It took just a couple of years, after HotWired sold the ad to AT&T manually, for software to be applied to ad sales.
Now in what the DMP managing director of ad-tech vendor Sizmek, Joshua Koran, calls the “third decade” of “programmatic” ad sales, he describes what is changing…
So, what exactly is different about the current phase?
“A lot of the value-add that the ad networks originally provided is still going to be provided by lots of different third-parties,” Koran acknowledges.
“But the UIs that we are building to make it easy for marketers to make use of all this technology are what are being standardized, as well as the pipes to exchange information across all these companies.”
In 2019, Sizmek is partly created by its earlier acquisition of the demand-side ad platform Rocket Fuel, which itself had acquired the early ad-tech outfit [x+1].
Koran says he is a strong supporter of the open web.
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.
]]>So why are so many advertisers either spending so little or using addressable for a different purpose?
In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat, a cast of “millennial”-aged companies assembled to discuss issues affecting the pace of roll-out of future TV advertising – and what advertisers really want it for…
The panel heard that what ad buyers really want is audience scale. This may seem to go against the inherent promise of addressable TV, which can make an audience far smaller but also far more relevant…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“There’s a lot of great data sets out in the marketplace. There’s 199 million homes. Get to half, you really have something. And then the strategy and the media planners will start funding that at a much, much higher rate than it does now.”
Today, connected TV even seems to mitigate against large-scale campaigns. One ad-tech exec said the promises aren’t quite living up to results achieved in limited trials – perhaps one reason so much advertiser spending in OTT is still considered “test-and-learn”…
Hardeep Bindra, Managing Director of Product, Sizmek:
“The general expectation from our digital-first customers is as we expand to CTV, OTT – and then adventuring to addressable and linear – is that we will continue that same (performance) approach in defining attribution. It works to a degree when it’s in a closed-loop testbed … But the minute you try and reach scale with it that’s when these systems start to either fall down or the delay in attribution breaks the existing models that we have in place.”
If connected TV advertising doesn’t yet have big scale, it may offer something else. Beet Retreat heard many executives talk about its ability to help cap the frequency with which viewers see a TV ad…
Frank Sinton, President & Founder, Beachfront Media:
“Connected TV but it hasn’t hit that 50% (penetration) mark yet. So we’re more like 10 or 15% penetration at this point. (In) connected TV, in particular, frequency (of ad exposure) is something that we’re looking really closely at.”
But the panel heard that using addressable TV to reach large audiences is possible. Two companies that have spent the last few years building out a patchwork of advertiser delivery opportunities, in very different ways, weighed in…
Beth-Ann Eason, President, Innovid:
Right now Innovid is 75 million households through nine different streaming devices across 1,000 different apps that are capable of delivering an interactive OTT ad. So the capacity is there. The systems and structure that we’ve talked about today is lagging that a bit. But we are continuing to focus on the largest potential audiences that can be lit up to be able to bring this reality to market.
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“One of the things that we’ve built over the last couple years is this local owned-and-operated station group opportunity which is, going back to we’re in 35 million homes, one out of every three TV homes, so we work with almost all the large station groups.”
Connected TV isn’t just about what happens on the TV. In a multi-touch consumer ecosystem, if you can track viewership and link it to outcomes like visitation and brand CRM data, you have the capacity to deploy sophisticated attribution that can prove the real value of connected TV exposure…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“We’re literally enabling them to prove that their local TV ads are actually driving to the website or actually driving to the store. We’re able to do that because we are literally bringing live placeIQ data and matching it against our IP and IDs. So, ‘Wou’ve seen the ad for the F150, did you go to the dealership?’ ‘Did you see the ad for Taco Bell, did you go to Taco Bell or to the website for TD Ameritrade?’We literally get live information.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“The last few years have really seen the transformation in the digital living room, where the TV has gone from being a content generator or content distributor to now really just becoming a device in the living room,” Bindra says.
“For us, we look at the extension of video going onto the TV screen, the largest screen, as something that we have to deliver to our clients to give a more omni-channel output to their campaigns.”
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Bindra talks about the challenges of working within connected-TV and OTT environments and how the digital side needs to learn from past mistakes when branching out to TV.
“We’ve run into similar challenges as other DSP’s of how do we take our optimization and our reach capabilities that the marketplace really knows us for and recognizes us for and then expand that into this new arena,” Bindra says. “There’s a lot of work for us to do around this.”
Sizmek has been running test TV campaigns, some of which began on the digital side, that have for the most part generated responses he describes as “fantastic.” But outside of test environments, it’s the same story that many others are encountering.
“We’ve run into similar issues of scale, of data on a de-duplicated or a deterministic basis,” Bindra says. “So a lot of our technology, which is very much centered around being precise, now has to start to look at things in a less-than-perfect environment from a data perspective.”
Data access isn’t the problem, nor is figuring out who a particular viewer is since everything is at the household level, “but also how attribution works and the time delay in getting that information back while the campaign is running,” he adds. “Our focus has really been in how we can collapse that time gap and who we should partner with to get data back to us in a near real-time fashion.”
Asked to reflect on Beet Retreat 2018, he says it was “extremely helpful” being around knowledgeable practitioners who are open about discussing issues common to many participants. “Being relatively nascent in this space, this access was very valuable to us. There are things that you just don’t know where to start and who to talk to and how to evaluate things,” says Bindra.
Another common sentiment at the Retreat was a willingness to solve, according to Bindra. “In the digital side, we have made mistakes and we are now acknowledging those mistakes, we are trying to learn from those mistakes.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>On the first anniversary of that acquisition, Sizmek says the company can now offer a tightly integrated, native AI capability for his ad software.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sizmek CEO Mark Grether says the company recently relaunched its demand-side platform and its ad server to tie both pieces, plus Sizmek’s data management platform, together in a single user interface.
Talking about how AI fuels that, he says: “Rocket Fuel was really famous for one thing, which was the AI. [But] we have 10x years plus experience in AI, so the system over time got better and better and better, with more and more data.
“So we took basically now this core asset, the AI asset, and almost kind of put it on steroids with all the data that we have now with the ad server. So a client can really benefit from all the data that an ad server is capable to generate.”
Grether predicts further industry consolidation and a new wave of startups launching to attack new ad-tech opportunities. That will produce a balance roster of vendors, big and small, he says.
for its part, Sizmek now counts 1,200 global employees, and Grether says it is important to have boots on the ground to serve markets like China, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Germany and France.
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.
]]>In this interview today at the annual DMEXCO conference, Sizmek CEO Mark Grether says given the company’s focus on agencies and advertisers, simplifying the process of buying various TV inventory is a key goal of the rollout, scheduled for later this year.
“The challenge was how can we actually provide our clients the biggest positive pool of inventory from an advanced TV perspective,” he says.
Last month, Sizmek released an enhanced version of its AI-powered DSP, offering advertisers and agencies greater efficiency and effectiveness for programmatic buying. The advanced-TV rollout will help bring together data, media, and creative across all digital media channels.
“I do think in the future what you will see is this coming together of media and data and creative in one single platform,” Grether says.
Sizmek will provide inventory by partnering with several advanced-TV supply platforms, including Telaria, Spotx, and Freewheel.
While having a lot of partners on the supply side “is certainly a key asset for us to have,” Grether emphasizes the utility of Sizmek’s ad server’s impression-level data “which we can now leverage as it’s integrated into AI when it comes to programmatic advanced TV buying.”
He notes that topics of conversation at DMEXCO typically include perceived next frontiers, as in how to leverage data in and advanced-TV environment in combination with dynamic creative optimization.
“I think that’s the next kind of big holy grail,” says Grether. “Advanced TV plus creative optimization. And that’s what we want to bring to the table here.”
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.
]]>That is the view from the boss of one of the leading ad-tech platforms, Sizmek CEO Mark Grether.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Grether discusses the European Commission’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which must be adhered to by companies around the world by May 25.
“I’m actually quite worried about GDPR,” Grether says. “As a consumer, will I actually have, in the future, more choice, or will the choice be limited because only a few big players will survive?”
The new GDPR updates prior consumer data protection rules in a significant way. Amongst other stipulations, measures include:
The implications seem profound for a marketing industry that has grown up around collecting user behavior data, often unseen, to better and better target messages.
“First and foremost, you will see a renaissance of contextual targeting, which basically means that the ads will be mapped for the context in which the ads are served,” Grether says.
That echoes a view many in ad-tech are expressing – that, in a world which has become used to pumped-up, super-targeted ads powered by incredible tracking and targeting capabilities, the brakes are about to be slammed on. But Grether believes machine learning algorithms will pick up some of the slack.
“You will have much scarcer (audience) datasets in Europe,” he says. “And, as such, what you will see is that AI technologies will be differentiated in the future.
“There are few (vendors) who can actually create media efficiencies and create performance with little data points – those are the ones who will see great demand going forward.”
Grether believes even measuring ad campaigns is about to become a lot more of a pain: “One of the great things about online performance campaigns in the past was that you could easily measure them. So if that is going to be relatively harder than it was in the past.”
But he thinks his own Sizmek is set fair to be able to deliver post-GDPR, thanks to having acquired AI-driven Rocket Fuel and operating its Peer39 context engine.
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.
]]>Sizmek‘s move followed a year in which transparency became advertisers’ biggest concern – and vendors rushed to profess their transparency credentials.
So what exactly is the solution to transparency concerns? Take a pinch of ad server, sprinkle in a hint of DSP, a dollop of DMP, a flavor of contextual classification, topped of by a generous helping of artificial intelligence, according to Sizmek CEO Mark Grether.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, he says: “We stay on top of every single media plan, we collect tremendous amount of data about campaigns, impressions, clicks, conversions, you name it.
“You then bundle that with all the consumer data that you can collect using our DMP. You have, then, contextual data about Peer39. We know whether a red ad performs better than a blue ad because we actually served the creative and we have the cost in our DSP.
“So we basically have all five data elements, which are key to optimize a campaign in one single stack.”
Back in September, Sizmek acquired Rocket Fuel in a deal that reset expectations for the ad-tech outlook, closed a chapter on Rocket Fuel and gave Sizmek access to power artificial intelligence power.
“We spent the … fourth quarter of last year on bringing both organizations together and I think we have basically done 95% of that,” Grether tells Beet.TV. “So it’s really now one organization under one leadership team and integrated one sales organization, one operations organization.”
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