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CulturePeople

Six Tips to Build a Culture of Learning

August 13, 2019 — by MediaMath

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This blog post is a part of IAB’s The Advantage: Knowledge for an Ever-Changing Industry series.

I joined MediaMath in 2012 and shortly after, helped launch the New Marketing Institute. The NMI serves as the educational arm of our company, providing training and certification for clients, employees and university students who are looking to transition into the ad tech world. I deeply and passionately believe in the power of learning and development to help people fulfill their potential and in turn, drive their firms and teams forward.

The NMI was created to tackle the education and talent gaps in our company. The purpose of education and training is to bridge the distance between people’s talent and what they need to know to exercise that talent. Since launch, we’ve trained over 20,000 people globally and have been recognized for our efforts by many leading educational groups and industry associations, including IAB.

I’m really proud of the progress we’ve made, and I’m encouraged by the impact we’ve had inside and outside our industry. I receive emails regularly from people wanting to know how to start an educational practice centered around digital marketing and technology at their own enterprise. I give everyone the same advice – creating a digital marketing education hub begins with acknowledging that every individual has room for improvement.

Whether you are a seasoned industry professional or new to the industry, we can all agree that the need to continue learning never stops. With technology — and ad tech specifically — we’re constantly realizing what we still don’t know. We may be experts in specific practices, but we can’t stay experts without training and education.

If you are tasked with bringing Learning & Development (L&D) to the forefront of your company, or you are looking to learn more about what it is like to do so, here are six tips based on my experience:

1. Create a Safe Space

You’ll be surprised what people reveal when you create a space to have honest conversations about their gaps in understanding. Everyone, even the CEO, knows they have blind spots in their knowledge. They all understand that uncomfortable feeling of having those blind spots exposed. If you can create an environment of safety and comfort, you will help more people embrace the function of education.

2. Be Bold and Courageous

This can happen in many different ways, like initiating a conversation about a best practice, a technology, or an unconventional way of thinking. It’s about having the courage to stand up and put ideas out there. Constructing new solutions to both old and new challenges is one of the really cool things about our industry, but having the training to underpin that construction is key to success. Complex subjects like algorithms and artificial intelligence may intimidate some people, but they are not intimidated by education. Professional development is seen as a way to level set knowledge and an investment in themselves.

To read the rest of the post please click here.

CareersCulturePeople

Helping Grow More Women Leaders in Tech

July 17, 2019 — by MediaMath

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In Singapore, women hold only 21% of senior management roles and 8% of corporate board membership, as reported by Diversity Task Force in Singapore. And the consequences are dire:

  1. Companies are losing out. We’re all individuals and can each bring different talents, skills, and experiences to the table. Having diverse senior management means more innovation and stronger capabilities in designing solutions for the company.
  2. There are not enough role models and mentors for future leaders. If there are more women in leadership roles, other women can also see themselves in those positions and would also be able to build bigger networks.
  3. The gender pay gap will not be addressed. At the rate we are going, it will take 217 years to end gender-based disparities in pay and employment opportunities. This is highlighted each year by Equal Pay Day, a symbolic day that symbolises how far into the year women must work in order to earn what men earned the previous year. This year in the US Equal Pay Day fell on April 2nd.

Last quarter, we attended Dream Collective’s Emerging Leaders Program. The event provided awareness, tools, and techniques for improving leadership skills.

Here are some of our key learnings from the workshop:

  1. Career success is 60% exposure and only 10% performance. Performance and a great work ethic only count for 10% of whether or not we will succeed in our careers, while a whopping 60% is attributed to the exposure that we get (and 30% to image). While a solid performance foundation is necessary, focusing on ensuring that we are getting internal and external exposure is also necessary to drive success.

Numerous studies such as this 2015 research from the University of Kent in the UK have shown that women are compensated on their track record (performance), while men are compensated on their potential. According to this McKinsey report, this difference in how men and women are evaluated can be blamed on embedded institutional mindsets. These structural barriers—or, put plainly, discrimination—when it comes to hiring and promoting makes it clear that men and women are judged by different criteria and rewarded differently for the same accomplishments.

  1. EQ trumps IQ. A common trait across successful leaders is understanding what motivates others and relating to them in a positive manner. Qualities such as empathy, self-awareness, and self-regulation are all factors that affect how successful people are likely to be in their careers.

The good news is that we can improve our EQ. One example of a method to engage self-regulation that we learned at the Emerging Leaders Program is the “Respond, Don’t React” method. While a reaction is instant, a response is based on information from both the conscious and unconscious minds, and will typically yield a better outcome than a snap reaction. Responding with a certain tone, words, body language, and sentence structuring can really make a positive difference.

  1. Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. According to the “Women in the Workplace 2018” study by McKinsey and Leanin.org, women are negotiating salaries and asking for promotions at the same rate as men. The problem is they are less likely to be successful. We learned some solid steps for negotiation, the most notable being that one should always have a Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) in mind. Essentially, have a second-best outcome at hand before you enter any negotiation.
  2. Personal branding is key! Everyone has a personal brand, whether we make an effort to work on it or not. Maximizing aspects of our personality and presenting ourselves in the best possible way is very important to succeed, both within our external and internal network. Ensuring we have a good social media presence and networking are two efforts that can be very effective. Using social media tools enables us to increase our professional visibility on those platforms. Networking by building relationships and staying connected to other leaders is extremely important as there is so much to learn and share.

It will take a lot of work to bring these ideas into practice, but it must be done if we want significant progress—not just for our own careers, but to create more and better opportunities for women in the global workforce.

Marta Barrera is a Senior Sales Manager at MediaMath. She currently manages a portfolio of blue chip clients and key agency partnerships across South East Asia. During her free time, you will find her scuba diving around Asia or simply enjoying a glass of wine with friends.

 

Shifali Ranawaka is an Engagement Director with eight years of experience in programmatic. She works in the Singapore office at MediaMath across a range of agency and direct clients. Shifali enjoys cooking, painting and indulging in terrible reality TV.

 

People

From Goal-Based Outcomes to Goal-Based Philanthropy

June 27, 2019 — by MediaMath

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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet. At the core are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address high-priority global issues. These are a call to action by all countries in a global partnership.

The goals aren’t just a framework for governments, but for companies and people to collectively address the world’s biggest challenges. We talk a lot about how we help clients achieve “goal-based” outcomes through our technology. But we know we can also use our platform, our time and our financial resources to help meet these more far-reaching global challenges.

Through our workplace giving and volunteering programs, MediaMath supports organizations working toward these goals, giving our employees a chance to step back from the daily grind and realize how each one of us can, and should, play a part in creating change. Our belief that every business should be a force for good is part of our every day at MediaMath, especially during Impact Week, the week in which we come together across all departments and offices to focus on doing good. This year was our third annual Impact Week, June 3 to 7. We promised to Do Good, Better—more donations, more volunteer events, more impact—and that we did!

Volunteering

Our employees spent a collective 801 hours giving back to organizations in their local communities. We participated in 35 volunteer events across 15 offices, a 20% increase from 2018. Each event focused on one of the 17 SDGs ranging from Zero Hunger to Climate Action.

Knowing it takes partnerships to drive significant impact, we called on our friends at Rubicon Project to join us in our volunteering efforts. We already partner with Rubicon in making marketing a force for good and to improve the effectiveness of the media supply chain. This Impact Week, we brought our employees together to serve meals to homebound elderly New Yorkers through Citymeals on Wheels.

In addition to addressing hunger, we tackled the education gap in communities in which we work. In Sao Paulo, our employees discussed career opportunities with teenagers from low-income communities. In New York, we partnered with The Opportunity Network to bring underserved high school students to MediaMath to learn about the ad tech space and participate in a resume workshop.

We also focused on our planet with a beach cleanup in Brighton Beach, a park cleanup in North Carolina and tree planting across NYC.

Donations

In addition to volunteering, we moved approximately $30,000 to various charities addressing a range of the 17 SDGs. With our donations, we were able to drive meaningful, measurable impact including:

  • Protecting 345 people from malaria via The Against Malaria Foundation
  • Restoring eyesight for 13 people with curable blindness who cannot afford surgery via Seva
  • Providing 9 years of basic income to a recipient in GiveDirectly’s landmark Universal Basic Income initiative
  • Giving 13 families six farming tools & training via One Acre Fund
  • Providing 2,039 people with food-based fortification for one year via Project Healthy Children
  • Donating clothing to homeless shelters and hosting several blood drives

Our tagline is “Strength in Numbers,” and we believe the collective power of our employees and partners helps us make a difference in a quantifiable way. Thank you to our colleagues for bringing their constant passion and hard work to the various causes we supported this year.

People

From Hackathon to Home: Saving Missing Children with Advertising Technology

May 17, 2019 — by MediaMath

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MediaMath’s promise to be a force for good permeates its business and employee culture, so much so that “Do good, better” is a formalized company value. That value, and our commitment to it, is demonstrably more than words.

In 2016, MediaMath founded MediaMath.org, a charitable arm dedicated to high-impact philanthropy. The following year, we doubled down by joining Pledge 1%, committing 1% of our time, technology and company equity to social good. We then decided to make “Social Impact” one of the five major categories in our 2017 and 2018 hackathons. A Social Impact entry won the overall vote in the 2017 hackathon. Additionally, in last year’s hackathon, nearly a fifth of all entries were submitted under Social Impact, and the winner in that category also went on to win the People’s Choice Award (as voted by MediaMath employees).

Today, MediaMath and MediaMath.org are excited to announce that the winning project in our 2018 Winter Hackathon—a proposal to integrate MediaMath with the Federation for Internet Alerts (FIA) in order to save missing children—is live in production.

We put forward an idea that did not end with a trophy but with a full-blown integration leveraging the power of MediaMath’s TerminalOne (T1) advertising platform to serve real-time, geolocated AMBER Alerts. These alert creatives replace advertisements on websites and feature far richer information than can be conveyed via the push messages on cell phones to which people are more accustomed. Specifically, the creatives can include photographs of missing children and their likely abductors, vehicles and license plates and other critical visual and textual information necessary to identifying and saving children as quickly as possible.

This integration was no small feat and could not have been accomplished without the invaluable support of Joe Zawadzki, MediaMath CEO, Jenna Griffith, COO, my hackathon teammates Karl Weiss, Director, Programmatic Strategy & Optimization, and Andrew Bannon, Associate, Site Reliability Engineer, and the extra hours put in by numerous other MediaMathers like Fotios ‘Fod’ Tzellos, Software Engineer, who told the MediaMath “All Hands” Slack channel that he was, “Super stoked to see this ticking. Proud to help make it a reality!” I’m stoked, too, about this passion project becoming a reality and quite literally helping to save children (and deter would-be abductors) with targeted advertising technology.

Of the integration, Jason Bier, President of the Federation for Internet Alerts, said, “MediaMath’s distribution of AMBER Alerts represents additional capacity to reach more Internet and mobile app users…I would like to thank MediaMath for joining FIA to distribute relevant, life-critical alerts about missing and abducted children and bring them home safely.”

Michael Quinn, Director of MediaMath.org, echoed this sentiment, saying, “This grassroots project is a fantastic example of how we can use marketing for good using our talent and technology. Congratulations and thank you to the team.”

With the project now under the stewardship of MediaMath.org, MediaMath looks forward to working with partners and clients to maximize reach and funding, saving children and reducing the nearly 200 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States every year. We also look forward to working with the FIA and fellow participants to expand missing child alerts to 29 more countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific regions in the months to come.

PeopleTrends

Highlights from the 2019 APAC Leadership Forum

May 15, 2019 — by MediaMath

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Following the success of our summits in NA and EMEA earlier this year, we launched our first MediaMath Leadership Forum in APAC this past March 27-29th. We gathered at the stunning Ritz Carlton resort at Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia with a stellar attendance of key leaders from partners, agencies and brands across Australia, Singapore, Korea, and the US.

The objective was to kick off an “unconference” that brings together senior thought leaders from across APAC in a relaxed setting to drive interactive learning about cross-regional opportunities and share perspectives around how we can collectively work towards transforming the marketing ecosystem for good, setting a forward-looking tone for 2019 and beyond.

Key topics discussed during the forum included future market trends and our product vision to support these needs, the future of people in programmatic, best practices around building a successful programmatic and data strategy and deep-dive roundtable sessions on identity, supply and AI moderated by MediaMath subject experts.

Knowing who your consumers are

The main focus areas essential for a thriving ad tech ecosystem are identity, supply chain management, the application of AI and ML and progressing the dream of true omnichannel outcomes and workflow. As an industry, we can identify devices as never before, while the number and types of devices are increasing at a record pace. Stable, persistent device IDs are core to achieving an accurate, anonymous digital representation of consumers. There are many challenges in bringing this to life, and some solutions exist, but it’s still a very siloed approach.

Creating a quality supply chain

Several factors have contributed to the complexity of the programmatic supply chain as the marketplace has matured. In recent years, transparency has been one major theme for the industry. Clients’ needs and sophistication may vary; some of them may want to look under the hood to see how the supply chain works while others are less concerned about it. A must-have for clients is super clean, performant supply for the best value, something we are working on at the behest of some of the biggest industry names like P&G. There is a need to understand that just because the walled-garden platforms are some of the most economical doesn’t mean the quality is the best. There is a continual challenge to balance price and quality, and often performance-based KPIs tend to push out discussions around either CPM or supply. We need to focus on business outcomes driving the conversation, combined with a transparent supply chain to drive better performance.

A is for AI, not automation

Many marketers still equate programmatic with automation, but automation alone does not guarantee the best business outcomes. In the data-rich world of modern marketing, optimal results require intelligent automation through machine learning (ML).  Fraud, privacy and transparency were all significant concerns/challenges raised at our summit. Whether or not AI and ML can help with better filters to help overcome this challenge is a question that remains unanswered.

And P is for people

While we have already addressed the hype in recent years around the need for AI in performing high-value advertising tasks, the next step is to be adaptable enough to apply it to almost any advertising campaign promptly. AI and automation will also help with talent management. With the rapid growth of the industry, we have really and truly stressed the talent pool. Finding the talent that has programmatic experience and retaining them is a challenge. AI and automation will relieve some of this pressure as the industry continues to grow. It will allow the talent pool in aggregate to mature and strengthen by taking care of the operational tasks, and this benefits all of us. The future of people in advertising means working on more strategic functions vs. repetitive jobs.

There is not and will not be one ideal digital marketing talent ecosystem. It will depend on the brand, the business objectives, the size and the geographical presence. It can be any combination of in-house, agency or consultancy if we ensure alignment on strategy, incentives, goals, communication channels, knowledge management and enablement and the best solution to maximise ROI with a level of effort that is optimal across those involved.

We are excited to help our clients and their partners tackle these opportunities in the year ahead, working to benefit marketers, agencies, publishers and consumers with a better advertising ecosystem that creates wonderful experiences

Click here to watch the recap video from the summit.

People

Doing Good Better All Throughout the Year

May 13, 2019 — by MediaMath

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The leadup to summer is a time when people start making their second New Year’s resolutions, trying to pack in as much fun in the sun as possible. Get that body ready for the beach. Eat meals outside. Hang out on the water.

But what about the stuff that doesn’t focus on, well, us? What about using a season outside of the holiday giving period to focus on giving back to something greater than ourselves—our communities, our less fortunate fellow citizens, our world?

We believe a business needs to pursue more than just profit. It should advance the well-being of people and the health of our planet—it should be a force for good. While we find various ways to act on this belief throughout the year, our annual Impact Week that we started three years ago, set this year for June 3rd to 7th, is the one time in which we come together across all departments and global office locations to focus on doing good.

As part of our commitment to Pledge 1%, we created a Volunteer Time-Off policy in 2016, encouraging each employee to use three days a year to volunteer—a way for us to give back 1% of our time! Impact Week is a great opportunity for our employees to use this time to give back to their local communities. During previous Impact Weeks, we’ve seen nearly 500 employees out volunteering for a wide range of causes.

During Impact Week 2018, our employees:

  • Helped prepare and serve hundreds of meals for hungry New Yorkers and people with serious illnesses through organizations including the Food Bank for NY and God’s Love We Deliver
  • Donated 34 pints of blood to NY Blood Center
  • Cleaned up beaches and parks in London and Berlin
  • Facilitated empathy workshops for people with disabilities and blindness
  • Provided career advice to underrepresented students through the Opportunity Network

And across our previous two Impact Weeks, we’ve moved over $60,000 in donations to charities that:

  • Restored eyesight for 25 people with curable blindness who cannot afford surgery via Seva Foundation
  • Dewormed 4,890 children via Evidence Action
  • Provided 5,100 people with food-based fortification for one year via Project Healthy Children
  • Protected 148 people from malaria for three to four years via AMF
  • Provided safe water to 475 community members for one year
  • Provided legal and education support for refugees on the US/Mexico border and around the world

This year we’re excited to make an even bigger impact. We have over 30 events planned across four regions. We will be going back to serve many of the same places and communities from years past, creating ongoing relationships with the organizations that drive important social impact every day of the year. Any one individual can make a difference but seeing what we can accomplish as a company proves that #teamswin.

So, we ask you to join us in thinking about how to do good better not just around the holidays, but throughout the year. Maybe you can pivot those summer resolutions to:

  • Get that body ready for Clean up the beach.
  • Eat Serve meals to the underserved outside.
  • Hang out on the Help provide safe drinking water.

We promise not only your mind, body and soul but also your communities, fellow citizens and planet will thank you for it.

EducationPeople

A Thank You to Our Clients and Partners for the Opportunity to Serve You

May 8, 2019 — by MediaMath

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We are fortunate to get to do what we do in this business. We get to work with amazing marketers and their agencies, lending human expertise and acting as a consultant to design the path to their future success. Today’s leading-edge marketers and their agencies deserve from their partners true consultative service and ongoing education because, as my teammate Avi says, this stuff isn’t easy. It’s our responsibility as a tech partner to do more for our clients than ship code and platforms—this has always been a business grounded in people, and tech should only give the people more runway to do amazing things, not replace them.

We are so delighted to have received industry recognition last week in the inaugural AdExchanger Awards for our service to clients. We won in two categories—Best Account Support by a Tech Company and Best Educational Tool or Program for our educational services arm, the New Marketing Institute. Our Professional Services Teams are dedicated to our clients and partners throughout their full digital marketing evolution with MediaMath. From clients’ solution design and onboarding to our platform to the education, services, support, custom solutions and consultation required to execute and continually optimize the marketing programs and strategy in order to reach and exceed their business objectives, our team is there every step of the way.

“MediaMath’s New Marketing Institute lives and breathes the mantra and mission to ‘meet the learner where they are,’” says Laura Rodriguez-Costcacamps, Director, Head of Education Services/New Marketing Institute. “We strive to live up to that phrase as we plan curricula, facilitate training and create videos, documents and resources. Our promise is to empower our clients and partners with the tools they need to be successful through educational excellence. It’s an honor to receive this recognition from the industry and it is extremely validating that we are headed in the right direction.”

But the real win comes in the honor we get day in and day out to serve our clients. Great clients like Uber, whose Programmatic Technology Lead Bennett Rosenblatt said in a fireside chat about taking more control of their media buying at Adweek last fall: “MediaMath began to lean in and run those campaigns on our behalf and began to give us those in-house learnings, telling us what was working and what wasn’t. And that was really valuable for us…Even though we’re Uber and we have 18,000 employees, we don’t have the resources to go super-deep on every campaign. If you’re working with a partner, you should trust them.” And CBSi, for whom we helped run an omnichannel campaign from the branding stage all the way to purchase driving to their “All-Access” subscription service, whose Senior Director, Programmatic Marketing & Monetization, Damon Mercadante said, “With MediaMath, we were able to align on goals across channels that met our overall objective to build up our subscriber base. It’s no simple feat, and the education, expertise and service the MediaMath team provided for us to get to this point have been top-notch.”

While we are a technology company at heart, it’s through tech and talent together that we’ve been able to achieve where we are today, and I’m so excited for the future. Thank you to AdExchanger for this recognition in both extremely competitive categories. Thank you to our clients and partners who recognize the value of personalized services, solutions and support that our teams bring all day, every day and for their commitment to MediaMath.

People

Celebrate Diversity Month: Service, Shared Interests & Ongoing Education

April 29, 2019 — by MediaMath

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In celebration of Celebrate Diversity Month, we’re excited about the work that we are doing to foster a collaborative environment through Diversity and Inclusion-related service, shared interests and ongoing education.

We believe an inclusive and diverse workforce will allow us to better exercise our core values and better serve our mission. At MediaMath, #TeamsWin and “Obsess Over Learning and Growth” are two of those core company values. The key to creating institutional excellence is teamwork, and when we build inclusive teams with a range of backgrounds and experiences, the vast majority of the research tells us that we set our employees and clients up for success.

As a global company providing technology solutions and professional services, collaboration and innovation are especially important to our culture as we build products and create experiences that align with our customers’ goals. Diverse ideas generate more problem-solving strategies, ultimately leading to “winning the customer” and “meeting each client/consumer where they are”—goals we strive for each and every day.

Creating work environments in which employees can share their ideas, take considered risks without fear and ultimately be who they are is critical as we embark on this journey. This month, we had an opportunity to collaborate, learn and engage with teams at MediaMath through structured programming and initiatives as well as organic experiences, such as:

  • Obsess Over Learning & Growth
    • We offer GROW Coaching to our people leaders, a tried and tested coaching model. The GROW coaching model stands for learning through experience: reflection, insight, making choices and pursuing them. The power of the GROW coaching model is that it leads to a clearly defined end result.
  • Maximize Joy and Shared Experiences
    • We live-streamed the 16th annual Time 100 Summit, which celebrates a diverse group of change-makers, entrepreneurs, activists and influencers from around the world who are making an impact in today’s society, from our auditorium.
    • We have dedicated Slack channels for Multicultural Marketing and Women in Tech to share resources, encourage group discussion and celebrate one another’s ”wins.”
    • Through our Culture Club and in honor of Earth Day, we got our hands dirty and built beautiful terrariums that we are hopeful will grow along with us here at MediaMath and beyond our four walls.

As leaders, champions and allies, we must think holistically about the impact of D&I across workforce, workplace and marketplace, and what each of us can do to shape our company culture and drive innovation through conversations, programs, partnerships and experiences globally.

For too long, D&I has been something to which companies have paid lip-service. To be meaningful and bear fruit, it must be a company-wide mission where each employee within the organization knows they are valued and, in return, is held accountable for their contribution to the culture. We remain optimistic, committed to the process and cognizant of the fact that D&I is a marathon, not a sprint. We will continue to learn, create spaces to collaborate and partner internally and externally to shape the experiences and content that meets each person where they are throughout this journey.

Below are a few D&I resources to increase awareness and support your growth throughout this journey.

DataPeople

An Open, Inclusive and Neutral Foundation for Identity vs. a Proprietary Commercial Consortium Foundation: Part 2

April 17, 2019 — by MediaMath

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MediaMath’s John Slocum recently penned a column for AdExchanger’s Data-Driven Thinking on why proprietary universal identity efforts will hurt, not help, the marketing ecosystem. Below, he shares more in-depth insights on how MediaMath is providing the alternative via an open, inclusive, neutral approach to identity. Read the first part of the series here

A neutral, open-standard, commodity ID is best for everyone

MediaMath is working with DigiTrust to support transacting on the DigiTrust ID. The reasons we joined still hold true. The non-profit, IAB-managed, neutral, common ID is the right choice on which to build our Open Identity offering, where the differentiation is higher in the stack. The commoditization in the DigiTrust ID layer is part of what makes our identity offering open, extensible and portable. We want the base ID to be a commodity—one that everyone can recognize and share to obviate hundreds of third-party tracking tags and numerous performance and privacy-challenging vectors, all while respecting consumers.

Call to Action

  • Publishers who want a neutral, independent persistent and lossless identity should deploy DigiTrust JavaScript to start writing DigiTrust IDs today.
  • Platforms should support the DigiTrust ID and transact on it with MediaMath in the RTB extension.
  • Advertisers who find the promise of a lossless, open and persistent identifier across all vendor platforms compelling should encourage their vendors to join DigiTrust.

MediaMath is co-chairing the DigiTrust ID Working Group and currently measuring ROI in a formal lift study with IAB DigiTrust members. Interested parties should join the DigiTrust Working Group.

Who/what is DigiTrust: a service from IAB Tech Lab?

DigiTrust is a neutral, non-profit, industry-wide collaboration of ad-tech platforms and premium publishers utilizing a standardized user token to improve the consumer online experience. DigiTrust was acquired by IAB Tech Lab in April 2018, and now operates as a service from IAB Tech Lab. The DigiTrust service and technology solution creates a randomly-generated user token, which is propagated by and between its members in lieu of billions of proprietary pixels and trackers on webpages daily.

What problem(s) does DigiTrust seek to solve?

DigiTrust seeks to dramatically reduce the number of third-party requests that take place on webpages and which slow down the consumer online experience.

Why does this problem exist?

Thousands of companies work in collaboration today to deliver consumers personalized digital content and advertising over the Web, across many different devices. Each of these companies assigns its own proprietary, cookie-based user token, which its partners can’t read. That means that to work together in real-time, each company must maintain elaborate systems and processes to synchronize the different tokens used by each of its partners, for each consumer, on each web browser, in every connected device. The conventional process to update those systems and synchronize tokens with each other is called “pixel syncing” (or “cookie syncing”), and this process—because it’s so widely deployed across so many companies—can result in more than 100 third-party requests on a given webpage. This slows down the Web experience publishers offer their consumer audiences and is costly for third-party companies to maintain.

How does DigiTrust solve this problem?

The DigiTrust service creates a pseudonymous user token and stores it within a conventional cookie that may be read and propagated by DigiTrust members. With a standardized token provided to and used by all parties, pixel syncs are rendered obsolete. Hundreds of billions of unnecessary daily third-party pixel sync requests will eventually be removed from webpages—improving the Web experience for consumers—while publishers and their partners continue to be able to work together to deliver consumers rich, personalized content and advertising.

People

Ads Impact: Making Marketing a Force for Good

April 15, 2019 — by MediaMath

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You might wear glasses or contact lenses, but aside from an annual check-up, you probably never think about your eyesight. But for the 35 million people living in developing countries who are blind, this disability can strip them of their livelihood and condemn their families to extreme poverty. The good news: 80 percent of these cases are treatable or preventable. Half of blindness is caused by cataracts, and an individual’s vision can be restored through a quick 15-minute surgery.

Seva is an international non-profit that partners worldwide to prevent blindness and restore sight. Seva works in over 20 resource-poor countries, focusing on communities where a small contribution goes a long way. In these areas, the average cost for a surgery to completely restore a person’s eyesight is just $50.

To raise awareness of Seva’s efforts during the busy holiday season last year, MediaMath and our partners, Rubicon Project and Oracle Data Cloud, contributed their time and technology to run a campaign aimed at driving email sign-up and visits to Seva’s Gifts of Sight catalog. Publishers Gannett, InMobi, AccuWeather and CafeMedia generously contributed $100,000 in donated media to the campaign, which also tested which audiences and creative messaging resonated with donors.

Thank you to each of our partners. We look forward to continued collaboration to demonstrate that marketing can be a force for good.