It all boils down to a need to balance two key pillars – performance and responsibility – according to MediaMath chief partnerships officer Laurent Cordier.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Cordier talks about how those imperatives can come to the fore.
Cordier says there are two key considerations:
He continues: “The role of the CMOs is critical.
“They’re the one who can influence their team about where to spend, and how important it is for any top brand in the world to continue to fuel the free, ad-supported web ecosystem with great dollars, with great money, with great advertising money.”
In 2019, MediaMath launched a new initiative, Source, committing to:
Source is MediaMath’s effort to bring together several hand-picked ad-tech vendors committed to accountability, addressability and AI.
Cordier is an 11-year Google veteran who joined MediaMath this April from HeadSpin, a video delivery company.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
]]>“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.
]]>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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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?'”
In the battle to straighten-out the digital ad ecosystem, artificial intelligence is being leveraged to do the volume of work that humans cannot.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Charlie Archibald, VP, Data Science, MediaMath, explains why AI is essential.
Some studies have shown, that for every dollar an advertiser spends, approximately 40 cents of that dollar, or 40% of it, is making its way to the publishers, because you have so many middlemen in there, taking their cut,” Archibald says.
“The challenge here is that, given the complexity of this ecosystem, the number of publishers that you have, the number of supply paths that you have in play, it just becomes a really tall order to ask the buyers and the traders to kind of manually day in, day out, kind of manage that.
“So it really requires an AI or machine learning-based approach to address that properly at scale, in an automated fashion.
“You’re just no longer at a scale where that sort of thing can be done manually solely at the hands of traders or buyers. To do that effectively, you really need to leverage, AI or machine learning based solutions.”
Archibald says AI can be used across a wide range of issues, including supply path optimization, the practice of reducing the number of ad-tech partners in order to gain a shorter connection between buyer and seller.
“You’ll see efficiency gains for the DSP by reducing the number SSPs that they are working with for any given a set of inventory and reducing the load on the bidders,” he says.
“And you’ll see efficiencies for the advertisers too, so that they can figure out which supply path makes the most sense to drive the ROI for their business.”
Archibald says using AI can help alleviate strain on header bidding. That practice has been used to entertain bids from multiple bid sources simultaneously, rather than in sequential fashion, so as to achieve higher yield.
But Archibald says that has led to inventory being re-sold through a multitude of SSps, leading to a big spike in the volume of bid requests.
Archibald says MediaMath’s platform is using AI everywhere it can, but chiefly in three ways:
Transparent insights go to the heart of MediaMath – or, rather, its Brain. That is the name for its algorithm which determines which inventory to bid on and at what price/
“AI and machine learning can often feel a little bit like a black-box,” Archibald adds.
“MediaMath has become very focused on delivering granular transparency into the decisions that our algorithms make. We offer reporting insights into the decision that our Brain makes.
“That reporting gives our end users insights into what factors are most influential in driving the decisions about how much to bid for a given bid opportunity.”
You are watching “Media In Transition: How AI is Powering Change,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Around a dozen enablers of a new, identity-driven digital ad landscape.
That is according to one executive whose company has been trying to bring about a consensual, yet consolidated approach.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jim Sink, MediaMath SVP of Global Partnerships, describes how the world will change after the deprecation of third-party cookies and Apple’s decision to make its IDFA, through which advertisers track iOS users, opt-in by default.
Sink says the sun is setting on the practice of synchronising third-party cookie data, the method by which many buyers try to infer a user profile from multiple devices using cookies set on partner websites.
“We believe the future is getting out of the syncing game and really transacting on as close to first-party signals as you can,” he says.
Sink is reflecting the growing belief of many that publishers and advertisers alike must, instead, pivot to working with real, first-party data provided by audiences with consent.
But Sink has a particular take on the method. He calls it an “open identity architecture”.
“Our view of our open identity is the ability to transact on those identity signals,” he says.
Enabling those transactions is becoming the new battleground for ad-tech platforms that, until now, had relied on cookie matching and synchronizing.
“This industry globally will have different players that win in certain areas,” Sink says. “We believe that a handful, maybe up to 10 to 12 over time, will be the identity players in the industry that agencies and advertisers are working with.”
It is almost a year since MediaMath launched a new initiative, Source, committing to:
Source is MediaMath’s effort to bring together several hand-picked ad-tech vendors committed to accountability, addressability and AI.
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.
]]>That is according to one ad-tech company leader that has staked his firm’s reputation on the switch.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jeremy Steinberg, head of ecosystem at MediaMath, says he is leaning into providing first-party user authentication and respect for user privacy, each helping brands build more meaningful and respectful relationships with consumers.
“If we live in a murky world, and we are in today, I’m very concerned about the vitality of the advertising industry,” Steinberg says.
“Without these notions of alignment and accountability and addressability, I think the lack of trust, the current opacity in the system, is going to create friction points that are just unachievable to overcome relative to walled gardens going forward.
“We see a world where marketers have 100 per cent trust in the supply chain that they’re buying, have full visibility into ROI so that they can better understand where they have the most performance supply and what drives the best outcomes for them.”
In the the findings of the @forrester Opportunity Snapshot study, over 70% of respondents find media accountability, transparency, addressability and alignment across the media ecosystem partner interests important to their programmatic buying decisions. https://t.co/n1zUWIPMLa pic.twitter.com/h1s77IEXyq
— MediaMath (@mediamath) August 26, 2020
In October 2019, the company announced the new initiative would commit to:
Steinberg tells Beet.TV: “Our whole strategy going forward has been to develop this open infrastructure that allows for marketers to basically pick the best path that they think makes sense for their business, that provides the greatest level of addressability going forward.”
This year, MediaMath has also been executing an initiative called Purpose-Driven Advertising, a partnership with Peer39 through which it hopes to encourage ad buyers to spend in quality media outlets despite brand safety concerns.
It has also been engaged in other initiatives. “We’ve launched a multicultural marketplace that supports hundreds of minority publications,” Steinberg adds. “We’ve launched a curated news marketplace that is really meant to help brands activate on quality journalism.
“With what’s happened with marketers boycotting Facebook, there’s this clear need for marketers to spend a significant amount of energy, effort and resources and time in really thinking through how to best protect their brand going forward, and doing it in a way that also supports quality journalism, supports a diversity of voices and healthy discourse.”
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.
]]>MediaMath, one of the industry’s leading DSP’s, is urging marketers not to use “blunt” keyword blocking. As an alternative, it is using the contextual tools of Peer39 to allow marketers to understand the “sentiment” of content, explains Daniel Sepulveda, SVP for Policy and Advocacy at MediaMath.
Through this alliance, the companies expect to expose an additional 30-35 percent of inventory with the contextual tools versus blunt blocking, he says in this interview with Beet.TV
Also seeking ameliorate the impact of blacklisting is Integral Ad Science, which is using machine learning to allow brands to be more “granular” in applying blocking. This according to IAS CEO Lisa Utzschneider in this recent interview with Beet.TV
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of brand safety and the use of keyword blocking during the COVID-19 pandemic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In October, MediaMath launched a new initiative, Source, that makes several promises all at once, including:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, MediaMath’s global head of ecosystem Jeremy Steinberg says Source was an attempt to make real the industry’s ideal response to “transparency” concerns. “Instead of spending a lot of time talking about it, we planted a flag,” he says.
“We’re building it, we’ve built the first version of it that we have brands live and running right now, and seeing great outcomes. And now we’re going to keep iterating over time, because we want the whole industry to adopt this new framework, and this new approach to advertising.”
Source partners include Rubicon, Telaria, LiveRamp, Okami, Oracle and publishers directly.
Steinberg says Source covers two core areas:
“When a brand places a dollar with us, they see all the way through the supply chain, exactly how much everything costs,” he says.
“We’re also building new infrastructure to support the buying of accountable advertising with Rubicon. And we’ll do it with Telaria and we’re in talks with other SSPs about doing this.”
“There’s a lot of frustration right now from consumers, because they feel as if they don’t have the trust, and a lot of these companies are taking advantage of compliance, as opposed to really driving forward consumers to control their own data,” Steinberg says.
“We’ve partnered with LiveRamp, and the goal is to expand that relationship and then to pull in other partners who have great identity-based, privacy friendly, consent driven solutions that our infrastructure will enable the best resolution for brands to consumers, in a privacy-friendly way.”
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.
]]>Whilst online ad buyers, over the last few years, have wrung their hands over viewability, fraud and supply-chain transparency issues, television – if only because it has been, by definition, disconnected – has sailed on by the controversy.
Could the new connection of TV devices to the internet change that, however?
Integrated Ad Science, a maker of ad fraud detection software, says it is gearing up to launch a product for connected TVs by Q1 2020.
But Mike Fisher, the VP of advanced TV at online ad platform MediaMath, says the problem isn’t necessarily a problem… if you buy from the right places.
“Connected TV is inherently 100% in-view, unskippable and fraud-free when buying through the right pipes,” he says, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“MediaMath’s philosophy is to always buy directly from the end seller, and from premium-end sellers, especially for connected TV… the Hulus, the NBCs, the Viacoms, the Discoveries of the world.
“We know that they are the good actors in the space. They’re not sending impressions saying they’re one thing (but) that they’re another. We’re not worried about impression spoofing or server-side ad insertion spoofing. We know what we’re buying is what we think we’re buying because of who we’re buying from.”
Fisher acknowledges some lingering issues like the inability of TV to truly indicate digital viewabilty signals, like whether a viewer walked out of the room during an ad playback.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right 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.
]]>That was just one piece of the problem. Ad-tech vendors also stood accused of obfuscating “ad-tech tax” fees siphoned away from real advertising spend.
Since then, the barely a week has gone by without various companies mooting solutions to the problem.
But, whilst a consensus has gathered that progress has been made, one of the leading ad-tech companies thinks the problem remains chronic.
“Surprisingly little progress has been made since, I think, two or three years ago,” Konrad Gerszke, president of MediaMath, says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The ecosystem has evolved into a situation where there’s a lot of fraud across various steps in the supply chain because of a lack of transparency. As a result of that, there’s a lot of money wasted that the brands and the agencies are investing.
“What we see in certain test we are driving is, between 20 and 50% could be wasted.”
That estimation will shock many in the industry, who believed that matters were improving.
“A lot of the advertisers were starting to get on the barricades to hold the industry accountable for all the spend that is going in the industry.
Gerszke thinks the ongoing problem needs solving through three “pillars” of accountability, addressability and AI. Specifically, through three measures:
MediaMath operates data management platforms, omnichannel DSP, audiences, supply and intelligence services.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>That is why MediaMath, a digital ad-buying platform, has just teamed up with IRIS.TV, a video technology vendor, to provide a “sentiment score” brands can use in their buying decisions.
“It’s better for the buy side, ensuring there is a brand safety and relevancy component to where they’re buying video content through my pipes,” says MediaMath’s Mike Fisher, head of advanced TV and video, in this video interview with Beet.TV
So, what is IRIS.TV? As a starting point, the LA company’s technology is already deployed on many broadcaster and publisher sites, for which it uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.
That data now also signals the context of videos to ad buyers, and IRIS.TV even allows buyers to buy ads right in its own publishers’ video units.
“We’ve partnered … to allow our clients to leverage their technology, which scores video content, a brand sentiment about that video and really be able to leverage that for advertising using a DSP workflow,” Fisher adds.
“A client is able to say, ‘if I’m looking to advertise an electric car, find the right video content to be placed adjacent that maybe talks about why electric cars are better’.
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>“One of the newer and exciting announcements for us is Sky with AdSmart,” says Mike Reidy, SVP, Digital Ad Sales, NBCUniversal. Sky being this amazing international leader but also in the OTT space as well.”
In this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan, Reidy also talks about the migration of video viewing to big screens and evangelizing the opportunities of connected-TV and programmatic advertising transactions.
“I think it’s interesting because when digital video viewership first began, it was seen as taking viewers from the big screen to the small screen” amid concerns like viewability of content and ads. “But now with the advent of connected TV, OTT you’re seeing those viewers migrate back to the big TV screen,” Reidy says.
It’s one thing to have “the largest canvas for a brand to communicate via sight, sound and motion” and another to have advanced TV sitting on a digital platform. “So that lends itself to all the capabilities of dynamic ad serving, new interactive ad units as well as data.”
Last month, Comcast united NBCU’s Audience Studio targeting solutions with Sky’s addressable advertising tools. Operating under the AdSmart name, it’s designed to enable global brands to reach customers in international markets and measure results across NBCU and Sky’s TV portfolio, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
Asked about AdSmart’s plans for the United States, Reidy says, “That’s what we’re working through right now, identifying what are the strong points from each of us respectively. But ideally, the long term is that if we have a client that’s looking at things from a global landscape through a global lens, we now have this incredible domestic and international reach to have a much more strategic conversation with them.”
As for working with DSP’s, Reidy says NBCU is “really excited about what MediaMath is doing. They’re leaning really heavily into the connected TV space and this programmatic landscape. We look at them as people we can partner with, collaborate with, to evangelize what the capabilities are here.”
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.
]]>“We do think that we have a couple of really interesting categories that would play really well above and beyond just long-form programming but maybe short-form programming and text and/or other kinds of products,” says SVP of Sales for TV Everywhere Lauri Baker.
“You’ll start to see a lot more kind of direct to consumer different models coming out of Discovery,” Baker adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan.
Discovery launched its branded streaming apps under the Go moniker in 2016 and they now number 17. That opened the door for a company used to traditional linear sales relationships to more advertising opportunities and, in the process, transacting programmatically.
“We found the capacity growing very fast on Go and we knew that we had to tap into demand from all sides,” Baker explains. “So we knew that if we wanted to tap into that we had to be a leader in bringing full-episode content to the digital world and we wanted to do that through very transparent and open relationships programmatically.”
Discovery engages solely in private programmatic marketplaces and eschews open exchanges, according to Baker. It works “very closely with DSP’s like MediaMath” and likes the marketplaces being created.
“We’ve seen a lot of change over the last year in bringing connected TV marketplaces into programmatic, which has been really exciting to us because it does give us the ability to separate our long-form content with the short form content, which is the majority of digital video in general.”
Addressing the direct-to-consumer landscape, Baker acknowledges “that’s where the bulk of the growth is happening from a streaming perspective but that’s not good for advertisers because there are no ads there.”
She believes that companies with deep roots in linear programming, along with its scale, can build streaming apps “that can rival a Netflix or an Amazon because we have the content at our disposal.” Discovery’s 17 apps are tied into one ad-serving platform and one DMP, “so all of the data, all of that scale lives together.”
Baker points to Discovery’s international rights to the PGA and its “incredible relationship” with Tiger Woods. “We have a direct-to-consumer app that we’re launching any day now that really has everything from video content to lessons with Tiger to setting up a tee time, et cetera.”
Subsequent to this interview, Discovery and Magnolia, the home and lifestyle brand led by Chip and Joanna Gaines, announced a media joint venture. The as-yet unnamed multi-platform media company will be composed of a linear television network and TV Everywhere app to be unveiled in Summer 2020. The venture has plans for a subscription streaming service to debut at a later date.
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.
]]>Last July, MediaMath raised $225 million from Searchlight Capital Partners, bringing its total funding at that point to more than $500 million, as The Wall Street Journal reports. In addition to independence, objectivity and scale, the trend toward more media—particularly video—being transacted on programmatically all bode well for MediaMath, says Searchlight Partner Darren Glatt.
Within technology, media and telecom, “What we see is a really interesting confluence of events where each of those three very large sectors are converging in vary many ways,” Glatt says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan.
“What we see tectonic shifts happening in these industries where we’re seeing increasingly, brands and agencies for that matter thinking through how to make their purchase of media more effective.”
As programmatic transactions for advertising inventory continue to grow, there needs to be an underlying level of software and technology to enable the more efficient purchase of media, according to Glatt. “We thought that MediaMath was one of the leading players, one of the really few leading global DSP’s of scale that’s positioned very well to offer an independent solution to both agencies and to advertisers.”
As opposed to walled gardens equipped with their own tech stacks and, in some cases, a vested interest “of selling and buying their own media on behalf of clients,” MediaMath doesn’t own its own media properties “and is very objective in terms of the results it tries to deliver to its clients,” Glatt says.
Both advertisers and publishers acknowledge that “there’s too much volume to be traded in an analogue fashion.”
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.
]]>Hulu has had programmatic capabilities since 2014 but “only recently we built a sales team around it” to work with Hulu’s local, national and performance marketing teams, the Regional Sales Manager of Advanced TV says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. “Hulu hasn’t been the easiest to work with programmatically in the past.”
The company works with “pretty much all” DSP’s, offering three types of programmatic deals. The first is automated guaranteed, wherein Hulu uses various data and determines targeting. “And then we send all those targeted impressions to the advertiser,” Laurenzo says. “It’s a fixed price. We do all the decisioning and pass those impressions on.”
Hulu’s second programmatic offering also is based on fixed pricing, called “unreserved fixed,” but it offers advertisers the ability to do the decisioning. “So based on the bid stream, they can decide if they want to accept or pass on those impressions.”
Three months ago, Hulu added a third programmatic variation that Laurenzo describes as the company’s “most differentiated deal type” called an invite-only auction.
“This is our first biddable model where you can actually go in and bid on inventory from Hulu,” Laurenzo says.
“It’s also the first time we’ve allowed multiple brands to run through one single deal ID. That’s a big deal for our DSP partners because that’s typically how they would prefer to work anyway.”
Asked about working with MediaMath, Laurenzo says, “We love the transparency, not arbitraging our inventory. We have so many issues in the marketplace with people representing Hulu inventory when maybe they shouldn’t.”
Given Hulu’s audience growth, “the DSP’s are actually working with us to help find ways to better utilize some of that extra capacity that we have.”
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.
]]>“I definitely think we’re coming of age, if you will. We’re hitting that critical mass where yes there used to be scarce inventory. But especially with consumer trends we’re seeing more and more of that inventory becoming available,” Psacharopoulos says.
Comscore is one of many companies that participated in the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. In this Beet.TV interview at the event, Psacharopoulos details Comscore’s latest contributions to planning, transacting and measuring results of advanced-TV campaigns.
Comscore is integrating advanced audiences into programmatic TV so that buyers can continue to venture beyond standard age and gender demos.
“We’re now introducing new metrics such as show-level exposure and dayparts and exposure to linear TV advertising,” says Psacharopoulos.
“We’re even getting into personas, believe it or not, whereby we’re now making available to the buying community the ability to buy based on people who were exposed or engaged with the World Series or the Stanley Cup or the Super Bowl.”
Also for programmatic TV, Comscore has metrics showing heavy, medium and light OTT and SVOD subscribers, as well as online gamers. “We’re trying to respond to what we’re hearing from the buying and selling community.”
Psacharopoulos says the industry wants trusted, third-party metrics that incorporated advanced-audiences insights. “We’re fundamental believers in the way in which we should be doing that is not from a single-source basis, given all the known issues from single-source type solutions.”
He calls MediaMath “an absolutely phenomenal partner. The way that they see us as a trusted partner, we also see them as a highly trusted, highly valuable partner.”
Comscore’s latest announcements heralded new “packages across our planning suite to enable folks to understand dynamics of disparate audiences, be it for their online and or offline behaviors in terms of understanding trends and patterns and so on.
In addition, “we’re enabling the targeting of those individual segments and making those available within MediaMath.” From the measurement side, within the Comscore Campaign Ratings suite, “we’re making available that post ad exposure measurement transparency again across these advanced audiences.”
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.
]]>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.
]]>One of Sling’s key selling points is enabling live television to be delivered by IP. “Being able to bring live television to a programmatic environment and bring it to buyers who can transact in real time is really unique and really exciting,” Arrix says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan.
“And I think that’s a beacon of what’s to come down the road for anybody in the live TV OTT space as well as CTV.”
At Sling, programmatic is “a significant portion of our overall revenue. It’s a really unique way for buyers to come in and get live television advertising in real time,” Arrix adds.
What powers the combination of programmatic with real time transactions is the ability to leverage Sling’s viewer data. “By leveraging our data, you can deliver very unique targeting and probably more importantly, you can deliver reporting on the back end that ties into ROI and ties in to attribution and takes measurement to the next level.”
Asked about how Sling works with MediaMath and other DSP’s, Arrix says there’s a lesson to be learned in terms of “what the DSP’s have built” and that their utility is dictated solely by the demand side.
“The demand side is saying ‘I like this company, I like MediaMath I like their UI, I like their platform and I am going to run my marketing dollars through to this platform.’ Supply siders that want to be a part of that “need to get connected and get integrated.”
Noting that Sling has full integration across the spectrum of DSP’s, Arrix says he thinks Mediamath “has done a great job in terms of drumming up added demand around CTV and OTT.”
As for the continued emergence of new, streaming-video competitors, Arrix says, “The advanced advertising or data-driven video space is exploding and there are developments left right and center. We love were we stand right now.”
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, little by little, other platforms are getting lit up with these new tricks, too.
That’s why the man who heads MediaMath’s video operations expects programmatic to hit TV in a much bigger way.
“I think that, during the back half of 2019, you’re going to start to see more linear inventory become available in a way that looks more programmatic,” says Mike Fisher, head of advanced TV and video at the ad-buyer platform tech vendor.
“(This will happen) via either optimized linear buying pads like what Viacom Vantage is doing, or through true addressable set-top box VOD which some of the MVPDs are starting to roll out, connections to SSPs.”
Programmatic technology processed just 2.5% of all US TV ad spending in 2018, expected to rise to 6.8% by 2020, according to eMarketer, which estimates: “Live TV Isn’t Ready for Programmatic Yet“.
But a host of technology companies is approaching the idea of “programmatic TV” around the edges, bringing more intelligence to linear TV ad buying, all eager to claim a slice of a US TV ad market that, whilst it is in slight erosion, is still worth around $70 billion.
Fisher says there is an opportunity to impress direct-to-consumer brands which, previously, may never have had the resources to buy a TV campaign.
This videos 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.
]]>This is particularly appealing to so-called direct-to-consumer brands with traditional digital video assets they can now extend to TV, the company’s VP and Head of Advanced TV and Video says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
What those newer brands have in common is that they probably haven’t had a relationship with a traditional agency while growing their businesses on the Internet with one-to-one, measurable marketing. They’re attracted to things like programming and tent-pole events they’ve never been able to access. “Programmatic really fits well into that pipe especially for TV, which is why direct to consumer is so big for us,” Fisher adds.
As video SSP’s continue to evolve, MediaMath’s model is “to focus on running on the rails that the publisher wants us to run on. A lot of our partners build leverage, Telaria and other video SSP’s, as their connection point for us into their inventory.”
This, in turn, “allows us to connect to multiple supply sources. It allows them to connect to multiple demand sources without having to do one-to-one integrations with networks.”
Working closely with its supply-side partners and TV networks yields lots of “cool things,” including enabling the passing of show titles, obtaining more information about viewing habits, which can then enhance the bid stream.
“Another really exciting we’re working on is being able to know how long someone has been in a viewing session,” Fisher says. “If someone’s spending four hours binging TV content, being able to hit them early with a message is so much more memorable and important than hitting somebody later in a binge session with a message.”
Working with SSP’s “we’re really able to determine how many ads that person has seen and use that to determine bidding.” Fisher describes the strategy as “this is what our outcomes are, this is where we want to be spending, but make sure we’re surfacing the right message and the right creative at the right time for that person, without needing to set up a separate strategy for video, and a separate strategy for TV and a separate strategy for display. Letting it all talk to each other, letting it all optimize across full funnel.”
Asked about the use of custom creative at various points in the purchase funnel, Fisher recommends that marketers use the same creative spots in connected TV as in linear.
While MediaMath isn’t seeing 10,000 different versions of a piece of creative, “some of our smarter clients are saying that after first impression happens with that mass-market creative, then start focusing more on driving a message for that specific user based on what we know about that user and their online behaviors.”
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.
]]>Against new regulatory limits, that brings untold complexity. So, could artificial intelligence help move marketing forward?
Ad-tech firm MediaMath thinks so. That is why, a year ago, it struck a partnership to work collaboratively with IBM’s Watson AI division on developing AI application for ad-tech,
In this video interview with Beet.TV, MediaMath international MD Dave Reed explains how machines could help target humans.
“If you think about the thousands of decisions that any marketer has to make for any one consumer per day just in paid media, and then if the ideal is to actually take it not just paid but owned and earned, you get to a quantity of decisions and number of complexities and variables that is impossible to pre-sort and rule-base off of,” he says.
“That’s where we think AI comes in. Certain things, to me at least, that we’re working on are that by leveraging that AI to really think about, ‘How do we take inputs like application behavior for brands that have applications or site behavior or past purchases or purchases from other brands or any of this wealth of information that’s exogenous to the media world?’, right?
“It has nothing to do with CPMs or CPCs or any of that. And leverage that to deliver better, more tailored, messaging. I think that’s really exciting.”
The excitement becomes particularly pertinent in a digital world beyond desktops.
Many of the devices consumers use to do their digital business are not trackable using conventional cookies, but marketers still need to develop a holistic understanding of a single consumer, regardless the devices she uses.
Says Reed: “To get full profiles of people, you really need to have an identity that is persistent and able to track across things like marketing tech like CRM email and SMS and push and things like that as well as paid media.
“The cookie is increasingly less relevant for tracking, and it becomes more so as device manufacturers like Apple increasingly don’t accept it by default, with Mozilla’s effort to get rid of the cookie and just, in general, people not allowing themselves to be tracked.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>There are 65 million households using some type of device to access premium video content in the living room and, for the first time, more than 50% of video starts being delivered on a connected-TV device are ad-supported, the Head of Advanced TV & Video explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“You’ve seen the viewership change, you’ve seen people embrace it as their primary source of content and you’ve seen these devices take over control of HDMI1 on the TV, which is the most important thing to control,” Fisher says. “No longer is a Roku device a way to get Netflix on your TV. A Roku device is a way to get TV.”
While connected TV definitely is the “low-hanging fruit for what we’re doing at MediaMath today,” within three to five years all linear impressions will become one-to-one addressable and targetable through the rise of IP video, “so we want to be well positioned to be able to play in that space as well.”
MediaMath doesn’t buy or arbitrage TV inventory. Rather, it sees itself as the connection point between buyers and sellers, according to Fisher.
“We’ve curated our list of supply sources that we do most of our transactions with down to, say, the top twenty percent of supply sources that drive eighty percent of the meaningful impressions that marketers are looking for,” he says.
Those sources include five network groups and three big virtual MVPD services in a fraud-free environment. “We’re never more than one hop away from the end seller,” Fisher adds.
MediaMath’s pitch to traditional TV buyers is one of reach and frequency and how they can shift a portion of their spend “to the same inventory and the same viewer model and the same screen they know how to buy but doing it in a smarter, more measureable way.”
The company tells the same story to digital buyers but with a twist since they already know how to buy audiences, measurable impressions and retargeted campaigns. “For the first time, a digital buyer has the ability to transact on the biggest most trusted screen in the house in a way that they know how to do and in a way that fits into their business model.”
With its cross-device graph and audience targeting capabilities, MediaMath sees itself as leading the charge in tying back actual down-funnel attribution to upper funnel branding metrics.
“Being able to say the first time a viewer is exposed to an ad campaign or a brand’s message should happen in video. Whether or not that’s web, mobile, tablet or TV, video is the best way to tell that upper-funnel branding story,” says Fisher.
“But that doesn’t get you all the way there as a marketer. You want to be able to find that household, find the users in that household, and tell a down-funnel story to drive attribution and actual action on the right screen with the right message at the right time.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Still, one ad-tech exec believes consumers have every right to expect a rebalancing of their relationship with publishers and advertisers, which the new GDPR law sought to usher in.
“We’ve seen a decrease in available inventory in the European Economic Area since 25th. But we are not having challenges executing,” says MediaMath’s media and growth channels GM Lewis Rothkopf, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
That may chime with a report from Digiday which estimates a cut in programmatic spending of 20% to 50% immediately following GDPR’s implementation on May 25, as some in the supply chain found it difficult to obtain audience members’ consent for data processing. But media buyers told the site brands’ programmatic spending had rebounded to around 30% or 20% less than beforehand.
Rothkpof said MediaMath, which offers a demand-side ad-buying platform and a data management platform, its supply partners and marketers had prepared for GDPR, which he expects to be replicated in other parts of the world.
But, despite the challenge, Rothkopf doesn’t have a problem with the movement that GDPR represents.
“Consumers deserve a better deal online,” he adds. “The value exchange that we are asking of consumers in exchange for their time and attentiveness needs to be far more in their favour.
“Things like ad blocking, things like regulatory schemes such as GDPR, things like browsers’ reader modes and Intelligent Tracking Protection, all of these things are strong indications that consumers have recognised that they are the product and they’re unhappy about that and they are lashing out as a result of that.”
GDPR came in to effect back in 2016, whilst the final deadline for compliance came on May 25
Now any global company which deals with EU citizens’ data must comply with a new and more stringent set of demands, risking a fine of up to 4% of global annual turnover, up to a maximum of €20 million.
New GDPR stipulations give consumers new protections including:
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the Festival, Seiler talks about the speed needed to deliver creative in real time and the utility of such technologies as artificial intelligence, artificial reality, virtual reality and blockchain.
On the issue of speed, there’s some catch-up needed between desire and reality, according to Seiler.
“Once you’re at the right person, what do you want to say to them and how much can you change that up to ensure that you’re getting the right message to the right person in…real time. And I pause on real time, because I think we as an industry talk about real time as if it were now and it’s way too big a lag,” says Seiler, who is President of Brand Solutions. “So I suspect that the accountability will get to individual behaviors and as close to the time that you wanted to solicit that behavior as possible.”
He believes that artificial intelligence has “been around kind of forever, but calling it AI has changed our perception of it. I think there’s an insecurity around machine learning that makes us think that people are going to become obsolete, and that obviously isn’t the case.”
To Seiler, machines should do things “that people are wasting an awful lot of time doing themselves” so that they are freed up to be much more creative. “It should be much more around the story rather than the technology that’s required in order to develop and or distribute that story,” Seiler says. “AI I think is going to be really helpful and really disruptive at the same time, because there are going to be jobs that are displaced by it, as there should be.”
Virtual reality is being used “all over the place,” but he thinks the application to media hasn’t really been determined. While it’s probably appropriate for gaming, beyond that “I don’t imagine anytime soon until the technology advances and you don’t have to have those really clumsy things on your face.”
Artificial reality “is going to get a lot farther a lot faster.”
Seiler considers blockchain technology as a potential remedy for providing needed trust, accountability, speed and measurement, but he’s not about to jump aboard the blockchain train.
“I don’t think we have a clue how to go from where we are today and how we are used to paying for things and tracking them, etcetera, to where we will go.”
At Cannes, it’s all about the creative for Seiler. “I love judging here because it means you’re actually guaranteed seeing the work. I wish always that we were spending more time around the work, which is what the point of this whole thing is.”
Nonetheless, he cites a palpable sense of insecurity given the struggles of some advertising-based holding companies and competition from, among others, management consulting groups.
“The collective understanding that things are changing but not a clear understanding to what. So there’s that uncomfortable thing of, ‘like I know it isn’t this but I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ I say opportunity.”
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>