Like many companies in advertising and media, Adobe is “seeing more and more that customers want to be working with their own first-party data,” Hammerman adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

“What that starts to bring up is PII, and whether we work with PII or not. We’ve been working a lot to think about how we can work both with, we’ll reference as third-party data, cookie data, unknown data, as well as being able to work with first party data.”

Enter the Adobe Experience Platform. Hammerman describes the technology as being about “the normalization and ingestion of data, along with semantics and controls that allow for the labeling and usage of data along with the democratization of data without the concerns of compliance.”

It’s powered by “a very strong overlay of AI,” which in Adobe’s case goes by the name Sensei. As Adobes AI foundation, the technology “really starts to look at things like what do you with that identity. How to do you look at further segmentation and data science in a very deep and meaningful and broad way.”

According to Hammerman, Adobe has 300 engineers dedicated to AI.

“What we’ve seen in data across the board is that the demand for data science is so high and you just can’t get enough of the workforce in place,” she says. “Additionally, the speed of data is moving so fast that to be able to do this in real time becomes almost meaningless for a customer, and AI allows us to move at that speed.”

With identity increasing at the core of great customer experiences, it encompasses not just advertising and marketing per se but also personalizing content experiences. “And that’s really ultimately what we think about when we think about a great customer experience.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.

“I think when folks are talking about transparency what they’re really talking about is validation. They really want to know that what they’re buying is exactly what we say they’re buying and it’s achieved the results,” says Judith Hammerman, SVP, Data & Programmatic Solutions, Time Inc.

The reasons for this desire are clear, as Hammerman explains in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“They’re big advertisers and they’re spending big budgets and they have large goals ahead of them. So it’s important that they be able to answer, both from a KPI perspective and for an overall ROI perspective, what they’ve been able to achieve,” says Hammerman.

To a certain extent for Time Inc., transparency is “a little bit of a non-issue” because it’s always asked its advertisers what they wanted to achieve and what were their metrics for success.

“For us, transparency isn’t a change. We’ve always been transparent,” Hammerman adds.

She then offers an interesting take on the walled garden moniker that often accompanies mentions of platforms like Facebook and Google. Quite simply, to be a walled garden environment you need a wall and a garden. “Garden is scaled content. What is bringing a consumer there and ultimately keeping a consumer there.”

While scale is baked into Time Inc.’s DNA, it’s the walls that are missing, according to Hammerman.

“We really try to ensure that the consumer can go wherever they want to go and that as they go we’re still capturing data,” she says. “But we’re also sharing that data with our advertisers so that they can learn the most.”

One of the things that interests Hammerman is the growing nexus of publishers, publisher data sources and supply-side platforms.

“A great example of this is Merkle’s M1 platform, where you really are bringing the best knowledge together and there’s a real collaboration happening on a more consultative level versus transactional level.”

As AdExchanger reports, Dentsu Aegis Network recently disclosed that its media agency brands in the U.S .will use Merkle’s PII-based M1 platform for centralized data planning and activation.

“It certainly puts more onus on the publisher to not only know their supply but know their consumer,” says Hammerman. “But to me it’s becoming a very exciting place where publishers can play and add incremental value.”

This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Now the outfit is bolstering that last part, by making an acquisition which will put more of the automation power in the hands of its ad buyers.

Last year, Time Inc bought itself in to the ad-tech ecosystem, by acquiring ad data outfit Viant. Now Viant is making an acquisition of its own.

In January, the company announced it is buying Waltham, MA-based Adelphic, a six-year-old demand-side platform for ad buyers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Time Inc global data commercialisation VP Judith Hammerman explains the company wants to cover both ends of the chain.

“There’s a piece of (Time Inc) … that is a more curated (advertising) opportunity,” she says.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t (also) put automation, data and people behind it. More and more, people want automation, and they want it in a self-service way.”

The move from managed service to self-service is an emerging trend in ad-tech right now. Venture investment is turning away from business models where revenue is linked to ad spend itself, as VCs prefer the certainty of guaranteed recurring revenue and the efficiency of empowering customers to do the heavy lifting some ad-tech providers do behind the scenes.

For Hammerman, it is about satisfying ad buyers, rather than investors.

“We’re sitting on a tremendous amount of data with 155m subscribers, 140m uniques, 120m on our mobile side. The acquisition of Adelphic helps to super-charge that.

“Now we have cross-device powered by Viant’s ID graph, measurement associated with that, and we have it in a self-serve platform.

“We’re creating the first people-based DSP, giving democratisation to the data.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.