“(We) didn’t have clear vision on all the things that we were being double- and triple-charged for as multiple providers in the food chain we’re offering their value add – things like brand safety filters or anti-fraud filters,” IBM’s Brandolino adds.

“So everywhere along the chain, we were paying for similar things multiple times. We were paying for ad quality that may not have been what we wanted. We were paying for too much for fraud.”

Back to the Source

To solve the problem, Brandolino says IBM, in addition to working on its own technology, began liaising with MediaMath, the ad-tech platform vendor.

“That became the origin of the Source programme,” he says, referring to the partner ecosystem MediaMath brought together last year with goals of making media more addressable and accountable.

“MediaMath was having the same dialogues with multiple customers as we were starting to bring up,” Brandolino explains. “So we decided to work together to figure out how we could reinvent the supply chain to be in all of our interests.”

As part of the discussions, IBM also ended up injecting Watson’s AI nous in to MediaMath’s platform, helping its customers leverage historical data on buying decisions.

“We think this is a great opportunity for all of us to clean out a lot of the things that have accumulated in the supply chain for programmatic media over the course of the last 10 years.

Re-Think Ad Supply From The Source: MediaMath’s Steinberg

You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

Opt-in privacy legislation, deprecation of third-party cookies and Apple ripping up the fabric of iOS ad tracking all pose a threat to the norms of digital ad targeting.

Sheri Bachstein thinks artificial intelligence can help.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the Global Head of Watson Advertising and IBM’s The Weather Company, says the changes will improve the market.

Privacy-first

“Targeting is not going away, it’s just changing and it’s evolving,” Bachstein says. “And frankly, it’s becoming more privacy-first, which is a good thing for consumers.

The industry is abuzz, examining replacements for cookies and Apple’s IDFA. Meanwhile, IBM’s Watson, its machine learning system, has been launching advertising solutions including:

• dynamic ad creative assembly
• providing marketing insights using AI
• a product to help brands find the right influencer
• combining weather and Nielsen shopping data to predict trends for certain products

Influencer economy

In June, IBM and Influential, a social media marketing company, launched Social Targeting, a tool using natural language understanding and IBM’s cloud to analyze social media data, turning it into a run-down of appropriate influencer targets.

“Consumers are spending money based on what influencers are marketing, but it’s really hard to find that right influencer because you have to look through so much data,” Bachstein says.

“You have to look at the tone of the influencer, some of their messaging hours.

“AI can come through all of that data to find that right influencer for the brand so then they can mark it that way.

Find a relationship

Bachstein says, in the world after conventional ad targeting, it will be key for publishers to obtain a first-party, consented relationship with audience members.

“It really comes down to that trust with your user or your consumer,” she says. “Do you have a relationship with your user that they are willing to provide some value in exchange for the free services you’re offering?”

Bachstein says The Weather Company is attempting to do that by offering high-quality weather forecasting in exchange for consumers’ information, usable in advertising.

“We’re providing very valuable information to consumers and we underwrite that with advertising,” she says. “For a consumer to share that information so we can better target those advertisers is really important for us, to be able to continue to provide that service for free.

“I have 200 meteorologists that it takes to deliver that forecast. Building that value of exchange with your consumer is critically important in making sure that you’re providing that valuable content.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series title Advertising in a Time of Privacy-Centricity presented by AppsFlyer. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But the emergence of multi-device user modalities had already posed a challenge to that method, and to brands that wanted to gain a holistic understanding of consumers’ cross-platform identity.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Greg Carr, who works on advertising data partnerships for IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence engine, explains why putting the nail in cookies’ coffin is just fine by him.

“No-one’s ever been in love with some of the solutions we have, but they were kind of necessary,” Carr says.

“As someone who’s kind of bought and sold a lot of audiences, and (is) painfully aware of some of the challenges and pitfalls in that category, I’m really excited about what we’re doing (in the industry).

“We’re getting better understanding in the consumer world of how all this stuff works. We’re cleaning up the stack, the supply chain. We’re removing redundancy. We’re getting better personalization without being creepy. Removing cookies … I think it’s really good for the industry.”

In place of cookies are technologies like identity graphs, which multiple vendors are building by taking privacy-compliant data from a range of sources.

Also, more marketers are looking at building more direct and opted-in relationships with consumers, complying with legislation like GDPA and CCPA.

But Carr cautions against thinking that a user-supplied email address is going to become the single cookie replacement.

“I think it’s a little more complicated than that and we’re going to see a possible outcome as less personalization and more contextual in ways that we haven’t considered it before, things like weather and other signals like that, that are more responsive as opposed to user based,” he says.

Carr’s Watson began life as a question-and-answer technology. These days, it is also a cloud-hosted computing platform that provides a range of cognitive services.

After acquiring The Weather Company, Watson also now makes local weather conditions available to ad companies as buyable attributes.

“We pass weather by zip to LiveRamp,” Carr says. “They group it into IdentityLink-based segments and push those into the DSP (demand-side ad platform) space.

“We have a Watson machine learning modelling capability within LiveRamp’s IdentityLink space that we sort of co-sell with LiveRamp.”

The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.

This video is part of  Beet.TV’s coverage  of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.  This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

Rangaiah uses E-ZPass as an example of how quickly customers’ expectations can change.

“Once E-ZPass was put in place and consumers got conditioned to being able to seamlessly go through a toll, that impacts not just tolls, but other industries as well, whether it’s turnstiles or buses,” says Rangaiah in an interview with Beet.TV at the ANA CMO Global Council. “So you really have to start with creating experiences based on not just what your industry or category competitors are doing but really what people in life go through.”

Rangaiah explains that IBM, among others, are using these everyday processes to rethink ways to engage consumers, even if it’s not driven by other competitors in the industry.

An example that Rangaiah uses is a partnership with 1-800-FLOWERS in which IBM created a Watson-powered online experience. Instead of going to a website and seeing a chart of all of the different flowers, this site allows consumers to be in conversation with the service, and in answering a series of questions, the customer is presented with a customized arrangement based off of their own tastes.

Rangaiah sees experiences like these as evidence that expectations for marketers to look beyond the advertisement are evolving.

“It’s more about how you’re measuring,” says Rangaiah. “And getting more laser focused and having more data and having more ability to measure what’s having the greatest impact.”

This video is was produced in Orlando at the CMO Growth Council.  The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv.  For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Hammer describes how the evolving roles of a marketer are making these positions both more attractive and more applicable to recruits with different backgrounds. Today’s prospective marketers don’t “just want to advertise things, they wanted to impact things, to build things,” says Hammer. “It’s more of a maker culture. So we’re in this stage now where marketing has to reach out to find new skills as well as train the existing talent that we have.”

As product, performance, and content all respectively evolve and overlap, finding those with a knack for critical thinking, regardless of what types of problems a person is used to encountering, can be applied to modern marketing.

“In the end, marketing is problem solving,” says Hammer. “There’s a lot of other people in professions out there solving problems – engineers, scientists, all these other people who are great at problem solving. There’s no reason why they can’t transfer those skills and become great marketers as well.”

On top of the creative challenge, Hammer proposes that bringing this talent to an in-house team is not only leading to content that is more meaningful to the consumer, but creates an environment in which influence can be found from all areas within the company. For that reason, working for a brand can keep this perspective fresh while working for a consistent mission.

“Great creative talent wants to work on great creative work,” says Hammer. “And a brand is a great place to do that.”

This video is was produced in Orlando at the CMO Growth Council.  The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv.  For more videos from the event, please visit this page.   

At Cannes Lions, IBM and Mediaocean announced “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain,” along with Unilever, Kellogg and Kimberly-Clark.

A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. For advertisers, blockchain could shine a spotlight on every fraction of a cent that might be taken by links in the chain.

In IBM’s scheme, IBM’s Hyperledger blockchain fabric helps to power a system connected to DSPs, SSPs and more through Mediaocean.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, IBM global marketing executive partner Babs Rangaiah says the scheme has now grown to “eight large advertisers”: “We’ve onboarded the brands, and we expect to get activity running imminently.”

Despite being part of the same group, Rangaiah says each brand on board has different goals: “All (their) systems are different. So in order for this to work, we’ve got to integrate with everyone’s financial systems and purchase order, insertion order approach. It’s not a kind of ‘do it once, and scale it in the beginning’.”

But, already, Rangaiah is dreaming of what else blockchain could solve.

So far, the solution is geared toward primarily digital and programmatic ad trading. But could the system have wider application, around the content itself?

“I think there’s a lot of potential plays here for television as well,” Rangaiah says.

“We’ve had some talks with companies about content provenance, and all this stuff with the fake news and trying to understand that. But also, one interesting thing I think is to look at videos that start on television but get small ratings but then over the course of a couple of days a week, get millions and millions of ratings.

“Or viewership. Because it’s on all different online platforms, some people copy and paste it elsewhere, and we could potentially use blockchain to try to get to the provenance of that and really take out duplication, really understand true reach.”

This interview was conducted at the EGTA New York meetings hosted by Viacom.   EGTA, the Brussels-based trade association of international television companies, is the sponsor of this Beet.TV series. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“I don’t think we should try to mimic business models that aren’t necessarily thriving,” Hammer adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“The media and publishing world themselves are trying to figure out how to evolve. I don’t think the right model is actually trying to be a publisher where KPI is quantity at scale and trying to be in everyone’s lives all the time.”

A better approach is to determine whether brand-generated content has a purpose, an audience need and desire plus brand purpose and an ability to help drive KPI’s, according to Hammer.

For IBM, it’s about “making less matter more, as people want to have fewer but higher quality impressions, engagements, experiences with brands.”

The company tries to figure out the right number of engagements, which could be between four and 10. “It might not be fifty, it might not be a daily publisher per se that maximizes our relationship with the audience, because we’re only creating stuff that matters to them.”

Hammer led one of the conference’s three kickoff sessions titled The End Of Advertising As We Know It: Now What? One of the session’s talking points was “The key is to stop selling and do a better job of connecting.”

Asked about his work with the ANA’s CMO Growth Council and its client-centricity vertical, he says that driving the most effective ways of engaging with consumers needs support at the C-suite and board levels “to really drive the change. But then it’s mostly a people and change-management exercise than a technology based thing that needs to happen.”

Hammer doesn’t doubt the power of television as it continues to evolve and shift. “If it wasn’t powerful, you wouldn’t see digitally first companies actually going into TV. It just is a medium that needs to be explored the right way. Just like any medium.

“If we just focus on making great stuff, the channel, no matter what channel it is, will continue to perform. If we focus on just making a bunch of stuff and lower budgets, then we’ll ruin the experience and every channel will continue to erode.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions.  Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video.   Please find more videos from the series here.

Over the last year, businesses of all kinds have explored the potential it offers to record every action and modification in a distributed ledger.

Chad Andrews knows. “We did a joint venture with Maersk,” says the global solutions leader, advertising and blockchain, at IBM. “Just by digitizing the global shipping supply chain process, the World Trade Organization said that is deployed at scale, we’ll have a 5% overall impact on world GDP, which is about three and a half trillion dollars.”

For advertising buyers and sellers, who, over the last couple of years, have been plagued by the creeping realisation that much of their money is siphoned off by intermediary platforms without full disclosure, that could be mana from heaven. Blockchain could shine a spotlight on every fraction of a cent that might be taken by links in the chain.

“If you look at the media buying supply chain, it’s just wrought, particularly with digital inefficiencies,” Andrews adds. “We all know somewhere between 50 and 60+ cents can disappear between the advertiser and the publisher, and 75% of ads are viewed for less than a second.

“So it begs the question: ‘Is that money really going in the middle of the supply chain, really going to performance?’ The true answer is in many cases, we don’t know.”

With blockchain, IBM, and several other smaller companies also now offering blockchain-for-advertising solutions, aim to find out.

It used Cannes Lions to announce, with Mediaocean, what they are calling “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, with brands like Unilever, and Kimberly Clark and Kellogg.

Andrews says it is about “tracing the life cycle of the media, buy from budget to PO (purchase order) to authorization, to the deal from the publisher all the way through invoicing and payments”.

“Once we’ve established that in later phases, we’re going to start to look at the vendor supply chain and the costs that are being charged across the change in the effort to start optimizing media delivery,” he says.

The consortium will first be piloted. After announcing early brand partners, IBM will be announcing participating agencies and suppliers.

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future.

That was the hope of one big-brand marketer, excited about the prospect for how the infrastructure which underpins crypto-currency could bring a step-change in transparency to the advertising business, speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV.

The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:

• Unilever global media VP Rob Master
• Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman
• Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise
• IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah

The theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which processes $140 billion dollars of ad spend on an annual basis – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain. Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of the consortium.

Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman:

“My expectation is that it will be a quality of life improvement. The ease with which you can defend the spend improves your quality of life. The extent to which you have confidence about the numbers that you’re putting in front of the meeting to make actual business decision, improves your quality of life.”

Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise:

“A lot of companies who have fraud running through their businesses. I think we all, as an ecosystem, want to clean that up.

“Our agency partners who are forward-leaning and run transparent businesses are pushing for this. They also want to be involved. We announced the marketers (first) because, at the end of the day, it’s your guys’ money, but the ad agencies are going to also be big participants in the pilot as well and we’re working very collaboratively with them.”

Unilever global media VP Rob Master:

“We spend so much time now around the reconciliation, around massaging the data, trying to track down the data, waiting for things to come in before we can actually spend our full amount of money.

“(Blockchain) allows us to actually spend more time thinking about the consumer.”

IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:

“We think about this initiative, in baseball terms, as the very first inning. We want to be able to show transparency of the money. The second piece is the speed of reconciliation. Lastly, if we can show any amount of improvement in that percentage of money that gets (ad-)taxed …  I think that would be considered a great success.”

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

When you think about using the same technology for digital ad management, however, it becomes clear that the infrastructure would need to cope with tens of millions of transactions per second.

Many people are starting to talk about the prospect for blockchain, the technology underpinning crypto-currency, to help manage the digital ad supply chain. The reality that blockchain solutions today suffer from a kind of latency that makes them unsuitable to digital ad scale may put the brakes on those dreams.

But not for Babs Rangaiah.

“In the 90s, we knew that you could do a ton of things in marketing online – whether that’s video, video ads, video content – but no one had broadband,” says the IBM global marketing executive partner in this segment from the Beet Retreat moderated by Rob Norman:  “But in a few years we know it will, so, (we said), ‘let’s prepare ourselves’.”

Could the same be true for blockchain technology? A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin, but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.

Advocates say blockchain can be used to track and trace any goods – physical or digital – that move within a system in which provenance is paramount. And much of the attention is turning to digital advertising, a sector which is mired in concern over fraud, accountability and identifying where every fraction of a cent is siphoned off.

Digital ad real-time bidding latency requirements are strict. A DSP typically requires a response within 60 to 75 seconds. There’s a real it’s called “real-time”.

That poses a challenge to blockchain dreams. Most blockchain solutions operate slower than that. In tests to mine crypto-currency, IBM’s Hyperledger infrastructure clocked more than 3500 transactions per second with 300 to 400 millisecond latency.

But bringing transparency to ad-tech doesn’t require mining for new virtual coins. And Rangaiah is convinced things will get quicker.

“If you’re thinking about blockchain, it’s a little bit like (broadband in the 90s),” he adds. “People think if you have high-volume transactions you won’t be able to do it on blockchain, it won’t be able to capture it and still get the consensus mechanisms in place with the smart contracts..

“The reality is it’s moving very fast, just like the internet. There’s a number of new companies coming in place.”

When the speed catches up, blockchain could be a perfect solution, premised on an “immutable ledger”, meaning actions that occur within the digital supply chain would be recorded in a way that cannot be tampered with.

At Cannes Lions, IBM and Mediaocean announced “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain,” along with Unilever, Kellogg and Kimberly-Clark.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But, despite years of talk about “omni-channel” marketing, the truth is – for many – that future is still some way off.

That is according to one agency exec turned tech sales honcho.

“I think in their hearts, advertisers are omni-channel,” says Jordan Bitterman, the former chief strategy officer of Mindshare in North America, who is now VP of IBM’s digital strategy and sales. “I think in the way they’re spending and how they’re operating, probably less so.

Omni-channel and the talk about breaking down silos has been in the industry for what seems like years now.

But talk only gets you so far. Why is real evidence of omni-channel practice still thin on the ground?

“The tools have to be in place for us to be able to really do that at scale in the industry, and we’re not there yet,” Bitterman adds.

“The breakage point starts with an understanding. We’re still in a point right now where we’re looking for results on a very quick, short term basis. It’s really a shame.”

He says that leaves advertisers exposed to accidentally showing too many ads to users who have already seen them on one screen or another.

“We’re doing a ton of damage,” he says.

But a panel of industry executives convened by Beet.TV debated how blockchain technology could usher in a new era of transparency that could unblock this bottleneck.

The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:

• Unilever global media VP Rob Master
• Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman
• Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise
• IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah

A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin – but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.

Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of what IBM calls a “consortium”. Details of how that group will operate are not clear, but the theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which mediates trades between buyers and sellers – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain.

Moderating, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell said the analyst firm estimated fraud and non-viewable impression wastage at $7.4 billion in 2016, projected to rise. She asked the panel how blockchain will benefit…

Unilever global media VP Rob Master:

“There is a lot of darkness and the lack of transparency and accountability. Are we serving (ads) to actual human beings and not bots? Are people actually able to see our advertising?

“This MVP (minimum viable product) with IBM and the promise of blockchain – actually, really at an exponential pace – scale the opportunity to really clean things up and provide a much cleaner digital ecosystem.”

Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman|:

“There’s been a little opacity as the industry matured and grew up – (there are) logical reasons, as the CMO has to traipse across the Lumascape and figure out how to put the Lego blocks (of software) together. You can only have complexity as a result.

“As a company (like ours) that’s 145 years old, you only have the right to survive or thrive if you either invent transformational technology or identify transformational technology that will allow you continue evolving. And so blockchain is one of those transformational technologies”

Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise

“This blockchain solution is actually going to be across all media – TV, print, radio, out-of-home, all forms of digital – because all media eventually is going to be connected through an IP address. So the plumbing for linear or traditional media is going to look more like digital.

“We think that’s why this solution is not a Mediaocean solution or an IBM solution. It’s an industry solution that we all need to prosper.”

IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:

“The great thing about what blockchain will do and what transparency provides is, you can figure out who the good guys are and you can figure out who the bad guys are. What we’re doing is setting up the underlying technology to be able to allow everyone to know what’s going on.

“There’s always going to be new issues that arise with transparency. We will catch those issues as they arise, or shortly thereafter”

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“The digital ecosystem is fraught I think, as we’ve all seen with a host of challenges,” says the VP of Global Media. “We believe that the blockchain is a potential opportunity to help give us a better understanding of how the whole ecosystem works and really empowers us to make better business decisions as we go forward.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Master talks about Unilever’s efforts to monitor ad viewability, weed out non-human traffic and seek brand-safe environments. “There’s a host of things in that ecosystem that we’re tracking,” he says.

He’s hoping blockchain will provide a more efficient and effective way to manage and monitor the whole process.

“It really starts with us as the advertiser with that dollar, and how much of that dollar is actually spent showing our great creative to the consumer. Where along the way are we spending that dollar to make sure it gets to the consumer in an appropriate way?”

Given the circuitous route that “a great piece of creative” can take on its way to a publisher and, ultimately, an audience, “Along the way I think there’s a lot of different things that have to take place to make sure it’s seen by humans.”

Gaining a better understanding of how the amount money invested with various publishers and platforms actually performs will help Unilever determine which ones are most valuable. “And it allows us to prioritize our dollars,” says Master.

“We spend a dollar and a host of things have to take place to understand how that dollar’s being spent. If we could do it much more efficiently and effectively, we could understand much quicker what’s working and what’s not.”

As it stands, it’s not uncommon to be waiting “waiting weeks or months to understand what was spent, whether it was seen. In a potential blockchain solution, we could do it in a matter of hours or days and the efficiency of our spend becomes that much better.”

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“We have GRP’s, we have declining linear audiences around 18-34 and we have the unreachables that are on non- ad-supported platforms or non-measured platforms,” says Fiona Carter, Chief Brand Officer, AT&T Communications. “So what are we going to do about that? How are we going to move to an all-screen measurement that works across all of the networks, all of the digital players?”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Carter applauds the coalescence of competitors joining forces to facilitate not only reach and engagement with audiences but also the ability to measure the ROI of those engagements.

“In the end, although we’re very keen on brand building and we’re very keen on measuring how well our brand engages with our audience, we’re also here to sell at the end of the day,” Carter says. “And so trying to get the ROI out of everything we do so that we can prove we’re an investment and not a cost I think is an ultimate goal for a CMO.”

Among the offerings at Cannes, she identifies artificial intelligence from IBM, Quantcast and others as “one of the most fascinating conversations here at Cannes.” She echoes the desire to harness AI to improve marketing while wondering about its impact on advertising creativity. “Can they coexist? Can machine learning actually inspire greater creativity or will it be the end of creativity as we know it.?”

Asked for her thoughts on blockchain technology, Carter says AT&T is “doing a lot on blockchain” while noting that “everyone understands the murkiness of the digital advertising ecosystem. As a marketer, I feel many of us have been asleep at the wheel in understanding when our budget goes in through our agencies how much comes out to meet the publishers and eventually the consumers.”

She praises “these companies that are trying to help us work out the tradeoff of all of these service taxes and tolls and what the value is ultimately and frankly what the real price of operating in the programmatic supply chain should be.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin – but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.

Over the last year, businesses of all kinds have explored the potential it offers to record every action and modification in a distributed ledger. But does blockchain pose a threat or an opportunity to media agencies?

“I think if I was still at an agency I would be thrilled and I would jump all over this,” says Carrie Seifer.

Of course, Seifer would say that. She is a VP and chief revenue officer and IBM, the company which offers one of the leading blockchain solutions.

But Seifer, formerly an SVP of digital at MediaVest, isn’t just self-interested, because she doesn’t work specifically on blockchain – instead, she helps run the content and Internet of Things team within IBM Watson, including Weather.com, so sees herself as an in-house customer of IBM’s own blockchain solution.

“As Weather, as a publisher, we’re very interested in participating because, when you have a brand safe place for brands and you’re willing to be transparent, this will help the money flow back to the publisher as it should,” she tells Beet.TV.

So what could the benefits be?

“Agencies, just like with the TV up fronts, have an incredible advantage in that they are pooling a lot different brands money,” Seifer adds. “They have so much power – but sometimes they don’t have the tools to do what they could do with that power.

“I think it’s a huge opportunity for them to pool what they do best, which is buy media in a collective way just like they do with TV up fronts. This is a great, great tool for them if they lean into it.”

IBM used Cannes Lions to announce, with Mediaocean, what they are calling “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, with brands like Unilever, and Kimberly Clark and Kellogg.

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“What blockchain does is create a single ledger that everyone trusts,” says Vedant Sampath, CTO of software and computing services provider Mediaocean, which is teaming with IBM’s iX agency on a blockchain consortium solution. Uniting some of the world’s largest advertisers, agencies and publishers—including Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer, Unilever and IBM Watson Advertising—the solution aims to provide transparency and build trust and accountability in the advertising ecosystem.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Sampath provides a before and after look at media transactions and explains what blockchain brings to the table.

“So if you look at the media supply chain, the value chain consists of the advertiser, the agency, the suppliers and all of the adtech players. All of these are multiparty transactions, meaning from a marketer standpoint that money is being spent by multiple players involved in the process,” Sampath says.

Without access to a blockchain, “everyone puts that information into their own ledgers. And when it comes time to reconcile, they take the invoice and compare it against their ledger. And this happens multiple times across all of the parties.”

This is where the single ledger comes in. “So where previously you trusted your ledger, now you trust the common ledger,” says Sampath. “So everyone has all of their transactions in one place. Reconciliation in that context becomes a lot easier.”

When an agency sends a media plan to its client, the marketer approves it and generates a purchase order, which has terms and conditions. “That gets written to the blockchain.” Campaigns are then generated, with spending across a number of different media suppliers.

“There are insertion orders, or if it’s a programmatic buy there may be a DSP where you’re sending the buy. All of those have terms and conditions. We capture that in the blockchain. And then when the invoice comes in and the payments happen, all of those are captured.”

Via the blockchain’s application programming interfaces, any players in the ecosystem can integrated into the blockchain and updated with the transactions that sit in their systems. The users have consoles that they can look at to roll up the data.

“Today, when there’s an order we update our internal ledger. But in the new world we’ll be updating the blockchain ledger, the distributed ledger. It will be transparent to the end user,” says Sampath.

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“It’s going to rise all tides,” says Wise.

However, some of the boats navigating those tides might be looking at rough waters ahead. “If your business is reliant on margins that are above market value or if there’s fraud being laced within your ad exchange or SSP, then obviously it will hurt your business,” he adds.

It’s okay for the margins of adtech companies to decline in a more efficient and transparent market if the end return outweighs that decline, according to Wise.

“So if your margin goes down ten or twenty or thirty percent but the business opportunity is ten to twenty X, that’s a tradeoff I think everyone would make and I think that’s the opportunity here.”

He cites three main goals of the blockchain consortium: more transparency, interoperability with other blockchain solutions and faster invoice reconciliation.

“A lot of marketers didn’t know how much adtech tax, if you will, they were spending and how much was going to working media. And when they saw that in digital programmatic it can be as high as sixty to sixty five cents on the dollar, they were blown away. So the first thing we’re going to do is make all of that transparent, make the supply chain more transparent,” says Wise.

Interoperability with other blockchain solutions will yield improvements in supply chain management issues, plus problems like fraud and privacy.

As for reconciliation, “We’re going to be able to reconcile much quicker, which means the pipes are greased. We can pay quicker, we can invoice quicker.”

Wise calls the blockchain consortium the “natural evolution of Mediaocean,” whose systems handle some $140 billion in annual global ad spend. “It’s not about Mediaocean, it’s not about what happens to our business, it’s what happens to the industry,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.