“Profound change,” according to GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, McDonald interviews MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki on how the entire advertising industry can reboot itself for a new era.
Both McDonald and Zawadzki agreed cookies, the third-party usage of which is being deprecated, are a “20-year-old hack” on top of rudimentary browser technology, and are ill-suited to modern demands.
“If you thought that either last click or post-click post view was the right basis by which to manage a $500 billion industry on our way to a trillion dollars… is it going to work by asking people to touch their TV?,” Zawadzki said. “Highly unlikely.”
"The advertising ecosystem is begging for a redesign and it’s our job to give it one." Read more from our CPO, Anudit Vikram, on the urgent need for programmatic redesign, live now on @TheDrum: https://t.co/1g4eO3nZfO
— MediaMath (@mediamath) June 29, 2021
“We’re in a situation where we want to recreate addressability as defined by the humans behind the screens and speakers, which is good. But the way that we’re going to have to do it – we’ll have to become enterprise-open. It’ll have to be a portfolio of solutions.
“Those things will need to be selected, stitched in scale – it’s going to be deterministic solutions, probabilistic solutions, open solutions, proprietary solutions. You’re going to have to put these things together in a way that allows for orchestration across set screens and speakers.”
Zawadzki said the new-look industry organization demands a more consensual, all-hands approach to redefinition. Previously, he suggested, self-interest ruled.
“People (have been) operating in silos in isolation… optimising for publisher yields, optimising for advertiser performance, optimising for intermediary profit growth,” he said.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
“You can’t solve the industry challenges in a silo.”
Global Forum on Responsible Media – Watch the Program on Demand
Ultimately, the significant disruption happening in the ad industry can be beneficial, the MediaMath CEO said.
“It is a requirement that the industry reorganise itself around a new set of principles and work backwards from what it should look like and what it needs to look like.”
And GroupM CEO McDonald agreed. “Profound times require profound change,” he said.
“Profound change does have us have to sort of look in the mirror.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>But, whilst all manner of initiatives has aimed to tackle the problems, and whilst ad-tech platforms have enjoyed professing their own higher standards versus those of rivals, “transparency” issues still appear to persist.
So MediaMath, one of the leading ad-tech software suppliers, is attempting to reboot the entire supply chain with a new initiative, Source, that makes several promises all at once, including:
“We’re literally doing the things that are necessary in order to starve fraud out at the source and remove it from the transaction entirely,” says MediaMath CEO Zawadzki in this video interview with Beet.TV.
What does that mean in practice? In public pronouncements, Source seems to be described variously as a “framework”, an “ecosystem”, a “product” and a “platform”.
MediaMath appears to have assembled a select roster of partners, under new terms of trade, in a configuration it believes better delivers the kind of transparent supply chain advertisers want, short-circuiting some of the messiness of the totally-open ad-buying world. Or, as Zawadzki describes it, “rethinking what was important” with “really, really clear integrations between the key components”.
As AdExchanger reports: “They include Havas Media and its own advertising customers, SSPs Rubicon Project (digital) and Telaria (TV), news publishers such as Business Insider, News Corp. and IBM’s Weather Company, and other vendors. Oracle Data Cloud fills the third-party verification role with Moat, and White Ops is used for pre-bid fraud detection.”
Zawadzki adds: “Because we had the opportunity to redesign the actual flow through the ecosystem, we could be bolder about how we contemplated that.”
That means Source will employ “radical transparency, bi-directionally for every hop in the value chain”, he explains: “To participate you literally have to… you know everybody that’s involved in a transaction, you know that the value that they create, you know the role that they’re playing, you know the price that they extract.”
As much as anything, Source appears to be an evolutionary project designed to raise transparency standards in digital advertising – starting small, but with big ambitions.
“By the end of 2020, I want to have the whole backbone of digital advertising re-engineered in this way,” Zawadzki says. “We want everybody ultimately to be part of Source … as they’re all willing to play by these very, very high standards and rules.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Connect All Fronts is the name of the conference MediaMath, founded in 2007 as an early programmatic pioneer, recently hosted to connect the various partners that are key to that vision.
“We know the goals of our clients. They’re looking to reach the people they that care about, they need to do it in a way that the people at the other end of the screens appreciate,” MediaMath Founder & CEO Joe Zawadzki says in this Beet.TV. interview.
He refers to the “technical plumbing” that integrates “a variety of standards with a variety of specifications and provide the normalization layer.” His longer explanation: “The bridge between the thousands of players that are necessary to make all this stuff happen across media technology and data partners and be able to translate those into the goals that Fortune 2000 marketers and their agencies across the world are looking to achieve.”
At the center of things is the question “Can we bring the community together?” If so, Zawadzki envisions a future that is “non zero-sum, where we’re creating value together because people think of this as a world of sides and it’s not. Good marketing makes consumers happy, good marketing makes companies happy.”
He believes it must be done in a way “that respects and rewards the ecosystem that connects them in a way that encourages people to do it again tomorrow and do more of it. This is a shared relationship, and if we can satisfy everybody in this process you can really produce a better marketing future.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>But one boss at the centre of the ad targeting boom thinks the so-called “GDPR”, whose final compliance deadline comes this May, is a force for good that will help clean up ad practices and put consumers in a better relationship with marketers.
“Advertising has not done a very good job of advertising itself,”MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “I think GDPR is this wonderful opportunity for the industry to basically say, ‘Let’s make all of those things that we’re doing explicit’.”
New measures in the GDPR, which passed in 2016, include:
And the rules must be followed by any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover.
But Zawadzki sees the positives. “What is exciting about it, I think, is having an explicit relationship with the end-consumer,” he says.
“Let’s have a consumer Bill of Rights. Let’s be true consumer advocates and let’s use this as some mode of force to not just do it for the EU, but to use this and decide that what makes sense for a global business is to have a global set of standards.”
Views of executives interviewed for Beet.TV’s GDPR series range everywhere from “not much” to “world-changing”.
Almost two years after GDPR was implemented, we have variously heard views that many businesses remain underprepared, many ad-tech investors remain in the dark, that GDPR could have little impact and that it will fundamentally re-shape digital advertising.
There is one consensus – that GDPR is coming at the same time as a general movement toward people-based marketing, a tactic in which advertisers develop real, consensual relationships with consumers, rather that simply watching them from afar.
All that may be true, but GDPR is a policy instrument. Whilst Zawadzki is eager to adhere to it, he thinks a common technology infrastructure may be required, to underpin an ecosystem in which everyone sings from the same hymnsheet.
“Some of the things that we are missing are some true identity standards – in terms of the use of consumer data, what’s PI, what’s anonymized, what is the role of synonymous in these things,” he adds. “There’s some definitions that continue, I think, to require clarity. That may not, in fact, come pre-May.
“To actually create advertising that works, we have to create those technical specifications and maybe even those companies in order to manage that.”
This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world. The series is presented by Criteo. Please visit this page for additional segments.
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