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Data Technology Trends

Latin America Trends in the Programmatic Market in 2017

January 13, 2017 — by MediaMath

Latin America is a dynamic programmatic region, as we reported in our study last year with comScore, The State of Programmatic Buying in Latin America. Despite lower spend relative to other markets, programmatic buying in LATAM is expected to increase four-fold by 2019. Catherine Archer, our head of marketing for the region, recently spoke with ExchangeWire about trends in the programmatic market for 2017. Here’s what she had to say.

“MediaMath have been in Brazil since 2014. We were one of the first companies to put our cards in the local programmatic market. Two years later, we ended 2016 with great progress.

“Not only did we see our revenues increase by 200%, but also our team grew, our headquarters are new, and the market matured. We know that the topic still brings doubt to a lot of professionals, but we’ve seen an evolution, so far, and we were part of it.

“We brought the New Marketing Institute to Brazil, presenting the most innovative practices in the global market, and prepared a market study in Latin America. In 2017, we are very optimistic. Programmatic media should conquer more space. I don’t mean only our growth, but the whole sector and opportunities for the next years.”

For more data on how the LATAM region will evolve in 2017 and beyond, check out our programmatic trends infographic.

Data Technology Trends

How CMOs Can Make Smart Technology Investments in 2017

January 12, 2017 — by MediaMath

This post originally appeared on IBM’s THINK Marketing blog.

Fact: CMOs are increasingly making enterprise-level technology decisions. They are expected to outspend CIOs for the first time ever by 2017, according to Gartner. And with the research firm’s latest CMO Spend Survey, conducted with 377 marketers at from North America and the U.K., we have a clearer idea of where exactly marketing leaders plan to make their investments. A few highlights from the survey, released in October:

Web, digital commerce and digital advertising were the top three categories for marketing spend in 2016
Two-thirds plan to up spending on digital advertising next year
In 30 percent or more companies, certain IT, sales and customer experience functions now report into marketing
Only a quarter of IT organizations have maintained control over martech capital investments

Even though marketing is controlling more of the technology budget, getting these investments right is not a walk in the park. The zenith is addressable, real-time, outcomes-oriented marketing, and not all platforms are up to the task. With all the technology choices in the ecosystem today, it’s important for CMOs to look for two critical components in their platforms to ensure they are making smart technology investments and can tie marketing efforts back to business outcomes.

1) An open, extensible platform: A single, open platform that can be integrated allows for a streamlined workflow through one UI. It should have a few key features:

Customer-centricity, rather than channel-centricity, so marketers can make decisions in alignment with customer needs across channels. This requires deep supply reach, omnichannel execution and the ability to manage a holistic media plan within a single UI that provides integrated and normalized workflows, execution and reporting for a united view of the customer across channels to allow optimizing back to the marketers’ true business outcomes.
Real-time capability to react to consumers as they shop, browse and consume content and enable integrated audience management and omnichannel execution at scale. This ideally allows the ability to identify users across devices and adapt to their changing behaviors in real time, with an intelligence engine that ensures what happens in audience informs what happens in media and vice-versa.
Flexibility so marketers can use other software systems or solutions, often through APIs that allow integration. Customers can use these APIs for themselves or make them available to the broader ecosystem. This unprecedented level of customization gives clients the ability to create the right tech stack for their needs.

2) Connecting adtech and martech: The breakdown of silos across paid and owned media has become possible thanks to the interconnection of automated systems on both sides, to orchestrate the very seamless, relevant consumer experiences marketers are trying to effect. CMOs will increasingly be able to broker these connections to drive competitive advantage and boost ROI across both paid and owned media. A few things to keep in mind:

Get executive support for your martech and adtech strategy and start connecting your paid media and owned media teams.
Look for connections that are easier to implement. Think marketing technology platforms with built-in functionality to allow digital marketers to extend email campaigns to paid media through a single UI.
Adopt an identity management solution so you know who your consumers are across devices. Your conversations will get smarter as a result because you’ll know their shopping and content consumption behavior across all the devices, whether you engage with them first in email and continue in display or hit them on mobile first. You’ll also improve measurement and optimization of spend across channels.

Technology Trends

Joe Zawadzki’s Take on Attribution in 2017

January 9, 2017 — by MediaMath

Will 2017 be the Year of Attribution? Our Founder and CEO Joe Zawadzki thinks it could be. He recently contributed his thoughts to AdWeek’s SocialTimes’ 10 Digital Media and Marketing Predictions for 2017 piece.

Marketers are signing up for outcomes, not inputs, inside of their own organizations, and they are increasingly asking the question of who watches the watchers, who grades the homework of a dynamic and diverse supply chain? Programmatic done right is attributed based on impact on true business goals, and it lets marketers see through channels and partners to the consumer behind all of those screens.

To read more about our thoughts on how marketers can utilize attribution, take a look at the below posts:

Data Technology Trends

EMEA Managing Director Dave Reed on Good Advertising, Omnichannel, Data and Measurement

January 6, 2017 — by MediaMath

Dave Reed talked with Bill Fisher from eMarketer for the publication’s State of the UK digital ad market report. The below are some insights from their interview.

Good advertising

“I think the best anecdote to perceived ills in the market is doubling down on quality. The UK has lots of examples where it’s leading on that. Quality means using first-party consumer data and modelling off it, or using high-quality third-party data to target consumers in a better way. This means leveraging programmatic not just for long-tail, relatively low-CPM buying…maybe doing it at a lower frequency, having a meaningful message.”

“It also means coordination of consumer experience not just in paid media but also across paid, owned and earned experiences as well. Across all these things, I’m excited and optimistic that some of these issues—fraud, viewability, ad blocking—are immediately compatible by focusing on common sense, consumer-first principles.”

Premium media

Inventory quality will continue to be a focus into 2017 in EMEA.

“I think the UK has a leg up on that in the sense that private marketplaces or some kind of prearranged deal that’s executed in an automated way are fairly standard here—50 to 60 percent of things classed as programmatic are also classified as some sort of direct/private marketplace deal.”

“We’ve moved into a world where a marketer will try to get reach against tens of thousands of opportunities a day across TV/print/OOH/radio etc. to a world of connected devices and multiple screens—literally hundreds of opportunities to get possible touch points with the consumer.”

Regarding the growth of new formats: “Some are new, some are held as new,” Reed said. “Out-stream, ad units that can be different lengths on video but with the same content, are getting some help from the supply chain. Video on both desktop and mobile will continue to take the lion’s share of growth…seeing some interesting growth in format, native and non-paid channels that we think programmatic can inform.”

Data

“There’ll be continued growth for marketers in complementary verticals sharing data (data collaboration), and publishers who increasingly expand into partnerships that are data-driven. We’ve seen a lot of retail space clients branch into partnership with brands they sell, or developing media propositions.”

Measurement

“There’s one general effect of measurement in marketing, and that’s revenue. The closer you can get to being able to tie marketing activity to revenue, either in the short term like a purchase, or in the long term in something like lifetime value or complete brand loyalist metrics, the closer you can get to that, and the better off you are. If you start there, you’ll tend to shy away from things that don’t actually show ads to people, unless you think unseen ads drive real revenue. Often marketers are left with an imperfect link between brand loyalty, short-term revenue or long-term customer value, and then it can be useful to introduce a number of inner media metrics. Viewability can be one of those but it shouldn’t be the effective function of your marketing to show viewable impressions—it should be to drive business outcomes.

Technology Trends

Joanna O’Connell’s Programmatic Marketing Prediction for 2017

January 3, 2017 — by MediaMath

A version of this prediction appeared on Forbes.

What will 2017 bring for the realm of programmatic marketing? MediaMath’s CMO Joanna O’Connell weighs in.

“Programmatic is moving into new territories—TV, audio, print, native. The true ‘programmatic future’ is taking all forms of media and making them addressable and connected at a consumer level. User data is what powers the marketing that allows brands to reach and engage with consumers on a one-to-one level across channels, formats and devices throughout the customer lifecycle. But there’s need for technical convergence and message coherence across channels as viewed from a consumer perspective. Consumers, after all, don’t care what channel they’re in; they just notice when offers are off, mis-targeted or annoying due to over-frequency of delivery. And then they block ads.

Without alignment of channels, it’s tough to sell marketers a real consumer journey story, much less create one for consumers. Omnichannel execution, combined with smart management, analysis and activation of first-, second- and third-party data sources, will be the way forward in 2017, with more and more brands realizing the benefit of unifying data across all addressable channels so they have a single identity of a user that drives one seamless conversational thread and, as a consequence, better user experience. We call this ‘programmatic marketing.'”

Culture People Technology Trends Uncategorized

The Year of the Sophisticated Marketer

December 30, 2016 — by Joe Zawadzki

If 2015 was the year of adolescence for MediaMath, 2016 was accelerated maturity into the responsibilities of young adulthood.

This year, we evolved from an adtech company to an enterprise software and services provider, because the latter is what the market is demanding. Marketers are more sophisticated than ever. We are entering a “post-channel era” where CEOs, CMOs and CFOs are as obsessed as we are with data and outcomes.

With technology at their fingertips to enable 1:1 marketing at scale, with real-time execution, direct connection to consumers and the ability to measure business results over publisher inputs, marketers are increasingly motivated to “make it so.”

Those are our clients. MediaMath’s customers index toward the more sophisticated, and we’ve built our business to cater to them. This drive to move programmatic out of test budgets or a portion of their media investments sometimes requires new business models or team configurations to do so— our work with Coke and MediaCom out of Mexico is a great example of how this can be done with success. Marketers like the folks at MediaCrossing have moved from siloed channel approaches to true single platform allowing omnichannel execution. And with the pipes to hook together paid and owned media systems through great partners like IBM and Oracle, marketers are extending conversations they start with known customers in email across channels and the marketing funnel. From our founding, MediaMath has partnered with these most sophisticated marketers to push the boundaries of programmatic marketing. We want to continue to be seen as a leading “Visionary,” the category in which we were recognized in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs in January.

In the context of this growing client and market maturity, we made some changes internally that were both exciting and daunting.

Early in the year, we unveiled a new product business unit structure around our data, media and intelligence products, bringing our product teams closer to the client. Our data team, which successfully launched our proprietary data business, formerly known as Adroit, then Helix and now as part of MediaMath Audiences, in January and released into general availability our real-time DMP capabilities Adaptive Segments and IQ in November, is helping marketers leverage more of their first-, second- and third-party data sources (including deepened and new partnerships with data providers like Acxiom, PushSpring and Cuebiq) and shape the analytics around them.

Over top these new product business units, we’ve ramped up our professional services capabilities to enable clients to unlock the full potential of programmatic with talent and expertise. Our New Marketing Institute, which is now officially in all regions with its expansion into APAC earlier this year, continues to help clients close education and talent gaps through their certification and training offerings and the Marketing Engineer Program. We also revamped our technology organization, appointing Wilfried Schobeiri as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Steve Steir as our new SVP of Engineering. Wil will drive our technical vision, ensure scalable growth of our systems and push the productization of our API and technology platform while evangelizing our technology both inside the company and externally to the market. Steve will make sure our global engineering team is aligned on the goal of continuously improving people and products.

Coming out of this new product structure, we have the right people in key roles across teams to move the company and mission forward. And there’s a renewed commitment to ongoing evolution and mobility that should smooth the migration of people and resources to the focused set of initiatives that need them at various time periods, varied as needed across geographies. We continue to strive to be a place where people at all stages of their careers want to work, and also encourage those individuals to give back in meaningful ways through the launch of our philanthropic arm MediaMath.org.

From a financial health perspective, our enterprise business grew just over 20 percent in our most mature market of North America and to over 100 percent in LATAM, along with (a return to) overall profitability. And we did that while taking something really good—a fast-growing and high-contribution business unit in Adroit—and blowing it up to free up the amazing talent and differentiated data assets inside to accrue to the benefit of all of our clients, globally, to become something great. Even more intestinal fortitude was required to shift our buy strategy for “batch supply”—Upcast—to build, in order to position it to grow by triple digits in 2017 as mobile and video did this year.

Whew.

What else is to come in 2017? Here’s what I know: the market for what we are doing is getting bigger and the number of credible competitors is getting smaller. Smaller point solutions—from channels like video to standalone DMPs—are getting bought, validating the need for the integrated, transparent enterprise solution that we have been building for close to a decade. Audiences addressable through all forms of media, the centrality of machine learning—these ideas are being embraced after 10+ years to move from fringe notion to “obvious.” We are in the business of transforming marketing through tech and math, and we know where the market is going and are increasingly able to shape its direction.

And yet we will do more. The need for supply chain hygiene will cause some to call for a return to the halcyon days of advertiser, agency and publisher in the same way that the challenge of attribution had many retrench to engagement or reach metrics alone. Thankfully, we have truth on our side. In 2017, we as a company and as a catalyst for the cause must focus on belief and proof, and show it in the data and the results.

To do that, we will continue to invest in innovation and even more in scaled operations and infrastructure, partnering with the most sophisticated marketers and the diverse ecosystem that supports them. We have an amazing team and the industry’s most powerful platform—the table is set. Now it’s up to us.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

Lessons we Learned from Data-driven Marketing in 2016

December 28, 2016 — by MediaMath

This byline originally appeared on CMO.com.au.

In 2016, the power and importance of “big data” finally started to pay off—everywhere around the globe, across all markets and industries.

For businesses, the role of information in supporting marketing and advertising is no longer just about providing learnings. Organisations now look to data for actionable insights and to drive better business outcomes. Increasingly, they are moving towards a smarter and more consumer-centric approach, which can only be done by deriving meaning from data. In a 2016 MediaMath-commissioned research study undertaken by Forrester Consulting, almost 41% of marketers in Asia Pacific said that they have adopted programmatic buying, with 82% of them either satisfied or highly satisfied with their investment in the technology.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s clear that data, and programmatic, is now a central pillar of customer experience, and therefore marketing. As businesses look to jump on board, here are some lessons we’ve learned over the past year that marketers around the world can take with them into 2017.

It’s still all about the consumer

Consumers increasingly expect a more personalised experience. This is perhaps why consumers are voting with a click of their mouse in order to avoid disruptive, annoying or irrelevant advertising. The increased usage of ad blocking technology is a consequence of irrelevant and unwanted advertisements.

To address this issue, marketers are enthusiastically embracing the “customer-centric” approach. Marketers are increasingly turning to data-driven marketing, including the management of customer databases, deployment of predictive analytics, and segmentation to learn more about addressable audiences, and implementation of omni-channel campaigns to have a more holistic view of their audiences. With platforms that recognise individuals across multiple devices, address changing behaviour of consumers, and enable omni-channel execution, marketers can deliver experiences that transcend channels, formats, and devices.

Digital is where it’s at

Web content, social media, search, and online display advertising increasingly make up a greater proportion of the marketer’s arsenal to reach their target audience—and it’s easy to see why.

Consumers from all demographics are now spending more time online. Digital consumers are spending an average of over six hours daily on the internet—which is equivalent to more than half of a consumer’s daily media time. With Asia home to more than half of the world’s internet users, marketers here can take full advantage of this huge opportunity by bridging the gap between traditional and digital in their media mix.

As such, marketers are reporting that digital media is now delivering the greatest return on investment, with the performance of their display advertising, web content, and social media investments making the most strides in the past year. With better performance, cost effectiveness, and operational efficiency, marketers are choosing programmatic to help them boost contextual targeting, reduce waste, and provide timely and relevant content to their audience across multiple devices. Marketing has gone digital, because that is where the consumers are—and are likely to stay.

Untapped potential

While close to three-quarters of marketers globally said that they remain confident in the practice of data-driven marketing and its potential for future growth, going digital requires expertise that can unlock and generate more value from data-driven marketing efforts. In addition, marketers today also generally believe that the optimisation of campaign measurement would be most valuable if it provides deeper insights to inform future campaign planning, media mix modelling, and other optimisation efforts. This is where programmatic comes in, with APAC marketers citing better contextual targeting, faster and more efficient execution and real-time optimisation as the most important benefits of programmatic.

The lesson is that marketers need to not only know the data at their disposal, but also be able to smartly analyse and activate it to get the best return.

The task of navigating more complex data from different media channels, with increasing customer requirements and higher expectations, is a challenge. With digital marketing technology, marketers can derive meaningful insights, enabling marketers to execute better targeted campaigns. The more intelligent the technology, the better the consumer insights, and the more targeted the marketing approach—eventually leading to happier consumers and better business results.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

Adtech: Predictions for 2017

December 23, 2016 — by MediaMath

The WARC blog recently ran a post on marketing predictions from industry leaders. MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell was featured—her commentary is included below.

“Consumers, after all, don’t care what channel they’re in; they just notice when offers are off, mis-targeted or annoying due to over-frequency of delivery. And then they block ads. To combat this disengagement with advertising, marketers should commit to improving audience management and better aligning how they execute media across channels. This is how you start having a single view of customers that allows you to communicate more seamlessly and, thus, deliver more customer-centric marketing.”

Read the other predictions here.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

EMEA Managing Director Dave Reed Talks the Evolution of Header Bidding

December 21, 2016 — by MediaMath

MediaMath partner OpenX recently hosted the eighth School of Programmatic event, which focused on the evolution of header bidding. Dave Reed, Managing Director of EMEA for MediaMath, participated in a panel on the impact of header bidding on the buy- and the sell-sides, moderated by ExchangeWire, with Tegdeep Kondal, product director for header bidding at OpenX, and Barbara Agus, director of programmatic EMEA and LATAM, Time Inc. Here is a recap of some of their commentary, which originally appeared on ExchangeWire.

Are buyers and sellers connecting through header bidding?

Barbara Agus from Time Inc., said header bidding is giving buyers the opportunity to access all the relevant users on a given property. This is a fantastic result; however, as a publisher, she is often asked whether she can see real changes in the way buyers are approaching inventory since starting to implement header bidding solutions. According to Agus, this is sometimes the case. At Time Inc., they are forecasting between a 10-20% revenue uplift. But publishers in the industry are often asking how buyers and sellers should be connected through header bidding, with concerns that a lack of understanding from the other side of the fence, for both buyers and sellers, could create confusion: HB might create a distorted and inflated vision of the volume of impressions available in any given auction. “We are sometimes accused of trying to make more money out of the same amount of inventory.”

Dave Reed from MediaMath responded to Agus’ concerns, saying header bidding is one of the most effective tools in bringing clients closer together. “It is often assumed that a higher price for the publisher means advertiser loss, and a lower price for the advertiser means publisher loss, but it doesn’t work that way. Advertisers will pay a lot for value, and that’s the world header bidding is starting to bring in.”

Is header bidding driving increased CPMs on the buy side and is that causing advertisers concern? According to Reed, no. He gave the example of a global client, where CPMs increased, but performance increased even more, which, as an advertiser, you might initially balk at. “It’s not a zero sum game”, said Reed, “as you can make the pie bigger for everyone, if you’re efficient.”

If header bidding is driving improved performance and yield for both advertisers and publishers, what’s the problem? Drawing from her previous experience using this tool, Agus points out that it’s the retargeters that seemed to be negatively affected. “We have seen buyer relationships improve significantly, but for retargeters looking for the cheapest impression to drive ROI, we have definitely seen a rapport decline. Before header bidding, those buyers had first access to inventory with no competition. With header bidding in the mix, they suddenly faced competition and, as a result, they wanted to stay out of the wrapper.” According to Agus, it is in dealing with premium advertisers that we can expect most improvements. However, this should not be regarded as a win/lose situation. According to Reed: “As marketers, we need to get beyond campaign-based buying. Consumers don’t live in a campaign world. Always-on marketing that allows programmatic tracking across devices and across platforms should increase CPMs, as buyers should be looking for quality.”

“Header bidding is bringing buyers closer to sellers”, said Reed, who feels it is helping promote a more transparent marketplace, with fewer walled gardens. Agus agreed, saying buyers have the opportunity to appreciate the value of their inventory, helping publishers understand how to price it better.

Are there concerns with header bidding?

Kondal said that, on the platform side, latency is the biggest topic: “I feel there’s a lot that can be done by publishers; but it’s really the job of the platform to optimise on behalf of the end user. At OpenX, we’re looking very seriously at how we can reduce the time it takes to return bids.”

Aside from latency, Kondal worried there isn’t much focus put on the DSP side; and explained how context should be provided to make them understand which bid requests are coming from header bidding and even ask them what type of auction they would like to participate in. “If you give them more context and control it would be a more balanced playing field on both sides.”

Speaking from the DSP side, Reed was, in general, very positive; but he did highlight that one downside is implementation: “If the publisher implements it, and the DSP doesn’t know the context, and is competing against an open auction, you haven’t achieved very much in grokking the waterfall and getting close to the first impression the user sees.” Reed admitted this isn’t a frequent occurrence, but it definitely happens.

HB is a fantastic piece of technology. When it fails, it is not because of the technology itself, but rather because it has not been fully understood.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

Simplfying Integrations Between Demand and Supply Platforms

December 20, 2016 — by MediaMath

SSPs, exchanges and DSPs aim to connect the world’s demand and supply at scale. Why all the middlemen? Exchanges and other intermediaries exist to minimize the number of direct connections. This saves resources as new integrations between demand and supply platforms are long and intricate. With one exchange integration, a DSP gets access to hundreds of individual supply platforms.

What if integrations weren’t so complicated? If the ideal is to bring publishers and advertisers closer, how can we change the status quo of integrations?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has been successful in standardizing the increasing complexity of RTB transactions with the Open RTB protocol. However, there has been an issue with supply platforms then adopting the IAB’s guiding terms as their own technical specifications. In doing so, they often add their own “twist.” This customization may reflect the uniqueness of the supply or the SSP’s own legacy systems. The issue is that even the most minor customization on the SSP’s end puts additional burden on a DSP’s engineers, resulting in longer lead times and leaving more room for bugs during the integration.

The status quo has been that, due to the unique nature of every integration, integrations at MediaMath were taking one to four quarters from lead time through go-live. This presented the most pain points for regionally-focused or product-specialized SSPs, because upgrading our current exchanges took just as long as new integrations. With dozens of direct integrations for a typical DSP and hundreds of SSPs in the market—plus the IAB releasing a new protocol version nearly every year—upgrading integrations and building out new ones could be the sole job of several engineers and product managers! On the other side, these smaller SSPs are forced to sell their inventory through exchanges, diluting the value of the advertiser’s dollar and limiting partnership opportunities with the DSP. It’s a drain on both sides’ resources any way you look at it.

At MediaMath, we recognized the problems of integration status quo: It’s slow, non-standard and reliant on middlemen. In an effort to make integrations fast and painless, we developed our own RTB specifications. Dubbed LITE Integrations, it is a simplified version of OpenRTB with no pesky custom fields. Combined with an online standardized contract to speed through the legal procedure (which always took longer than the actual integrations), our new way of integrating allows supply platforms to get started immediately and connect to MediaMath’s global demand in as little as two weeks instead of a quarter or more.

We think this could be a game changer in the way the industry integrates. If this process is adopted across the adtech ecosystem, global connectivity and the value of the advertiser’s budget will strengthen while engineering teams will have more resources to innovate.

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