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EventsMediaPeopleTrends

Kick off the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup by Scoring the Best Media Placements

June 28, 2023 — by MediaMath

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Women’s soccer is hot right now.

Ticket sales have topped 1 million for the FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup taking place in Australia and New Zealand from July 20th to August 20th, putting it on track to be the most attended standalone women’s sporting event in history. About two billion fans are expected to tune in from screens globally. It will be the first-ever dual-host Women’s World Cup and the largest-ever with 32 teams competing. Add to the popularity of women’s soccer the fact that global sports tourism is one of the fastest-growing sectors and a boon to commercial and economic growth in host cities. The market was valued at $587.87 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 17.5% from 2023 to 2030.

There are some unique characteristics of women’s soccer fans:

  • 42% actively seek out information on the brands that sponsor the sport (Nielsen)
  • 61% believe that sponsors gain the favorable attention of the audience (Nielsen)
  • 56% of Women’s World Cup fans use social media, 39% order food and 35% drink alcohol while watching sports (GWI
  • 23% of U.S. female soccer fans are Hispanic, 47% hold a college degree and they enjoy an average household income of $80,362. (Gilted Soccer)
  • 58% of Gen Zers identify as “superfans” or “supporters” of women’s soccer and 12% report that they prefer women’s soccer to men’s (Footballco)

Compared to Men’s World Cup fans, Women’s World Cup fans are more likely to watch official content and sports documentaries and purchase sports collectibles.

MediaMath’s Curated Markets help you get your ads in front of shoppers where they are. 

MediaMath’s Curated Markets are designed to help you get your ads in front of Women’s World Cup fans wherever they plan to watch the matches. 

Sports Marketplace

Ensure your ads get delivered in premium sports-related environments people know and trust, with geo-targeting to show relevant ads to audiences based on their location and the local sporting seasons currently happening. 

Performance Marketplace 

This marketplace offers turnkey, privileged access to premium content owners in quality environments optimized for direct response campaign performance. Plus, target MediaMath Audiences at no additional fee.

Download our regionalized FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup collateral to get more statistics about the audiences that watch and tips for reaching them in the best environments. 

DataEventsPeopleTrends

Winning Advertising Audiences for Wimbledon

June 21, 2023 — by MediaMath

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Wimbledon, the world’s oldest, most famous and most prestigious tennis tournament, kicks off on July 3 in London. 

Last year, more than 500,000 people attended Wimbledon—the most in history—and 7.5 million viewers tuned in during the Men’s Singles Final. US viewers can watch online via ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN+ and The Tennis Channel this year. Sling TV Orange, Fubo, and DirectTV Stream offer both, while Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV have ESPN. In general, tennis fans watch on every possible screen, but studies have shown they are 42% more likely to respond after seeing a commercial on cable TV and 37% more likely after an ad was served on a streaming app.

Tennis fans have some specific traits that can appeal to certain advertisers. For instance, 80% of tennis fans are college-educated, have an average household income of over $120K, and spend on average 17.9 hours watching cable TV per week and 11.7 hours per week on the Internet. Wimbledon’s wealthier audience is 3.3X more likely to have an affinity for Ralph Lauren, 4.4X more likely to have an affinity for Stella Artois and 4.3X more likely to have an affinity for Jaguar than the sports fans’ audience.  

MediaMath’s Curated Markets help you get your ads in front of shoppers where they are 

To reach high-value tennis fans where they will watch Wimbledon, advertisers can tap into some of MediaMath’s Curated Markets, made up of high-quality websites:

Sports Marketplace

Ensure your ads get delivered in premium sports-related environments people know and trust, with geo-targeting to show relevant ads to audiences based on their location and the local sporting seasons currently happening. 

Price Floor Range: Display – $1.00-$3.00 CPM, Video – $5.00-$9.00 CPM 

Available Regions: Global 

Channels: Display & Video 

 

Shopper Marketplace 

This marketplace perfectly aligns with e-commerce in-market shoppers to reach your target audience wherever they are in environments they know and trust while improving your CPA, ROI and general direct response goals. Combine with MediaMath Audiences shopper data at no additional cost! 

Price Floor Range: Display – $1.00-$3.00, Video – $4.00-$6.00 

Available Regions: Global 

Channels: Display & Video 

Download our regionalized Wimbledon collateral to get more statistics about the audiences that watch and tips for reaching them in the best environments. 

DOWNLOAD APAC ONE-PAGER

DOWNLOAD EMEA ONE-PAGER

DOWNLOAD US ONE-PAGER

Trends

Make this March Madness Your Best Yet with MediaMath

February 22, 2022 — by MediaMath

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It’s an exciting time of year for U.S. advertisers as we hover between The Super Bowl and March Madness. With sports betting now legal in more than half the country, MediaMath is your go-to partner to activate gambling campaigns around these key sports events with ease, safety
and transparency.

March is Madness. MediaMath is your Best Bet.


Thank You!

Your request has been received and we will contact you shortly.



 

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.”

 

 

TechnologyTrends

Marketers Must Master These 4 Things to Win This Record-Breaking Holidays Sales Season

December 1, 2021 — by MediaMath

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The last 18+ months have accelerated certain digital trends that will impact this holiday shopping season in a major way. Marketers must be prepared with strategies that help them stay agile and adapt. Built for this moment and the next, the MediaMath platform can help you execute your holiday campaigns with stability and flexibility in mind.

The Shopping Landscape for Holiday 2021

After more than 18 months in and out of lockdowns and quarantines, US consumers are ready to spend like they’ve never spent before this holiday season.

Even with supply chain issues, shipping delays and an uncertain economic forecast, retail and e-commerce sales are expected to reach between $1.1 trillion and $1.3 trillion in the US this Q4 shopping period according to Deloitte. This trend will extend globally: more than a quarter of Australian shoppers and more than half of UK shoppers are planning on spending more this Christmas. Download detailed holiday guides to help with campaigns in each of these markets: North America here, EMEA here and Australia here.

Call it “revenge shopping” or the YOLO economy or whatever you’d like — taking advantage of this return to pre-pandemic shopping requires a data-driven, omnichannel approach to keep your brand top of mind in the month ahead.

Find the Right Shopper as They Search for the Right Gift

The path to capturing your share of this year’s massive holiday spending begins with your own data. Onboard whatever first-party CRM data you have, such as email addresses, to target seasonal shoppers that bought last year. To reach shoppers in the research phase, target audience segments based on what they have looked at on your site or the ads with which they have engaged. You can then model out those audiences to find shoppers with the same characteristics as those who buy from you most. Keeping your audience segments fluid is key as shoppers will browse, cart and purchase rapidly. As users move in and out of segments, reach customers based on what they intend to buy and drive awareness before targeting them with specific promotions.

Whether you are activating first- or third-party data, MediaMath’s identity graph can expand the reach of audience segments in privacy-first and probabilistic ways. Utilize our identity graph to ensure you can control ad reach and frequency at a person level and extend reach to mobile devices and high-quality video this holiday season.

Keep Your “Presents” Strong Throughout the Funnel

COVID-19 has accelerated two main trends in consumer behavior: use of mobile and adoption of CTV. Mcommerce will continue to gain share of total holiday e-commerce, jumping 18.8% to $97.15 billion and accounting for 8.5% of holiday retail sales. CTV households will increase to 115.2 million by 2025, from 106.4 million in 2021.

For holiday performance-based campaigns, you want to target at the user or device level to drive performance across all OTT channels — that is where you will see conversion. CTV is designed for awareness, so you can follow up from this channel with sequential messaging to drive engagement down the purchase funnel. As holiday travel ramps up, consider emerging channels as well, such as audio or DOOH. A unique approach not to be missed this holiday season is social display, in which you can use the same social media creative across quality inventory for engagement and creative at the scale of traditional display. Advertisers using social display see 5x improvement in brand lift and consideration on average.

Here is the best breakdown of channels to pursue for each buyer stage this holiday season:

  • Awareness: OTT formats, social display, audio, mobile video, DOOH
  • Action: OTT formats, social display, online video, native, contextual, behavioral, retargeting, audio
  • Interest: Display, contextual, behavioral, retargeting, audio, social display
  • Conversion: Retargeting, display, audio

Measure True Business Outcomes

It’s critical to have a measurement strategy in place that fits your business needs, whether it’s on-site engagement, in-person footfall traffic or CTV measurement. Leverage footfall traffic data to inform attribution and Brain optimization in our platform. Automate as much as possible by utilizing MediaMath’s data connections to import your data into our platform so that campaigns can automatically optimize towards your most valuable users. Increase your media efficiency and bid accuracy by ingesting your third-party attribution data to inform optimization in our platform and have it available in data export reports. Go deeper into your supply path optimization strategies through publisher revenue reporting and working media percentage calculations.

Select Supply that Sleighs

The content your ads run on is more important than ever in this age of dis- and misinformation. Our SOURCE ecosystem is the best way to guarantee brand-safe inventory and transparency into how holiday campaigns are performing. We see advertisers committing to programmatic guaranteed, private deals and marketplaces to secure inventory across all channels that reach holiday shoppers. Additionally, targeting options via custom contextual segments help you reach valuable audiences during the holiday crunch. Check with inventory partners, especially on PMP deals, to see if they will still have available inventory as you move through the quarter. Also consider diversifying supply vendors as well as possibly moving deals to programmatic guaranteed.

A final note: If possible, attempt to extend holiday campaigns through the New Year to take advantage of lower CPMs and increased scale. This past January, there was a record-breaking number of returns for 2020 holiday gifts during what has become known as “National Returns Week.” Be prepared to attract those shoppers looking to swap out their wares for something better to put the final bow on your holiday sales performance.

TrendsVerticals

Challenging the Advertising Industry’s Transformation

October 26, 2021 — by MediaMath

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MediaMath Named a Challenger in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech

In Gartner’s recent release of its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech, MediaMath was named a Challenger. We’re proud to see Gartner continue to rank MediaMath as a significant ad tech player, but let’s dive into what the criteria, ranking, and evaluation mean to understand the nuances of Gartner’s assessment of the ad tech landscape. Taking a look at Gartner’s own definition of our Magic Quadrant placement: Challengers in the Magic Quadrant perform as well, or better than, Leaders, but tend to focus more narrowly on certain channels, strategies or non-enterprise buyer profiles. Challengers are positioned close to the Leaders Quadrant and, in many cases, their specialization is an advantage to some buyers.

At MediaMath, we continue to challenge the status quo and help marketers think about how they should most optimally execute their digital marketing strategies in this continually changing landscape. This aligns with our mission statement to empower brands to reach their customers and drive real business outcomes through personalized communication at scale, leveraging all touchpoints, data, and outcomes with ease of use and transparency in a privacy-first world.

We are excited that Gartner distinguishes our expertise in execution when it comes to our product and functionality. We have recently redesigned key elements of our omnichannel platform that combines a flexible identity foundation, complete supply chain accountability, and modular, extensible, customizable components with new and enhanced workflows for traders and supply managers.

Marketers deserve an industry-leading DSP to execute powerful campaigns optimally. We have been focused on delivering that for them and the results are showing: In addition to our Magic Quadrant ranking, we have been recognized by our customers as a trusted brand and our Net Promoter Score has risen 30 points. It matters to our customers that their media is working, and our improved workflow, campaign management, and intelligent automation capabilities provide the solutions for them.

We continue to show the world our vision with our native identity story. At MediaMath, we believe that the shift in the identity ecosystem has been a long time coming. We are helping advertisers reach the real human beings that matter the most to their business. We firmly believe that first party user ID’s will create a better ecosystem, offering game changing advantages across the board because they are based on a direct relationship between brands, publishers and people.

It is likely that a single identity solution will not receive universal adoption, and that brands will have to leverage a mix of different identity options. With that in mind, we have built an identity infrastructure which natively allows transaction across independent identities and gives you an “easy button” to address your identity need for tomorrow. In this era of the unknown we have built the systems which will stand the test of time across user based, aggregated, and even completely user-independent (contextual) identities.

We continue to execute on our SOURCE promise and supply chain transparency with a vision for the future. We are working to give users full control of their supply chain, in a way that benefits advertisers, agencies, and publishers. We do this by providing transparency and insight, as well as giving advertisers tools to action on this insight. We arm advertisers with tools like our Supply Path Manager so that brands can easily define and enforce permissions for what paths they are willing to transact on, across their entire organization.

Our SOURCE framework received the highest feedback and response from the industry leaders and stakeholders as a “scaled, transparent ecosystem.” Transparency continues to be top of mind for marketers, and we are the first DSP to provide full fee transparency in-platform for reporting. Additionally, MediaMath’s Brain algorithm is recognized by Gartner for the fourth year in a row, noting “a unique mix of media and user variables to predict action rates and optimize bidding strategy.”

At MediaMath, we are committed to the open internet and here today to work through the complexities of the evolving ad landscape, with solutions that are built for this moment and the next.

Trends

5 things marketers need to thrive in this moment and the next

October 13, 2021 — by MediaMath

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Even before the onslaught of COVID-19 forced us to quickly adapt to working, educating and socializing from home, the digitalization of many aspects of our world was already accelerating the “do life” from anywhere with any device mindset. The last decade has catapulted the shift to a digital economy, which makes up anywhere from 4.5 to 15.5 percent of world GDP, and consumers expect seamless experiences across channels as a result. All of this activity is significantly ramping up the amount of data we are creating, capturing, copying and consuming around the world—about 59ZB in 2020, with a forecasted 175ZB by 2025—which is making consumers more protective of the information they share with brands. 

If you’re a CMO in this environment, you need to know with full certainty where your marketing dollars are going and what they’re returning to your business. Only with a solid foundation rooted in transparency, interoperability and performance can you adapt to the evolving whims of customers who want both more choice and more security. We’ve made updates to our platform that allow for these very things so we can continue helping marketers meet this dynamic moment in time, and the next. 

 1. Reach consumers wherever they are  

More than half of every advertising dollar is being spent on digital channels as more addressable screens and speakers emerge. The events of the last 18 months have only accelerated the growth of several of these channels. Between Q2 2020 and Q2 2021, time spent consuming OTT streaming video grew 13% overall, 46% of it on smart TVs. Digital audio is expected to surpass traditional radio in time spent for the first time ever this year, after usage of the former rebounded at the end of last year. And despite a drop in DOOH ad spending during the pandemic, DOOH ads will account for 31.2% of all OOH ad spending in 2021 and 42.0% by 2025. Access to premium inventory for these and other channels, and the ability to efficiently manage creatives, campaigns and budget across them, will become more critical to engage consumers with relevance and respect.  

2. Get radical transparency  

 The continued opacity that persists in the digital advertising supply chain is a direct contributor to CMOs’ inability to account for their spend and the results it might or might not drive. In fact, in a Q2 2020 survey of B2B buyers worldwide, 32% stopped using certain vendors due to a lack of transparency. 

To run automated advertising that performs the way you need it to, transparency into everything, from fees to signals such as inventory type, fraud and identity​, is critical. Our modernized ecosystem SOURCE provides marketers with the tools to grade their supply partners in addition to full supply-chain cost reporting across 100% of inventory. It also fosters bidirectional data-sharing​ between both brand and publisher to help both sides understand each other’s goals and how they’re trying to get there. By cleaning up how supply is sourced and the chain of partners through which it runs, you will minimize discrepancies, ensure brand safety and ​make more accurate decisions.  

3. Deliver on KPIs that matter most 

 Incomplete metrics have long governed digital advertising, and that needs to change from the ground up and the inside out to get results that actually impact your business. Last October, more than one in three US digital media professionals reported that attribution-related problems like cross-device attribution (42%), accurate measurement (36%) and assessment of campaign ROI would be among their biggest challenges for the year ahead.  

 Access to improved supply chain signals and publisher data via our SOURCE ecosystem is the first step to get you there—more accurate inputs lead to more accurate outputs. Then, you need the ability to: optimize your bidding decisions, which we provide through our Brain machine learning algorithm; tap into modeled audiences to reach the most relevant, highest-value customers at scale, a component of our MediaMath Audiences offering; and test, target and measure at scale, something our proprietary Lift Measurement and third-party attribution integrations enable. Our tech is adaptable enough to let you adjust all of these levers when your business needs and goals change.  

4. Benefit from interoperability  

Trying to stitch together disparate tools to make a tech stack is not “integration.” To be truly interoperable, the technology you use must be truly agnostic. It cannot prefer a channel, a specific supplier, a certain identifier or a measurement solution. The ability to build custom solutions with expert help and use APIs to develop atop your core technology foundation will go a long way towards helping your marketing stay nimble, yet technically sound.  

5. Get help when you need it 

 Great support and service are typically not characteristics of many of the big technology providers. No matter how great the product, every marketer will need help at some point to run a complicated campaign, test into a new channel or tweak their advertising strategy as they incorporate new products, services, audiences and markets. Being able to choose from a menu of services, from the most basic onboarding assistance to full hands-on keyboard management, will help you stay agile while knowing you have a support system backing you up.  

Even in a precarious time, brands and agencies don’t have to feel beholden to legacy tools or status quo processes. You can take control of your marketing with tech and talent that provide the same flexibility and stability consumers, and all of us, are craving in every aspect of life. 

Watch video to see MediaMath in action:


Learn More: MediaMath Platform

EducationTrends

Are You Wasting Time During A Critical Phase?

March 11, 2021 — by MediaMath

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In the last week, Google has made clear their perspective and approach on how to evolve the foundations of digital advertising to better protect consumer privacy and personal identity, and in order to eventually regain consumer trust.

The main message of the blog post should not have come as a surprise:  “Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.” Google’s approach and technical toolkit are (going to be) anchored in their Privacy Sandbox initiative for cohort-based targeting. This is consistent with what Google has been stating publicly over the past year.

MediaMath saw this coming…

Let’s start with stating the obvious:

Brands have been struggling with an inefficient ad ecosystem while publishers have battled to monetize effectively. Consumers lack trust in how their data is used. This is why we implemented an Identity architecture that’s unique and differentiated in the market.

The technical underpinnings are changing. Measurement will change. KPI benchmarks will change. This is not new. Remember Firefox? Safari? The market will see – at least for some time – a fragmentation of identifiers and multiple co-existing approaches: Consent-based deterministic targeting approaches, math-based probabilistic approaches.

Our commitment to our clients:

MediaMath has the architecture and partners in place to support our clients in whatever direction the industry moves. Our brand partners can choose identity and data partners that are the best fit for their marketing and data services stack. We provide our clients with the flexibility and optionality to use the ID solution (and targeting approach) that is best for them and allow them to transact natively on our platform. We already support aggregate approaches and will also support cohort-based approaches (incl. Flocs as soon as specifications become available).

We’re also leaning in on Google as part of their Privacy Sandbox.

Our recommendation is simple:

The future of identity is now. Waiting means wasting valuable time to learn. Most importantly, we urge our clients to reinforce their 1P and open web connections to publishers and start to build metrics and benchmarks for new ways of reaching their consumers. Running experiments at scale is what digital advertising technology allows us to do. Let’s take advantage of that and learn what works and what doesn’t, gather insights into how KPIs and benchmarks are changing.

Our teams put together an Identity Playbook to guide marketers and agencies through this process. Some of our clients have already tested the approach. They invested scaled media budgets and worked with their preferred providers to establish initial benchmarks and to gather valuable insights. That will give them an edge in tomorrow’s market.  It puts them into a position to curate the market they need to thrive in the future of digital marketing.

EducationTrends

Stop Financing Misinformation and Disinformation Fueling Chaos

January 14, 2021 — by MediaMath

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By Daniel Sepulveda, Senior Vice President for Policy & Advocacy

A mob laid siege to the United States Capitol last week. They had a plan and a mission – threaten Congress into overturning a free and fair election. It was tragic and frightening. We hope legislators create a commission to investigate the event and its causes as they did with the 9/11 attack on the United States. The threat to American national security and democracy is no less insidious or dangerous because it is internal rather than external.

For our international colleagues and clients, we recognize that the purveyors of chaos are everywhere, disseminating misinformation and disinformation to fuel hate and violence. We further recognize that advertising supported media is global and that we must come together as an ecosystem to starve platforms and publishers that host misinformation of marketer spend for the safety and security of democracies and their people everywhere.

Failing to address and break the financing of misinformation and disinformation proliferated on the internet and across digital media threatens our ability to govern ourselves, global stability, and the future of the internet as a force for the democratization of legitimate commerce and civil discourse. We can and must all play a part in the solution.

MediaMath can help your brand spending to avoid being part of the problem. We have been thinking about this for two years and working on solutions, as well as advocating for greater attention to the challenge. After multiple civil rights organizations initiated the Stop Hate for Profit movement and successfully encouraged multiple global advertisers to pause advertising spend on Facebook, we worked to ensure that our pipes presented an alternative for advertisers to choose to ensure that their dollars were not financing hate. Given recent events, we want to bring this work to your attention.

MediaMath Platform Wide Protection with the Global Disinformation Index (GDI)

It’s well documented that disinformation campaigns have run rampant on Facebook and other social media platforms. But the open web is also vulnerable to content that destabilizes democracies and harms the social good. As a result, major brands unknowingly monetize disinformation content and publishers through the programmatic ecosystem at a staggering scale — an estimated $250 million dollars annually according to a 2019 GDI study.

In response to the challenge, MediaMath has partnered with Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a non-profit organization that leverages AI and intelligence gathering to identify disinformation on the open web. With a tech-driven approach that removes human subjectivity from analysis and more than 100,000 domains in its system, GDI provides the SOURCE ecosystem with a scalable solution that automatically identifies inventory that appears alongside controversial and offensive content, such as anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and fake news surrounding COVID-19. More recently and at the root of the movement to engage in insurrection, misinformation and disinformation related to election fraud, white supremacy, and militia recruitment and mobilization have also risen to the top of our communal concerns.

Through this partnership, MediaMath becomes the first DSP to integrate with GDI to protect brands and agencies from disinformation sources and content across the open web.

Activating Newsguard on the MediaMath Platform

In addition to the baseline protections that GDI provides for clients across our platform, we also enable clients to activate NewsGuard to help them serve ads on credible news sources vetted by trained journalists while avoiding misinformation and disinformation. NewsGuard’s team of journalists’ rate news and information websites based on nine credibility and transparency criteria, ranging from whether or not the site repeatedly publishes false content to whether or not it discloses its ownership and financing. By applying the criteria equally to all sites, NewsGuard has been recognized for being apolitical by commentators from Slate to Fox News.

Finally, it is important to note that advertising within the news maintains or can even increase brand trust according to 84% of consumers in an IAB study. Access to NewsGuard is available directly in MediaMath through our Peer39 integration and gives advertisers the ability to maintain spend in news during critical moments with brand safety in mind and while ensuring they are financing only credible sources.

Next Steps

Almost all of the platforms and publishers that distributed misinformation and the tools that fed and organized this debacle is advertising supported.

All of us involved in the monetization of media, social or otherwise, have to investigate our role in that process and what we can do to starve hate of the content that fuels it. Beyond that, we need to invest in the needs of communities across America and ensure that they are heard, supported, and made capable of pursuing the American Dream. Some part of that includes ensuring that we finance healthy local and national news media subject to journalistic standards and transparency. We must also finance the voices of disenfranchised communities to enable them to tell their stories in order to inform our leaders about conditions on the ground far from centers of power. We can, as an ecosystem, do all of these things and we must.

Every day every marketer, every agency, every trader across the globe makes decisions about how their media dollars are being invested. Those investments have both immediate and direct effects as well as larger, external effects on the voices that are amplified, the stories that are told, and the businesses that succeed.

While it starts with your choice of media platform and channel mix, your active choices inside our platform makes a difference. Please take advantage of the tools we’ve introduced above. Become familiar with our Purpose Driven Advertising SOURCE partnerships in news and multicultural publishing – supporting the thousands of jobs and quality journalism that today’s digital advertising environment underweights – and in publications owned and amplifying the voices of women, people of color, the LBGTQ+ community.

There are no painful trade-offs: doing what is right in the world comes typically at no cost to business KPIs, and in many cases delivers improvements by reaching engaged audiences on underfunded media. It also serves your brand goals across corporate social responsibility and diversity and inclusion efforts. Ask your account team for relevant case studies to support any internal business case necessary to put a spotlight on these issues and drive change inside your organization.

If – when – our clients take action we can shift billions of media investment away from the bad and toward the good. It’s time.

Thank you.

TechnologyTrends

MediaMath in Conversation with Smart Adserver on Driving Advertiser Outcomes and Achieving Better Monetization for Publishers

December 7, 2020 — by MediaMath

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In October 2020, we released the new SOURCE Ecosystem Scorecard to continue our quest to offer unmatched access to data and transparency in the digital supply chain. The Scorecard is a configurable setting that provides brands and agencies confidence in where their advertising dollars go regardless of the channel.

Demands for greater transparency are everywhere. In May 2020, the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) released the findings of its two-year-long research into the workings and value of the current programmatic supply chain. There are several callouts and recommendations in ISBA’s report for all players in the industry to strive toward that more transparent, efficient supply chain—and they are things we are already doing with our partners.

As part of the Winter Ad Tech Virtual Event, Vignesh Narayanan, Senior Director, Media Partnerships, MediaMath recently spoke virtually with our partner David Pironon, Chief Programmatic Officer, Smart Adserver about how the industry has been working to solve some of these challenges since ISBA released its report and how through our new Scorecard they are helping drive advertiser outcomes and achieving better monetization for publishers. Watch a recording of the panel here.

Watch a recording of the panel here:

Smart is well aligned with MediaMath on the vision of a high-quality, transparent and healthier digital advertising industry. Smart has been an early adopter of new market standards and best practices in ensuring both publisher and ad quality as well as taking industry-leading roles in early proofs of concept such as Trust.ID.

Among these, Smart was an early leader in the adoption of ads.txt, app ads.txt and, more recently, sellers.json and SCO, all of which are meant to benefit both sides of the business:

  • For brands, quality audience in premium publisher environments on every channel, format and device with the assurance of brand safety and efficient investments
  • For premium publishers, not only a better valuation of their quality inventory, which will ultimately lead to an increase in revenues, but also a better understanding of the value added by each tech partner and the opportunity to optimize their monetisation path.

The alignment of core values and operational excellence provides a strong foundation for the integration between MediaMath and Smart. Together, we take a shared interest business approach, bringing advertisers and publishers the best-in-class, highest-quality advertising ecosystem.