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DIGITAL MARKETINGPROGRAMMATICTransparencyUncategorized

MediaMath Achieves Platinum Status with TAG

March 31, 2023 — by Justin Adler-Swanberg

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MediaMath is now Platinum Certified, having obtained certification in all three of the current major TAG programs, the TAG Certified Against Malware seal, the TAG Brand Safety Certification, and, for the first time, the TAG Certified Against Fraud seal.

Earlier this month, MediaMath was awarded Platinum status with the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG). TAG is our industry’s leading self-regulatory body focused on programs and certifications that demonstrate a commitment to high standards to protect the entire advertising supply chain, from buyers, through platforms and supply sources, all the way to the end users. In order to achieve Platinum status, MediaMath has obtained certification in all three of the current major TAG programs, the TAG Certified Against Malware seal, the TAG Brand Safety Certification, and, for the first time, the TAG Certified Against Fraud seal. We have done this all through independent validation by an outside auditor. MediaMath joins a select group of companies that represents an elite fraction of TAG’s total membership (the full list can be seen here: https://www.tagtoday.net/certifications/platinum-status). This accomplishment would not be possible without the efforts of MediaMath team members across the organization, and it demonstrates MediaMath’s adherence to the highest industry quality standards. 

Each of the TAG certifications contains within itself specific rigorous requirements that an organization must follow to be compliant. For example, the Brand Safety Certification requires that we have in place tools and policies designed to monitor, detect, and minimize ad misplacement based on Brand Safety and Piracy concerns. The Certified Against Malware seal demands that we have effective malware and malvertising filtration tools to protect our supply partners and especially the consumers whom we serve from the threat posed by malware and malvertising, as well as processes and policies to escalate and review any instances that may occur. While the importance of malware and malvertising protections may not always seem clear from the buy side, in fact these protections are critical for our industry to maintain its positive relationship with consumers, since malware and malvertising represent direct threats to end users’ devices and data. The Certified Against Fraud seal similarly requires that we implement various threat filtration tools for domains, apps, and IPs, as well as work with a TAG-accepted Invalid Traffic (IVT) filtration solution across our network. In our case, this is our MRC-accredited IVT detection and filtration partner HUMAN. Additionally, the certification requires the use of standard supply chain transparency tools and follow the money solutions such as ads.txt and supply chain object. These tools help ensure that our client’s media investments are safe from fraud. 

These are only a few of the major requirements for each of the certifications. The full details are much more involved, and by employing an outside auditor for independent validation of our efforts, we have demonstrated a high degree of objective adherence to these standards. MediaMath has been a longtime member of TAG, and an active participant in all TAG working groups. We have long been committed to delivering a high-quality ad ecosystem in order to provide the best service to our clients and maximize their return on investment. Our TAG certifications represent the fruit of our ongoing efforts, and our firm stance on consistently working to ensure that the supply chain remains secure. Our clients can trust that they will continue to be able to deliver the right ad message, at the right time, to the right person in a brand safe and suitable way that avoids ad fraud and delivers ads in a way that keeps the end user safe from the effects of malware and malvertising. Our newfound TAG Platinum status is the external proof and affirmation of this commitment. 

DIGITAL MARKETINGTransparency

How MediaMath is Helping Indian Marketers Drive Performance Through Transparency

May 23, 2022 — by MediaMath

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Last month, we participated in ad:tech New Delhi, India’s #1 marketing and media technology event. MediaMath Country Manager, India, Pranjal Desai sat down with Matterkind Business Head Paras Mehta to discuss how we’re working with Interactive Avenues, a leading online digital marketing agency in India, to deliver advertisers a modernized ecosystem across all channels that’s transparent, fair and effective.

What marketers want

What marketers are seeking from the advertising ecosystem is pretty simple yet thus far elusive to achieve at scale: performance. This isn’t off-the-shelf performance as we’ve historically thought of it—clicks—as we know incomplete metrics like this can be doctored by fraud and can’t be tied to true business outcomes. Rather, marketers are seeking the type of performance that actually drives business results, like return on ad spend, return on investment and sales.

To get there, marketers need clean programmatic pipes, processes and partnerships. In other words, an advertising environment that is brand-safe, fraud-protected and transparent. This type of ecosystem shows marketers where their ads are running, helps them understand their audiences in more detail by layering in additional insights and offers single-view reporting. It also allows for the seamless execution of innovation and the ability to test and learn to future-proof for the post-cookie world.

How does transparency influence performance? The cleaner the inputs into programmatic pipes, the cleaner the outputs. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. Fraudulent, low-quality supply and ad spend that has gone through too many low-value intermediaries or partners that take too much of a cut leads to sub-par or inflated results.

Why is transparency important?
Watch what our partners AdColony and Lotame have to say below.

 

How to create a better future

Getting to the desired future state comes by way of three components:

1. Buy-side and sell-side mutual benefit

The buy and sells sides have gotten far too disintermediated from each other, to the point where they’re often even at odds. But both advertisers and publishers are working towards the common goal of getting consumers to engage with what they are putting out on the internet to generate revenue. Good quality advertising helps monetize good quality content and vice versa.

How do you bring both sides closer together again? Through bi-directional data-sharing between buy and sell side, in addition to sharing the goals each has for a given campaign.

2. Clear roadmap for industry to evolve and grow

The industry is changing too rapidly for any technology company to rest on its laurels. Being a fast-moving innovator in key growth areas like connected TV and identity is critical, in addition to offering flexible, modular tech paired with consultative professional services to maximize use of platform features.

3. Unmatched transparency

This means full visibility into all fees, via log-level impression data that aligns performance data with all media cost data—SSP fees, DSP fees, audience fees, serving fees, measurement fees—for all pathways.

“As an SSP, transparency reporting is our biggest USP,” says Amit Rathi, Country Manager, South Asia, at AdColony. “We ensure that parameters like brand safety, viewability, quality traffic are catered to.”

“Transparency is very important for a data partner or a publisher,” says Gaurav Seth, Managing Director at Lotame India. “Unlike media, where the ads are served on the website, with data, the ads are served on an external network of websites and applications. So, it’s very important to know how many impressions have been served, and that’s why transparency is important.”

Watch what our partners AdColony and Lotame have to say about the future of the digital ecosystem below.

Delivering results through an innovative, flexible and transparent ecosystem

Through better transparency, reporting and updated platform tools to run advertising campaigns and easily take action on insights, MediaMath is working hard to help marketers get the results they deserve. “We work very closely with MediaMath on a number of campaigns where we see MediaMath can either help with a solution which otherwise doesn’t exist in the market, or we are confident that with MediaMath we will be able to deliver equal if not better value for our clients,”  said Mehta of Matterkind Business on behalf of Interactive Avenues. The value MediaMath brings to the agency includes:

  • Flexibility to deliver performance
  • Compatible with the wider ad tech ecosystem (SSPs, DMPs, brand safety partners)
  • Seamless data integrations
  • API-based reporting
  • Best-in-class support

The promise of programmatic as an automated, agile and transparent market can be realized through partners that value full visibility into its inner workings and how they impact performance. We look forward to continuing to work with our partners and clients in India to make this the rule, not the exception.

DIGITAL MARKETINGTechnology

MediaMath and Lotame Prove Cookieless Targeting Can Drive Addressability in the Future

January 18, 2022 — by MediaMath

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In the lead-up to cookie deprecation in 2023, brands are grappling with which identity solutions to assess and test. That’s why MediaMath gives marketers choice when it comes to evaluating the identifier best suited to their business and the ability to easily activate it through our recently updated platform built for this moment and the next.

We recently worked with the Lotame Panorama ID™, the only people-based identity solution for the open Web and part of our Identity Marketplace, to see if third-party data could be used in cookieless targeting across all browser environments for one global financial brand. This first-of-its-kind cookieless test campaign in Latin America consisted of targeting personas showing continued interest in traveling locally or abroad: “Tulum-inatis,” single, young adults with no children, and “Lady and Lord Multitask,” married individuals ages 29-45 with children.

The brand’s agency worked with Lotame to build audiences that reflected their finely crafted personas for their Latin American consumers. Leveraging the enrichment capabilities of the Lotame Panorama ID, Lotame provided the high-quality data necessary to transform the brand’s personas into targetable audiences. MediaMath then activated and optimized the segments, using the same age and intent travel parameters to target both audiences via cookie segments and Panorama ID cookieless segments. The latter delivered superior results. In addition to increased impressions, the Panorama ID campaign resulted in:

  • 2.5x more efficiency in frequency capping
  • 44% more unique individuals reached
  • A $7 cost savings in eCPM, with the cookie campaign 116% more expensive than Panorama ID

See the details of the test and the results – Read the full case study below.

DIGITAL MARKETINGTrends

2022 Trends from MediaMath, IBM, Butler/Till and Audigent

December 13, 2021 — by MediaMath

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A lot that we thought was going to happen in 2021 did not. We expected to say goodbye to the third-party cookie and hello to a return to pre-pandemic normalcy. Some even forecasted this year to mark a repeat of the “Roaring 20s,” where consumers began lavishly spending their COVID cash savings. While we may be a ways off from all of the above, we will see continued acceleration of certain digital trends like CTV adoption and first-party identity next year. Read on to see what trends leaders from MediaMath and other major players in the ecosystem anticipate 2022 will bring to digital advertising.

Joe Zawadzki, Founder and CEO, MediaMath

“Marketing has never been more important than it is right now and we need our most talented CMOs to lead the way…CMOs have a huge amount of license to get beyond the wasteland of digital triage and create a growth engine that they can fully own and seamlessly operate in real-time.”

“Identity is first on everyone’s mind and the growing list of potential solutions is fueling more anxiety than the fatalistic predictions. But 30 months is plenty of time to curate and formulate a comprehensive portfolio of identity approaches that will secure 1:1 outreach and protect the brand from the whims of GAFA. The ecosystem is more than ready for the necessary process of elimination that will take us from a wide-open field of more than 80 contenders down to a tried and tested group of roughly 25 viable identity solutions. My advice to individual brands is simple: Start with a slate of 12 solutions and let transparency and measurement guide you in paring it down to six.”

“The CMO who embraces this disruption will be able to connect themselves to business results, transform from being seen as a spender of money to being relied upon as a driver of outcomes, and fearlessly make the claim that sales will slow down or sputter if they stop what they are doing in any given moment.”

Anudit Vikram, Chief Product Officer, MediaMath

“What we are focused on in this building of the systems that allow you to use the data to use data on both sides of the equation, not just for one side of the equation. So to me, I believe that 2022 will show us even more usage of those kinds of tools of prevalence in the marketplaces within the Internet. And I think in some ways, the breakdown of these purely walled gardens because the buyers and the sellers will find that there are pockets of value present outside of these walled gardens.”

“The cookie might go away, but first-party ID is here to stay. And as long it does, we have solutions that we can allow our brands to actually use to still run marketing and digital advertising as they used to…the work that we had started last year with scaling out these first-party IDs and being able to test how first-party IDs work is stuff that we should actually double down on right now. We have a few extra months to test this out fully, and from a first-party identity perspective, to scale it out fully, and we at MediaMath are working very very closely with our customers to ensure that we do that.”

Tiffany Shih-Shiuan Lee, Head of Publisher Development, MediaMath

“CTV itself is so broad in who has the rights to distribute, carry, sell…I think we just need to find a better way to distinguish who has the rights to carry, who has the rights to sell, who is actually surfacing this information so we won’t be tracking old spy channels with content that’s not relevant for anyone and not safe for a brand or any client to run upon.”

“MediaMath has been very involved in pushing for a transparent ecosystem. We have our SOURCE initiative we launched in 2019 that really focuses on addressability, accountability and alignment across all players in the space and to really expose to our buyers a really safe environment to transact all of their digital purchasing. Fraud is table stakes. We are really lucky to have this partnership with HUMAN where we can identify fraud in all directions.”

“We also have nuances of brand safety and brand suitability. How are we identifying if you’re perhaps an alcohol or gambling brand, are you OK to run across all family channels? Are we understanding the nuances of what’s available? OTT vs CTV — is it device-oriented? Can we be safe across all elements? So I think there is a lot more to explore especially with CTV just because of the complexities of the landscape as well as it is a newer channel and we haven’t had the opportunity to expose all of that.”

Jackie Vanover, VP, Media Platform, MediaMath

“At MediaMath, we have taken an open identity strategy where we’re exploring many different options in terms of ensuring that we have the ability to engage with consumers in ways that they are comfortable with. I don’t think it’s going to be an end-all, be-all solution…because then I think we might end up in the cookie 2.0. And I always think that it’s better to diversify your options rather than pin everything on one idea.”

“I’m super excited about the measurement space. I feel like it’s another place where it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer, and I kind of hope it’s not because I think a multi-layered measurement solution will give you a better answer. I really love the idea of having all of these different inputs and getting a much broader picture on what is happening on the consumption side of advertising.”

Rich Brandolino, Global Media Channels and Adtech Leader, IBM

“We have built up an entire ecosystem around the fact that we know who people are or at least what they’ve been doing recently so we can continue to target them in ways that help maximize their outcomes as well as ours. So we’ve got to solve that problem. No one can solve it on their own. It’s going to be a collection, it’s going to be a consortium, it’s going to be lots of different people working together to generate an outcome that’s going to keep this industry solid. Otherwise, we’re going to end up living in the walled gardens with really no way out.”

Drew Stein, CEO, Audigent

“The countdown to the cookieless future continues for 2022 and the next twelve months will see two major trends dominate – the move toward cookieless identity and dynamic identity platforms, and the move away from open exchange inventory and toward curated marketplaces and curated exchanges where premium data is driving value and performance through the supply path.” 

Scott Ensign, Butler/Till

“All of us in the ecosystem have a tendency to treat the idea of media buying as a zero-sum game, when there is opportunity to make the pie bigger for everyone,” Ensign said. “I’ve seen really encouraging things when we bring publishers and clients together, along with partners on the ad tech side to say, how can we tackle the problems we’re all facing in a way that promotes a collective win?”

He continued: “If brands and agencies working with publishers and sell-side overall to share data that can give us meaningful performance and metrics, we can all work together to get beyond things like CPM, and clicks, moving to something that drives business and creates value.”

David Olesnevich, Head of Product – IBM Watson Advertising

“There’s just going to continue to be a tremendous amount of change that’s going to continue to happen. Google pausing on the cookie, that was just a moment in time. This is not a time for us to sit back and relax. We need to continue to test, we need to continue to see what data signals are available, we need to understand what technologies are available to harness those privacy-forward data signals..you’ve got all these different signals now, and how are you using those to personalize while respecting consumer choice?”

“What do we all need to do to evolve our businesses? It’s partnerships. It’s everyone in the supply chain working together to develop our future.”

 

 

DIGITAL MARKETINGTechnology

IBM Watson Advertising Weather Targeting Now Available in MediaMath’s DSP

November 9, 2021 — by MediaMath

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From water cooler small talk to heated debates on climate change, the phenomenon of weather has fully saturated our lives in recent years. And with good reason.  

Extreme weather events are becoming commonplace, increasingly impacting our lives: our commutes, our vacations, choices on where to live and our health. Weather remains a proven and privacy-friendly predictor of consumer intent and behavior — it accounts for nearly half a trillion dollars in economic impact in the U.S. alone each year. But just as it is becoming increasingly challenging for brands to effectively target and engage their audiences due to privacy regulations, weather itself has become harder to predict, making it difficult to leverage for advertising products and services to consumers.   

For all the reasons noted above, MediaMath is excited to announce the next phase of our longstanding partnership with IBM: the integration of IBM Watson Advertising Weather Targeting into our DSP, which will empower brands to future-proof their strategies with addressable, performant solutions for the open Internet that do not rely on traditional identifiers.  

IBM Watson Advertising Weather Targeting uses AI to recognize what the weather “feels like” and how consumers in a specific location are likely to react. It then aggregates and analyzes increasingly large and complex data sets to enable more effective, efficient targeting opportunities using only a contextual ZIP Code that is passed to an ad server or platform.  

Third-party cookie data is not required. Weather Targeting only serves relevant ads to consumers based on the projected impact of upcoming weather conditions in a defined area, helping marketers increase the precision and effectiveness of their campaigns, reduce wasted ad spend and meet new privacy standards.  

More than 300 triggers proven to perform 

IBM Watson Advertising Weather Targeting turns the relationship between weather, location and complex data sets like health conditions, product sales and consumer activity into actionable, proven solutions. Here is how this can break down across categories: 

  • Relative conditions can account for how weather in its various forms is felt differently across regions. For instance, 50 degrees might feel cold in Miami, but not Chicago. 
  • Product triggers can reflect the optimal weather conditions that drive demand. For instance, a huge snowstorm might drive consumers to stock up on essentials like toilet paper. 
  • Pharma triggers include Symptom, Prescription, OTC and Predictive Health and can be based on published medical research, IMS data and sales data for conditions such as allergies or asthma. 
  • Activity triggers reflect the mix of weather conditions that are likely to drive certain behaviors and experiences, such as hiking outdoors or a game night in the living room.  
  • Watson Health anonymized data can enhance the precision of IBM’s triggers, helping to reach the consumers most likely to be experiencing symptoms. 
  • COVID-19 infection rates are gathered from public sources, aggregated and analyzed using Watson AI to serve messaging tied to increasing or decreasing cases based on local conditions, driving the relevant consumer actions. 

Working together to make advertising better 

Back in 2017, MediaMath Founder and CEO Joe Zawadzki and IBM Chief Digital Officer Bob Lord stood on stage at DMEXCO and painted a picture of the future of marketing that paved the way for our accountable, addressable and aligned SOURCE ecosystem launched in October of 2019. The vision they laid out would solve many long-standing challenges that have prevented marketers from unlocking the full potential of brand engagement, and help them deliver advertising with transparency and trust. Just two years later, IBM as a client was our first advertiser to run a campaign in SOURCE, seeing outstanding results including 60% of the ad dollar making it to the publisher and viewability increasing by 40%. A little over a year ago, we integrated IBM’s upgraded suite of AI advertising tools — including IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator and IBM Watson Advertising Predictive Audiences — into our DSP.  

 We are thrilled for this next phase of our continually evolving partnership that we know will help more brands and their agencies deliver the right ads to the right consumers with relevance and respect.  

DIGITAL MARKETING

Advertising Week Panel Recap: MediaMath, Audigent and Butler/Till Talk How to Create a Fully-Aligned Supply Chain Between Brands and Publishers

October 27, 2021 — by MediaMath

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For years, brands and publishers have not always been on the same page when it comes to their advertising, subscription and content monetization goals. Data around all of these areas have been siloed, and technology has been disparate, preventing a fully integrated view of customers that yields insights to power personalized experiences. This is especially concerning as privacy regulations abound and the final days of the third-party cookie draw nearer. 

On an Advertising Week panel last week, MediaMath Chief Product Officer Anudit Vikram explored innovations around how both brands and publishers can use data, curation and technology to drive results together with MediaMath Co-Founder and CEO of PMCR Consulting Greg Williams, Audigent CEO Drew Stein and Butler/Till VP of Strategy & Partnerships Scott Ensign. By providing greater transparency, reporting and updated platform tools to run ad campaigns and action on insights with ease, MediaMath and its partners are working hard to help brands, agencies, publishers and tech partners get the performance they need.

You can catch up here.

DIGITAL MARKETING

Money, Time, and Peace of Mind: MediaMath Traders Trade Up with DBA

July 30, 2021 — by MediaMath

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On the way to the coffee pot to fill his first cup of the day, several thoughts cross Steven’s mind. “How many did Embiid put up last night” he wonders grabbing his mug. These are the easier morning ponderings before he encounters a more pressing thought: “This remarketing campaign is performing fine as is, so should I shift budgets around?” He hasn’t even poured milk into his coffee. This is every day for Steven.

He’s not alone either. At many of MediaMath’s partners, traders not only manage campaign setup and execution, but they also juggle that responsibility alongside media planning and reporting. It’s a full plate that makes maximizing campaign and personal performance difficult. The through line of these challenges is that there isn’t enough time in the day. Whether it be managing campaign pacing and performance, discovering and funding best performing strategies or simply ensuring that incremental budget can be spent, these are opportunities to introduce automation.

For many traders, automation has been most synonymous with bidding algorithms, but through a new beta product, Dynamic Budget Allocation, MediaMath is unlocking more time in trader’s days. “DBA saves me 3 hours a week” Steven Choi, a MediaMath trader, said.

To achieve those time savings, Dynamic Budget Allocation excels in two ways. Through machine learning techniques, it profiles live bidding behavior to automate goal values based on real-time pacing. Next, it automatically adjusts strategy budgets daily to optimize toward performance goals and pacing constraints. Activated across 50 campaigns and 750 strategies, the time savings become meaningful quickly.

As part of the Beta, clients are starting to see success beyond time savings. Dynamic Budget Allocation drove a 58% lower CPA for a large B2B tech company in Q1. For a large national retailer, it increased ROI by 155% while decreasing eCPMs by 25%. Traders are reporting that campaigns are pacing more evenly throughout the day, and that the best performing strategies are adequately funded.

“DBA literally makes my life better,” Choi said. Maybe that’s because he has extra time to pull up Sixers highlights alongside his morning coffee. Maybe it’s because he’s able to spend more time each week creating campaign recommendations for his clients. Two things are certain, though. His campaigns are performing well, and it’s requiring less of his time.

DIGITAL MARKETING

Keeping it Real at the Beet TV Global Forum

July 26, 2021 — by MediaMath

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MediaMath is committed to maintaining the free Internet, building a more sustainable media ecosystem, and supporting high-quality independent journalism that amplifies the voices of people of color, women, and the under-represented. And we welcome the chance to meet with others who share that mission. In partnership with Group M, Beet TV’s global forum on “Rebuilding a Robust, Responsible Media Future” brought together some of the best minds in our ecosystem. Our CEO and Founder Joe Zawadzki had the opportunity to sit down for a fireside chat with Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM North America.

DIGITAL MARKETING

We Are Rebuilding Digital Advertising: Marketers, Your Choices Matter

July 20, 2021 — by MediaMath

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Originally published on ANA Marketing Maestros

Last year, I led a conversation among industry leaders in partnership with the ANA, where we discussed how to fix the broken digital media supply chain. The advertising industry’s challenges are well documented: fraud (now on phones and TVs), misaligned metrics, and a foundational lack of trust and transparency, resulting from fragmented solutions pieced together without purposeful design in the form of the open web, or with very intentional design in the market structure of GAFA.

Over the last year, we’ve also seen a new set of challenges emerge — the global pandemic disrupted nearly every facet of life at both a business and individual level. The use of CTV increased exponentially as quarantine and shutdowns saw many of us flocking to streaming services. All the while, we’re still dealing with the proliferation of misinformation and the impending demise of third-party cookies. These trends will only accelerate in the post-pandemic world, and the cracks in the digital media supply chain will deepen. With status quo ante disrupted — how to connect to desktops, mobile devices, and TV in a privacy-forward way; how to measure omnichannel performance and compare year-over-year results — marketers effectively have a forced zero-basing of the 51 percent of the budget that is digital advertising.

As we look forward to the reopening of society, “getting back to normal” will become an intentional choice. We can choose what aspects of our pre-pandemic routine we want to go back to and what we want to leave in the past — everything from five-day workweeks in an office, to business travel, to the role of physical-only conferences will be re-considered.

For marketers, the events of the last year should serve as a catalyst for real and lasting change. If you lamented the lack of transparency in the supply chain, you have a choice right now. If you were frustrated by inflated metrics, and with growing fragility around cross-media measurement thanks to regulation and the competitive response to it — you have a choice. If you want your dollars to fund high-quality journalism over misinformation or to amplify the voices of people of color, women, and the under-represented — guess what?

The need to address these issues is more urgent than ever. We need to reboot, change and commit to choices now. There isn’t another opportunity where business is so clearly disrupted, where the leverage in coherent choices will have such impact. The sins and saints of commission — of active choice — trump those of omission. Those who simply go back to normal are making a decidedly specific choice about the marketplace they are re-voting with their wallets for.

 

What Decisions do Marketers Need to Make Now?

There are currently two approaches to addressing the challenges facing marketers — walled gardens and open supply chains — and both are flawed. Closed environments are kind of like fast food — you have scale and simplicity, it’s easy for money and data to go in; but it’s empty calories, lacking metrics and insights, renting your customers as opposed to creating durable connections with them. On the flip side, a fully open supply chain, in theory, looks to resolve the transparency and direct connect to media and consumer issue. Yet, it is fragmented without anything to tie all the disparate pieces and technologies together. We need an “enterprise open” marketplace. The middle way where scale doesn’t require opacity, where transparency doesn’t take ten times more work.

We at MediaMath have been working toward this “enterprise” version of digital advertising since our inception. Over the last two-and-a-half years, our roadmap for collaboration — SOURCE — has looked to direct the efforts across brand, agency, media, tech, and data toward common goals.

We aren’t saying that this is the only framework. We are saying it is a working-at-scale commercial framework that connects the world’s most sophisticated brands and their agents, to the most premium publishers across all channels and devices, globally. It brings the “ecosystem” of technology and identity and service together to support that connection in ways that work for everyone.

We used three pillars to systematize the work — Accountability, Addressability, Alignment — and we’ll touch on each with specific examples of what each pillar actually means and does:

  • Accountability. A lot goes into this in terms of data rights and consent, anti-fraud tools and a starving of the financial incentives for it in the market. But if you were to pick out one thing to demand from this pillar it’s (radical) transparency. Being able to see everything that happens around a real-time transaction is the beginning of trust. Who influenced the decision? What role did they play, what value did they create, what price did they charge? The IAB’s work here around ads.txt, sellers and buyers.json are strong technical specifications to drive transparency; the ANA’s membership can choose to adopt them. Marketers demanding transparency — and sharing their own goals and constraints with increasing fidelity to those who have earned their trust – is the way forward. If you control the budget, you should vote with your wallet, spending more if not exclusively with those who are willing to operate with sunlight.
  • Addressability. We are taking an active role in industry efforts emerging under the pressure of solving identity’s future approach, including IAB’s Project Rearc and PRAM ensuring the effort has a core focus on marketer needs. Thankfully, we’ve seen growing convergence that the third-party cookie will not be replaced with a silver bullet. Rather, that a portfolio of privacy-first solutions will be deployed to “last-mile” ads to screens and speakers, and to measure and attribute what happened from there. Proprietary standards like those of Google and Apple, to commercial solutions on top of open standards across cohorts, consent, contextual. Cohort-based approaches such as FLoC can’t address the ongoing transparency issues completely by themselves. Will it be easy to “select, stitch, and scale” across this portfolio to build addressability back better? No. Do we have the tools to be able to reinforce identity signals across brands and premium media, while striking the right balance between openness and scale? Yes.
  • Alignment. Finally, the most challenging and profound of pillars — designing a marketplace that works together to drive the shared outcomes of people, marketers and media. There is so much to be done to move the industry from “optimize this single transaction for me” to “optimize the sum of interactions, over time, for us”.

The key for marketers is to take baby steps: First, share what you really are driving toward; your organization’s actual business goals. Don’t focus exclusively on efficiency (price) but reward effectiveness (value) in your media and service partners. If the people you work with can’t leverage this insight — or worse, use it against you — find new ones. But this commitment to the closed loop is what will separate those who choose to do good, and win over time, from those who don’t.

This is a stressful period in marketing, advertising, digital. It’s become impossible to look backwards for reference, and hard to look forward into the cloud of probability that is the future. But, like the pandemic, we’ll come out here too, one choice at a time. Two good times to plant a tree, journey of a thousand miles: make some choices, make them count.

Joe Zawadzki is CEO and founder of MediaMath.

DIGITAL MARKETINGInfographic

How Balsam Brands Extended Audience Reach with CTV

July 20, 2021 — by MediaMath

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Balsam Brands, the world’s leading retailer of artificial Christmas trees and holiday décor products, tasked MediaMath with driving quality site traffic from shoppers looking to decorate their homes during the holidays.

MediaMath partnered with global TV measurement and attribution provider TVSquared to offer real-time insights and reporting to Balsam Brands, which allowed the company to optimize spend, extend their reach to new audiences, change CPM’s, slow or push dollars and drive overall strategies in a real-time approach.

Throughout the campaign, MediaMath’s client success team was able to optimize against high-performing publishers and devices to drive ROAS by 150% versus the year prior and achieved 78% unique CTV reach, by tapping into a subset of users that were unreachable on Linear TV.

Here’s how it worked.

Driving Performance with CTV

To learn more about how CTV advertising can help your reach beyond Linear TV, fill out the form below and a MediaMath representative will be in touch to answer any questions you might have.

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