Two weeks ago, Viktor Zawadzki, General Manager EMEA and APAC, MediaMath, participated in IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day. Viktor joined leaders from IAS, CNN International, Adform, Magnite and Index Exchange in the panel “Programmatic Advertising Beyond Third-Party Cookies” to discuss the status of different solutions and industry initiatives to ensure the continuation of privacy-first relevant ad experiences in a world without third-party cookies. Watch the session recording below and download our whitepaper “Preparing for a Post-Third-Party Cookie World: Identity & the Future of Online Advertising” here.

Our long-time, forward-thinking partner and client IBM was one of the first to run a campaign on SOURCE by MediaMath, launched one year ago this month. As IBM’s Head of Marketing Innovation and Programmatic Media Rich Brandolino recently told Beet.TV: “We decided to work together to figure out how we could reinvent the supply chain to be in all of our interests. Obviously IBM as an advertiser is looking at this, but all of our peers in the industry were looking at the same problem and we think this is a great opportunity for all of us to clean out a lot of the things that have accumulated in the supply chain for programmatic media over the course of the last 10 years, some of it intentionally…some of it unintended.” Hear more of what Rich had to say about our partnership here and see the results of IBM’s SOURCE campaign in the case study below.

It’s been almost a month since leading civil rights groups initiated a movement called #StopHateforProfit calling on advertisers to leave Facebook until their demands to eliminate the monetization of hateful content, misinformation and disinformation from the platform are met. The story of how that boycott movement came to be is well told in this Politico article.

Hundreds of the world’s biggest advertisers have heeded the call. The movement is dramatically more successful than anyone could have imagined from that perspective. Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg has dug in and is refusing to change the platform’s practices, arguing that advertisers will come back to the platform—at some point.

Facebook has some of the best engineers in the world and is an incredibly powerful platform. But that is not the right lesson to learn from this situation. As a company that also deals in digital advertising, we believe there are three key lessons for society and marketers to take away from this event.

1. Advertisers have both the power and responsibility to drive the development of a healthy media ecosystem, and the Facebook of today is not healthy.

Advertisers are Facebook’s actual customers, not its users. They are ours as well, but we cannot and would not ignore their concerns. The fact that Facebook believes it can is a market problem. The fact that it does is a societal problem. And it’s one advertisers can solve by shifting their spend to better, safer, more curated media available across the open Internet.

Facebook is a juggernaut in advertising because it is cheap to advertise on, it knows its billions of users intimately and it is designed to keep them engaged on the platform by amplifying all kinds of content, some good, some deplorable. Advertisers flock to it because they see the low price at which they can reach millions of people in a highly targeted way. But that price does not capture the full cost to their brand.

Every responsible corporation that is mission-driven and focused on building long-term, mutually respected relationships with consumers is damaged every time its ads appear next to hateful, racist and/or inaccurate content. By its own admission, Facebook only catches 90% of hate speech on its platform and, given the volume of content that it publishes, that other 10% constitutes a lot of awfulness.

What the last two weeks have shown us is that advertisers from Unilever to CVS recognize that it is their responsibility to society to not fund that kind of content.  It is inconsistent with their own values, and it’s not what their customers want them to do. It will be interesting to see if mission-driven, direct-to-consumer brands and others with smaller advertising budgets follow suit for the same reason.

2. Advertisers are overspending on Facebook to the detriment of news publishers and diverse voices curating healthy content on the open Internet.

The percentage of spend that advertisers funnel into Facebook comes from media budgets that could be going into high-quality news publishers or websites independent of Facebook. As a result of that disproportionate spend, Zuckerberg has argued they can wait out the boycott without changing their practices or listening to their customers. They believe there is no competitive alternative that can do what their advertisers want. They are mistaken.

Advertisers would do well for themselves and society to ensure that they finance more pathways to consumers on more responsible media. The decline in advertising on news publishers, local and national, and the lack of investment in minority-owned or -serving publishers is in large part because advertisers are funneling their spend to Facebook. Advertisers may have brand-safety concerns over advertising on the open Internet or may worry that the scale isn’t there to be effective on curated media, but the market is addressing those concerns. There are strong brand-safety and suitability tools to ensure that advertising on the open Internet and in the news specifically is done intelligently and safely. There are also marketplace solutions coming together to enable buying on minority-serving publishers or local news at scale easily.

3. All of us engaged in the business of the Internet need to do a better job of ensuring it finances responsible media.

MediaMath as a business was born from the idea that the power of mathematics could be brought to the efficient purchasing of media. We focused on building the smartest tools and enabling the most cutting-edge tech solutions to make that process easy and effective for our clients. But we recognized a few years ago that we needed to elevate the “media” in MediaMath to a higher place of prominence because it was time for the ecosystem to evolve. We have partnered with NewsGuard to help weed out misinformation from the supply we access and are working with supply-side platforms independent of Facebook to create minority- and news-specific sources of inventory that our clients can target. Context matters, content matters, brown and Black voices and their stories matter. Let’s start financing the right things.

We want to be part of the solution, and we want to partner with publishers and advertisers that have learned these lessons as well. We’re ready if you are.

This interview originally appeared on MarTech Series. 

Hi Anudit, tell us about your experience as a Product Management leader in AdTech during a lockdown crisis?

Covid-19 has changed the rules of the game with businesses re-aligning their priorities to address the suddenly changed needs of their customers. The key to success in these times is clear communication across the organization, ensuring everyone understands and is on the same page with the new objectives. At MediaMath, our team is set up to change course in required direction swiftly.

How do you relay your ideas and managerial expectations with your team? Any tool, app or solutions that have helped you meet ad tech demands faster?

The current situation has amplified the need for clarity in communication. More so for people taking on new roles or joining new organizations. We used to get together in a meeting room around a whiteboard, or over lunch. Now it has to be done virtually.  Building new relationships through purely virtual means has its challenges. Video conferencing certainly helps since it gives a sense of body language and receptivity to an idea. Long-form writing is becoming more relevant so that plans, ideas and expectations are properly detailed.

Programmatic ad tech marketplace is bursting with energy and optimism. Which ad formats would rule the space in the coming week, and why?

Within the COVID context, the boon and the bane for programmatic advertising is its flexibility. Programmatic advertising allows marketers to adjust campaigns on demand and shift ad budgets to new and emerging channels on demand. We started to see brands and agencies moving their budgets to channels like CTV. It is the very same flexibility which enables advertisers to run a test in a programmatic channel with ease, tweak program goals and desired outcomes in real-time, with preferred financial commitments. Dynamic Creative Optimization with its ability to tailor messaging in real-time is set up well for these times and, of course, with the increase in video content consumption, video ad formats are certainly seeing an uptick.

We hear that gaming experiences are driving customers to experiment a lot with various ad formats. Any advice to publishers and advertisers looking to monetize gaming platforms to deliver ad experiences?

The greatest advantage of in-game advertising is that it is unlike traditional advertising media which are essentially passive and offer mainly one-way communication—from the advertiser to the consumer – games are inherently an interactive medium and user interaction with the ad is more detailed. From the game publisher’s perspective, this means they can create a very engaging monetization vehicle and provide more in-depth metrics into the consumer’s interaction with the ad. For the brand, this provides a great channel for direct communication with their target consumer.

We have watched with outrage and heartbreak the events surrounding the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. We stand in solidarity with the Black community against violence, hate and injustice. This has nothing to do with politics—it has to do with human rights. Everyone has a right to feel safe and protected regardless of the color of their skin.

At MediaMath, we strive to create a diverse, inclusive and safe community through our recruiting and hiring practices and celebrate our diversity through our Diversity and Inclusion Council and employee resource groups. However, we know we must do better, both as individuals and as a company. From a diversity and inclusion perspective, we are nowhere near where we need to be. We pledge to our employees, clients and partners to reflect deeply on what we need to do to change this and then work unceasingly to make it so.

This includes, first and foremost, listening to our black colleagues to understand how they feel, what they have experienced and how we can support them. Then, to effect real change, we must hold our leaders accountable for creating a diverse and inclusive workforce. We cannot delegate this work to anyone else in the organization or on our teams. It is a personal responsibility for every leader and will have an impact that shows over time.

The work to end systematic racism and injustice will require constant work, from top to bottom, across all spheres of our lives. We cannot forget the task ahead for all of us when the heavy media attention wanes. What we do in the face of the ugliness we are witnessing right now—ugliness that has reared its head in some form countless times over the course of American history—will define the future for the next generation. We all belong. Let’s work to create a world in which everyone truly feels this every day of their lives.