Team Dayā started in November 2018 and has since raised over $100,000 from the advertising and tech industry. They completed construction of their first school in Dhayapur, Nepal, in February which is currently providing services to 165 students.

They have two additional schools slated for 2020, one in Malawi in East Africa which will be constructed this spring and then break ground for a school in Guatemala in the fall.

“We’re thinking a lot about 2021 and beyond in terms of both raising money but also starting to build some infrastructure for Team Dayā,” Sears says.

This includes finding out what kinds of industry events they could be plugging into, looking for fundraising mechanisms that are repeatable, and exploring how to recruit people to go on some school-building trips.

All contributions to Team Dayā go directly to their non-profit partner buildOn, and are 100 percent tax deductible.

“We raise money in a number of different ways, and we continue to get more creative in terms of how to do that,” Sears says.  Some of the largest contributors have been WideOrbit and The TradeDesk.

Team Dayā has a number of corporate sponsors including The Trade Desk and Wide Orbit, and the majority of support has come from executives across the advertising and technology industry. They have received over 300 individual donations so far.

Sears outlined three main ways to get involved with Team Dayā. First, those who would like to actively help can join a school building trip.

“It means that you get involved in the fundraising but you actually travel with Team Dayā to a place like Nepal or Malawi or Guatemala and you’re in the community side by side working with them on the initial groundbreaking of these schools, living with host families,” Sears says.

The second way is to make an individual or corporate donation, which people can do through their website. Lastly, people or companies can use a platform that they might have to help them tell the stories of building these schools.

Amongst other stipulations, the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measures include:

• tighter consent conditions for the collection of citizens’ data.
• consumers can instruct companies to stop processing their data.
• automated decision-making and profiling decisions must be made clear.
• consumers can request decisioning by automated processes be stopped and handled by a human instead.
• they have the right to request an explanation of automated decision-making.
• they can request free access, rectification and deletion of data.

The measures apply to any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover. Steps data handling and data processing companies should take include conducting risk assessments, appointing data protection officers and overhauling policies and systems.

So, with less than a year ticking on the compliance clock, how are advertisers and their agencies responding to the new regimen?

At a panel debate convened with Beet.TV, four agency data executives said GDPR compliance was a big deal, but they framed privacy regulation in the context of consumer aversion to “creepy” ad tactics generally…

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“There are a couple of things (clients) probably miss on… an understanding that there is a true impact of what many of these regulations are, and how the EU and the US are not necessarily going to be in sync.

“(Clients) are not at the point where they’re willing to have a conversation around, ‘If someone’s giving me data, what am I giving in exchange?’ It’s going to get harder to justify bombarding consumers with impressions that they don’t need, just because you know who they are. Less is more. That is a far more fundamental shift that has the come – privacy is one part of it.”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser

“We have more conversations about how advertising can be relevant engaging without being creepy… there very rarely is (a breach of privacy). Part of our job as agencies is to ensure clients don’t find themselves getting sued for breaching privacy laws.

“Privacy is not an issue for our clients so much as following the law; that’s never been an issue – it’s more about … using data for good to make the consumer experience better.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray

“If we use some insight about an audience to personalise a communication … the trust is there because you’re using the data in a way that there’s a value exchange.

“As we start to use data across more parts of the agency and client, there’s an education that has to happen, so that people that haven’t necessarily been handling data previously and are now having data conversations know the implications and are trained on how to handle that data or send an email without being in breach.”

Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:

“I think clients should own all their own ad-tech contracts, agencies should operate them, and they should be fully transparent.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

For many, that has meant a promotion for the executives who once ran outlier data divisions within an agency but who now are calling the shots.

What changes when that happens, and what have those people learned along the way? In this recorded panel discussion at Cannes Lions, four agency executives opened up. Here is what they said…

Brian Lesser, CEO, GroupM North America (previous: CEO, GroupM’s Xaxis):

“It’s a sign of the times that people with data, analytics, platforms backgrounds are now being put in a position to manage media agencies.

“For me, it’s a matter of making sure our agencies have appropriate platforms… make sure we are data-informed at every step along the way … activation across all channels.”

Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer, IPG Mediabrands (previous: president, IPG’s Cadreon):

“In this role, I’ve started to see the reality of the imbalance between planning and buying. Planning tools are activated by data sets which are still not quite where they should be.

“There are silos being created which are legacies from the past, you need to clean them to make some of the tech and systems work. That’s all I’ve been focused on for the last there of four months since starting the role.”

Doug Ray, product and innovation president, Dentsu Aegis Network (previous: CEO, Carat):

“I’ve always been on the planning, strategy and management side, not so much on the buying side. What has made great plans and strategies … is human insight, to have a deep understanding of customers. Clients are looking for the human truth, the insight to help them with better outcomes on their media.”

Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Hearts & Science (previous: CEO, Omnicom’s Annelect):

“We under-leveraged the audience creation and syndication side of it. The buying side of programmatic is actually the least important side of programmatic. The three most important sides… are the audience creation, syndication and also using some of the new ad-serving capabilities like an Innovid … to do the orchestration of the creative assets in the product.”

Those were some of the conclusions of a panel of ad agency technology executives, who debated the topics in a session recorded by Beet.TV.

In the panel, the quartet spoke about the problem of inconsistent data taxonomies and how advertisers can make hay where consumers are already buying.

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“When I say an audience segment is ‘somebody who is interested in fashion’, am I defining it the same way across these different datasets, are the taxonomies similar? If they are not, then, even if it’s deterministic, it fails, because I’m actually not reaching the audience I think I am.

“How quickly do you refresh this data? If my data is a year old, should I really be using that or not?”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:

“We’ll never get to a category standard because the industry thrives on information asymmetry – everybody wants to know more than their competitor.

“We have to tell (clients) things they don’t already know about their own consumer but also model out their potential consumer.  You’re seeing a cottage industry crop up to answer these questions.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:

“The mobile device is the gateway to people’s passions. We can instantaneously learn about a product, the price and buy that product at that moment in time. If there’s one thing that will continue to transform the way our clients market, it will be mobile.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Often, the question is framed as an “either-or” in which Netflix would have to choose between continuing its current premium SVOD model or ripping it up in favour of ad funding.

Previously, Ampere Analysis’ Richard Broughton has told Beet.TV Netflix could make up to $8bn a year from advertising if it switched over entirely, but would have to accept churn would knock off some of the gain, as angry consumers quit.

But one ad agency executive doesn’t think the choice has to be so dichotomous. Speaking in this panel debate recorded by Beet.TV, GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser said an ad model for Netflix could be a lot more intrinsic and less disruptive.

“The question is not necessarily, ‘Is Netflix thinking about how to infuse advertising in to its model?’,” Lesser said.

“Netflix is, I would bet, having conversations about how big-brand advertisers can get involved in content creation so that they can have a more effective engagement with their consumers.

“I think, over time, all over-the-top content, with Netflix being the gold standard, will have to be financed in some way by what we, traditionally, know now as the advertising business.”

Also in the panel, ad agency tech and data executives discussed whether the modern-day precision capability to target only customers known to be in-market for a particular brand or product will mean an exclusive focus on performance advertising, at the expense of traditional top-of-funnel or brand-based advertising of the like commonly seen on TV.

• Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn: “If (a consumer) can’t afford a Mercedes Benz, why not save the money and not advertise to them?”
• IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar: “We need to focus more on things like the customer joinery – in what stages of life are those customers… ? Figuring out… so that you can get the best outcome.”
• Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray: “Consumers may not be int he market today, but maybe in the market down the road. There’s a role for building the purpose of the brand, amplifying that through lots of exciting creative type of engagement.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Now, slowly, as new attribution technology hots up, brands are being promised the ability the ability to close the loop.

But, whilst, to many, this evolution appears to be driven by brands, agency tech chiefs, in this Beet.TV recorded panel discussion, say some clients have a long way to go. Here is a flavour of what they said…

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“Depending on who in the client organisation you talk to, you tend to get get a couple of different definition of ‘What is an outcome?’

“There is a disconnect in the conversations you have in procurement (and the brand). There is a desire in one part of the organisation to drive toward the outcome – and the other part doesn’t necessarily believe that that is measurable or comparable across a wider set of the ecosystem. There needs to be an alignment.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:

“You get what you measure. If you’ve got a procurement department, they’re looking at ‘How do we extract cost and drive down that cost? … If I can buy what I bought before more cheaply, the thesis is the return on investment will be improved’.

“There is a race to the bottom. It can only be bought so cheaply before you’re starting to fundamentally disrupt the quality of that inventory.

“We’d like to change the conversation and look at the value-in versus cost-out. It may cost you a higher CPM – but, if the response from the consumer is greater, then the overall value of that media buy is going to be better for that client.”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:

“The technology would be easy to solve. The most powerful media companies right now have a better understanding of consumers than many advertisers do – they want to hold on to that leverage, they want to define their own metrics, they want to grade their own homework. We’re left with Nielsen, which is imperfect at best.”

Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:

“A lot of clients believe there’s one true god and that god is Nielsen – and that is wrong.

“If you’re an application … you have to install the Nielsen app in to your SDK, and there’s not a lot of room for that. We think 40% of all video or content that could be measured is not. That’s a big problem.

“The great thing about programmatic … and fusing different panels … in to a DMP is, you can actually start to look at the causality of marketing.”

In this discussion panel recorded by Beet.TV, ad agency tech executives say many clients are capable of moving forward – but they are caught between two worlds…

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“The newer companies look at performance (marketing) very differently and they’re far more open to restructuring and not having silos. They’re very good at lower-funnel, they’re structured internally to do that.

“Where they struggle is, in many cases, they see that as a battle for market share, as opposed to figuring out, ‘How am I going to get to the top of the funnel?’”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:

“Market-mix modelling has been the holy grail of channel allocation fora  very long time. When you come from the new school, you say, ‘Market-mix modelling is looking through the rear-view mirror, that can’t possibly be right.’

“You get part of your media plan using real-time media to buy and optimise, and part of your plan that’s looking backwards. The answer is not either-or, frankly – tis’ about updating that model more often.”

Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:

“The big problem with the market-mix models right now is the competitive data set which powers most of those are powered by Nielsen, and 75% of Nielsen’s money comes from the TV networks – so the mixed models themselves are totally based on TV and don’t take in to account what’s really happening in digital.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:

“We’re working with a lot of our clients on, ‘How do you bring those two worlds (clients’ media team and and customer data team) together? How do you apply the precision and audience understanding that those groups had, how do you leverage the understanding that those CRM or ecommerce teams and leverage similar types of data in a mass-media ecosystem?’ That’s evolving, we’re able to apply some of those principles in the mass-media space.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

To Jay Sears, this means focusing not on proxies or clicks or even intention “but actual sales lift as the result of an exposed population seeing an ad.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Sears, who is SVP of the Ad Intelligence unit of Mastercard, talks about assisting brands in the categories of restaurants, retail, travel and telcos and the emergence of more infrastructure around planning and measurement.

Although advertising starts with understanding consumer behavior, starting with purchase intent and ending with actual purchase, there are many steps in between, according to Sears.

Because of its trove of privacy compliant consumer data, Mastercard Ad Intelligence is “in a unique position to help the advertiser in the start of that journey and also to complete the journey and understand the return on ad spend and what the impact has been on sales,” he says.

While a lot of infrastructure that grew up around ad technology continues to consolidate, what’s probably more interesting for brands is the convergence of advertising technology and marketing technology.

In marketing tech, there’s an understanding of planning and insights and measurement. Meanwhile, ad-tech has concentrated more on activation.

“As these two things come together, the marketer is weighing in more heavily in the decision making, which is a sign of marketing maturity and it’s a good thing,” says Sears.

He foresees a whole lot more infrastructure built out around “measurement and around planning and understanding in an audience-driven way.”

Asked to reflect on the evolution of media agencies, Sears observes that many have taken capabilities around data-driven advertising that were originally developed in specialty groups within a holding company “and making them broadly available in their operating agencies and pushing them closer to clients. That should be a big benefit for clients.”

A major trend he sees is brands taking action on managing their ad investments as they relate to business outcomes, having already solved for things like viewabiity and attention.

“So just keep going and let’s understand the impact all the way down to purchase, to sales impact,” Sears says.

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Rubicon Project was tapped by Spotify to automate audio ad inventory, by an alliance of four leading US news publishers, by Flipboard to launch a mobile ad marketplace, and even launched an Olympics-themed ad marketplace with multiple publishers.

For Jay Sears, Rubicon’s SVP of marketplace development, “programmatic” has evolved far from the early days of real-time bidding and auction-based buying.

“Everybody needs to look at the private market, and understand how that’s truly different from the auction market,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That’s a much more comfortable entry point for a lot of participants.”

Sears says the advance “orders” business is growing, and claims to operate what is now “the third largest mobile marketplace in the world”.

But in-roads to the biggest advertising medium of all remain slow. “We’re early in the cycle when it comes to television automation,” Sears concedes, joining the many in the industry who are coming to realize disrupting TV won’t be so straightforward.

“Its a long roadway ahead … where you add value, how it all gets measured, what the currency is.”

This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders. The series is sponsored by Videology. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.

After the session, we spoke with moderator, Jay Sears, SVP at the Rubicon Project about the issue.  He says fraud is real, but it need not be part of the equation if the buyer and  seller understand the “rules of engagement.”  When the transaction is clear, “there is nowhere to hide.”

For more videos from the Rubicon session, please visit this page.

“If the agency and the client can have a very clean discussion about what is the value of the offer and what is the fee they charge, it is no one else’s business how it is set up,” said Dentsu Aegis Network’s AMNET global president Ashwini Karandikar.

“As programmatic evolves beyond display, the money that’s going to be at play is going to be 100 times what it is right now. So can we move beyond this silly question and talk about what is the value that you deliver? That discussion needs to be a one-on-one, not an article written in the press.”

But VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer and Bank of America’s global media investment SVP Lou Paskalis took issue.

“No,” Paskalis said. “The industry needs to have an understanding about the business model.

“Agencies, for the most part, are transparent about what they’re not transparent about. As a client, you have to understand that.  We have to be very clear what the rules of the road are.”

This segment from the Cannes Lions Festival was part of a series on programmatic advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series. 

“A lot of the headlines have gotten it incorrect,’ he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The headlines are ‘AOD is dead’. The fact is, AOD in automation is more alive than ever.

“What’s happening is, a lot of those employees are coming out of a centralized structure and being pushed in to the operating agency. That’s great news for the entire business. It means the experts in automation will be the folks talking to the clients, sitting at the table when strategy comes together. That means a more holistic approach to automation.”

Sears says Rubicon will be hosting panels on retail and automating advertising on a dramatic rooftop location during the Cannes Lions festival later this month.

SMG programmatic SVP Mac Delaney previously told Beet.TV that VivaKi, too, is not dead. “VivaKi still lives on. AOD is just one component of VivaKi.” Rubicon recently helped Publicis’ Digitas enable ad orders programmatically.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  This interview took place in the London office of SMG.

The exec whose company powers the so-called Pangea Alliance says such comings together, once considered rare in the cut-throat world of media, are beneficial.

“(In advertising), there’s always been that trade-off between scale and quality,” Rubicon Project marketplace development SVP Jay Sears tells Beet.TV. “Publishers are seeing Google and Facebook with the ability to provide that scale. With cooperative arrangements, they can do the same thing.

“By coming together, this group of media owners has created a global footprint of 110m monthly uniques that’s pretty significant in an environment that denotes quality.

“The phenomenon of the cooperative is something we’ve seen quite a bit of. You can see La Place in France, the Czech Publisher Exchange in the Czech Republic, the Danish Publisher Network in Denmark.”

These networks along with the Pangea are powered with technology from the Rubicon Project.

Sears was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“You need to look at the organisational structure of the media owner and the organisational structure of the ad holding company and understand how both of those entities are re-architecting to come together around automation,” Rubicon Group’s marketplace development SVP Jay Sears tells Beet.TV in this recorded video interview with with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, at DMEXCO.

“Automation was germinated inside the holding company entity in the trading desk – if you go back to the early days, they were only folks that knew anything about automation. But the ad holding company execs eventually figured out over the last couple of years, automation can also be a very profitable exercise versus some of the planning and buying processes that have been under severe compression.”

This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO.  Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.

“You always see innovation happen at the bottom of the market, which is exactly what happened around the rise of RTB (real-time bidding) and open-auction,” says Project Rubicon‘s marketplace development SVP Jay Sears.

“But what you’ve seen is increasing investment and organisation around the order-automation piece, the private piece.”

He was speaking to Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.

Sears moderated a session at Advertising Week about programmatic with most of the heads of the agency trading desks, We spoke with him afterwards.