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Why Programmatic’s Word of the Year Should Be “Ownership”

May 26, 2020 — by Chris Keenan

Ownership.

This was the first word that came to mind when Paul Gubbins asked, “In one word, what can programmatic offer both buyers and sellers that a direct IO booking may struggle to match?” during Mediatel’s “Future of Media Trading” panel earlier this month.

The fact that we are even comparing programmatic to direct IO buys is frightening to me. But with the ground continuously shifting beneath our feet with GDPR in 2018, CCPA in 2019, the never-ending “death of the third-party cookie” and, most recently, the ISBA study which speaks to how only 51 percent of every dollar reaches the publisher, maybe this comparison is warranted? The last thing brand managers need to hear is that 15 percent of their COVID-slashed budgets cannot be accounted for due to an ominous “unknown delta.”

Eighty-six percent of brands in European countries have already partially in-housed their programmatic operations according to a 2019 IAB study. But are their technology partners truly enabling them to take ownership of their programmatic strategy?

I believe there are three key areas in which we’ll see brands take on more ownership throughout 2020. Let’s dig in.

Ownership of your outcomes

It is only appropriate to start with outcomes, as that is what every marketing team needs to prove out to secure additional, unbudgeted investment—or, in today’s times, to simply retain any of the existing commitment. It has never been more important than now for CMOs to connect media metrics to financial metrics like ARPU, LTV, churn rate and payback period. The hurdle rate for investment in marketing has only gotten higher.

Ownership of your data

Everyone has access to the same DSPs that you do, but only you have access to your first-party data. It’s what you do with it that will determine if your marketing team is a contributor to building a defensible moat for your company.

Partners have traditionally provided limited access to raw data, preventing advertisers from being able to analyze media efficacy and customer behavior on their own. One reason cited for the low 12 percent match rate in the ISBA study is that log-level data was not available, so the researchers had to instead rely on aggregated data. This is simply unacceptable in 2020.

By putting log-level data (inclusive of a pseudonymous user identifier!) in the hands of its rightful owners, brands can build a competitive advantage for themselves by developing proprietary decisioning and optimization logic atop MediaMath’s APIs. There are varying levels of sophistication and complexity, starting with custom attribution modeling, leveraging your own optimization algorithms or, ultimately, utilizing our Custom Bid Router capability, which allows brands to respond to bid opportunities via their own AI/ML environment.

Ownership of your supply chain

We are getting closer to a world in which advertisers are not beholden to a murky supply chain but are instead actively participating in one that is a curated, aligned and based on an optimized subset of hundreds of supply and technology vendors globally. All advertisers now care about quality no matter how they are executing digital marketing. To offer the level of transparency that brands deserve, you will see DSPs begin to operate differently:

DSPs won’t work with all partners—just the best ones who truly add value.
DSPs won’t tout their QPS metrics as a selling point—they will curate access to the highest quality and performant inventory.
DSPs won’t shy away from audit requests—they will proactively make log-level data available.

As the ISBA report points out, it takes providing absolute transparency to both brands and publishers and alignment between publishers, ad tech intermediaries and advertisers through bidirectional data-sharing. This means modernized commercial terms that hold each partner contractually accountable for providing incremental value within the ad tech supply chain. It’s also accountability to implementing the technical standards buyers require—impression-level fee transparency and alignment on the latest impression-counting mechanisms within OpenRTB—to provide them transparency into price, partners and the purposefulness of ad spend across all ways in which they access media programmatically.

The driving belief behind our SOURCE initiative is that “the sum of all parts is greater than the whole”. If a rising tide lifts all boats, no independent DSP will be able to best serve their clients by being an island. We are already working with 15+ best-in-breed partners who share the same vision for a 100 percent accountable, addressable and aligned ecosystem underpinned by modernized commercial terms and updated technical specifications. But we are only getting started.

Ultimately, it comes down to if transparency is a publicly stated priority on a technology partner’s roadmap. Have they put their stake in the ground? This is not a movement in which you can simply be a willing participant. You must be an enthusiastic evangelist for it. You must be a champion for accountability in the supply chain.

With each step we take toward a fully transparent supply chain, we will naturally see a shift away from ominous “unknown deltas” and into working media that you should demand of our industry.

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New Study Validates SOURCE by MediaMath Approach

May 7, 2020 — by MediaMath

The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) has released the findings of its two-year-long research into the workings and value of the current programmatic supply chain.

Even in the unprecedented times in which we are living, clients across industry verticals acknowledge the importance and need for quality in their supply chain. These days, every CFO is demanding performance metrics and justification for every dollar. 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 through SOURCE by MediaMath.

Industry bodies and participants should agree to standardized T&Cs for data access and sharing, to be implemented in all contracts along the supply chain.

As I shared last week in my blog post on our supply path optimization efforts, we have outlined through SOURCE modernized commercial terms that hold each partner contractually accountable for providing incremental value within the ad tech supply chain. We also hold them accountable to implementing the technical standards buyers require—impression-level fee transparency and alignment on the latest impression-counting mechanisms within OpenRTB—to provide them transparency into price, partners and the purposefulness of ad spend across all ways in which they access media through our platform.

The industry needs to mature urgently to facilitate the data sharing that is a key step towards a more transparent supply chain.

Exclusive data-sharing between MediaMath and our SOURCE SSP partners provides publishers with the necessary brand strategy goals and user-level prediction of consumer action. Brands receive cost transparency as well as the benefit of the utilization of auction results data, including the winning bid

The percentage of advertiser spend that reached publishers (‘‘working media”) averaged 51%.

With brands and publishers sharing data, we can put more of every dollar to work. There is no black box here. In our work with one of our biggest SOURCE clients, 60 percent of the ad dollar made it to the publisher.

Unattributable costs representing around one-third of supply chain costs need investigation and resolution. Concerted action is required by all industry participants – advertisers, agencies, adtech, publishers and possibly regulators – to minimize these costs, in order to drive up the proportion of advertiser spend that reaches publishers.

We are the only DSP, working with 15+ partners and hundreds of publishers, committed to building a 100 percent accountable, addressable and aligned supply chain with complete, granular publisher-level transparency into all fees and costs that inform real-time optimizations or quick supply path optimization modifications. SOURCE offers “clearinghouse control,” an optimized flow of funds and real-time cost transparency. By reducing the complexity of our ecosystem and by rethinking how important tech partners integrate with us, we are driving down the total cost of ownership end-to-end throughout the supply chain. Brands are seeing a more than 15 percent drop in costs related to executing in programmatic compared to other DSPs, and more spend is reaching publishers.

Participants, trade bodies and regulators should work together to better understand the unknown delta, with the aim of uncovering causes and agreeing upon industry-wide actions to reduce them.

We are driving industry principles and support for a more accountable and addressable supply chain. The Supply Chain Co-op is an example of our work here to unite publishers and advertisers around a plan for experimenting with and uncovering insights about the strategies and rules necessary to deliver truly addressable and accountable advertising. The work being put forth with key publisher partners is informing the agendas of industry trade associations and moving these standards forward.

Industry participants should also engage with industry initiatives such as sellers.json and OpenRTB SupplyChain object (both driven by IAB) that seek to limit unauthorized reselling.

Through our supply chain optimization work in 2019, we are already illuminating the true costs of media with SOURCE through features to support industry initiatives like ads.txt, SupplyChain object, and sellers.json. As we continue toward our commitment to build a 100 percent accountable, addressable and aligned supply chain this year, we are focused on strategically optimizing supply paths with an approach that puts the onus on providing flexibility and driving performance for brands.

When programmatic is executed through accountable and addressable pipes, it provides full media-cost transparency, eliminates non-working media and allows you to bid with confidence. We believe that all digital marketing will soon be held to this higher bar.

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There is More Than One Path to a Successful SPO Strategy: Enabling Flexibility and Performance Requires Brand-Publisher Alignment

April 29, 2020 — by MediaMath

In a conversation with Rubicon earlier this year, our CTO/CPO Wil Schobeiri described our supply path optimization efforts (SPO) as “a fundamental component of ours.” We were the first DSP in market with SPO and remain the only DSP that takes a comprehensive approach to active supply chain management.

Our SPO work in 2018 focused on cutting out unnecessary paths and fixing the foundational commercial and technical issues in the media ecosystem as we prepared for the launch of SOURCE. Our advertising clients and agency partners benefit from the modernized commercial terms outlined in SOURCE that hold each partner contractually accountable for providing incremental value within the ad tech supply chain. We also hold them accountable to implementing the technical standards buyers require in order to provide them transparency into price, partners and the purposefulness of ad spend across all ways in which they access media through our platform.

As we continue toward our commitment of building a 100 percent accountable, addressable and aligned supply chain this year, we are focused on strategically optimizing supply paths. Our approach puts the onus on providing flexibility and driving performance for brands. To achieve both, it is important that we optimize the supply chain using intelligence and data.

In words straight from our CTO/CPO Wil Schobeiri, “To successfully redesign our supply chain, we must start from a place of mutual support for both the buy and sell sides. Over the last year, we’ve been working directly with publishers and their SSP and technology partners to gradually migrate supply over to modernized infrastructure that removes the burden of non-value-added intermediaries and opaque arbitrage, which results in increased revenue efficiency for publishers. We’ve found that the publisher community has been very receptive to this approach. We’re approaching this problem as a form of game theory—if publishers and advertisers work with each other, the collective result is more sustainable in the long term than if we maximize our local outcome at the expense of the industry.”

We approach our SPO and bid de-duplication efforts with fundamental data analysis and machine learning techniques. We use the outcome of this work to strategically reduce paths that provide low incremental value to our advertisers, resulting in better ROAS for clients and lower algorithmic complexity and trading overhead while maintaining stable publisher revenue. The result is a supply chain of optimized paths in which our clients can still customize to implement their own approaches to SPO, rather than being forced into buying via a single path. This approach has benefits for publishers and SSPs, too, whose needs we consider on a per-partner basis so they can maintain revenue opportunities and help shape a more transparent, efficient supply chain.

As we evolve SPO functionality over time, we expect buyers and sellers to see improved performance across both brand KPIs and publisher revenue goals. We will continue working to strengthen overall business relationships between MediaMath’s brands and their top publishers. In SOURCE, we are committed to creating an environment in which “a rising tide raises all boats.” A vibrant internet economy requires a successful publisher community, and we’re doing our part. We take our cues from the publisher, SSP, brand and agency communities, who are important design partners in the development of an ecosystem that is aligned towards providing positive marketing results for all.

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Unlocking the Scale and Reach Potential of CTV

April 23, 2020 — by MediaMath

While CTV has been a channel on the steady climb for the last few years, advertisers have faced hurdles in adopting it. The landscape has been fragmented, with different apps and devices, pricing models, delivery specifications and measurement approaches all creating challenges.

Now, CTV’s massive growth in the month since COVID-19 started—we saw CTV grow by 20% in our own platform between February and March—keeping citizens across the world at home has brought the industry together to accelerate the effort to mitigate these challenges by creating more accountability and addressability in this medium. We’re committed to continuing the work with our trusted partners to bring accountability to the CTV supply chain by providing access to high-quality inventory that delivers radical transparency with minimal discrepancies and fraud.

Measurement

We are bringing transparency, standard metrics and proof of performance to digital TV with our announcement Wednesday of our global partnership with TVSquared. Our partnership furthers our ability to deliver greater accountability and addressability to brands and agencies through proven accuracy, scalability and fast time-to-insights. Through our work together to provide full visibility into the performance of CTV buys, thousands of advertisers will be able to track, measure and optimize the performance of streaming video ads served via CTV.

Fraud

As fraud follows money, CTV is a prime target as it continues to grow this first half of 2020. Last week, we shared a blog post by our SOURCE launch partner White Ops about the massive CTV fraud operation known as “ICEBUCKET,” which counterfeited over 300 different publishers in over 30 countries by hiding sophisticated bots within server-side-ad-insertion (SSAI) backed video ad impressions.

The impact of the ICEBUCKET threat was extremely negligible to the MediaMath platform, with less than 0.1% of impressions affected. Our clients and partners remain protected against this threat thanks to White Ops’ pre-bid IVT filtering technology and other anti-fraud measures we were already taking to help protect against future threats:

Vetting and holding our supply partners to SOURCE partnership standards that rest on direct relationships and require full supply chain accountability and transparency
Actively encouraging our CTV supply partners to adopt and post app-ads.txt files so we can readily enable app-ads.txt targeting within our UI for this channel without impacting scale
Adopting sellers.json to support further visibility into the supply chain and supply path optimization, planned for release in summer 2020

As markets react to change, so must your advertising and media strategies. We know advertisers must remain fully protected and confident in where they spend ad dollars. MediaMath is best prepared to help you take advantage of better CTV outcomes with the efficiency of programmatic buying on the industry’s most transparent and brand-safe supply chain.

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White Ops Gives Fraudsters the Cold Shoulder: Inside the Largest Connected TV Bot Attack

April 16, 2020 — by MediaMath

This post was published by White Ops Satori Researchers: Dr. Mike Moran, Mikhail Venkov, Ryan Castellucci, Aaron DeVera, and Davide Mandrini and originally appeared on White Ops’ blog here. here.

Our SOURCE launch partner White Ops announced today on their blog the takedown of a massive CTV bot fraud attack operation called ICEBUCKET. We saw low impact of this threat—less than 0.1% of impressions across the MediaMath platform were affected—due to our strict supply vetting processes and elevated partner standards, which continue to evolve through our transparent, accountable SOURCE by MediaMath offering. Read more from White Ops below.

Connected TV (CTV) provides massive opportunities for streaming services and brands to engage with consumers through compelling content and advertising. Because of this opportunity, it is incredibly important for the CTV ecosystem and brands to work together through a collectively protected advertising supply chain to ensure fraud is recognized, addressed and eliminated as quickly as possible as bad actors always follow the money. Ad fraud can happen when you buy inventory through unprotected channels. Ad fraud can be eliminated quickly through protected channels where there are direct relationships, trust, and full transparency. Working together through a collectively protected supply chain will ensure the ecosystem realizes the full benefits of creating a great CTV customer experience that is fraud-free.

A new CTV ad fraud operation—named ICEBUCKET—started in a part of programmatic advertising where the supply chain is less transparent, sellers are not reported in sellers.json files, and buyers and sellers typically don’t have a direct relationship. The bad actors behind ICEBUCKET had a good thing going until they tried to expand and scale their efforts, including the partners we protect. We blocked the attack, protected and shared data with our partners, and improved the efficacy of our platform to ensure we stay ahead of fraud and the bad actors behind it. Here are the details on how the ICEBUCKET operation was detected and stopped from impacting a collectively protected supply chain. In an effort to further protect advertisers, we lay out our recommendations to the CTV ecosystem and brands to remain fraud-free.

The White Ops Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team recently uncovered the largest and widest Connected TV (CTV) related fraud operation to date. At its peak, the ICEBUCKET bot operation impersonated more than 2 million people in over 30 countries. The operation counterfeited over 300 different publishers, stealing advertising spend by tricking advertisers into thinking there were real people on the other side of the screen, when in reality, these were bots pretending to be real people watching TV. The operation, dubbed ICEBUCKET, hid its sophisticated bots within the limited signal and transparency of server-side ad insertion (SSAI) backed video ad impressions. The White Ops Bot Mitigation Platform is able to detect this fraud scheme and protect partners from falling victim to this operation, and similar ones.

One ice, two ice, 28% ice

The ICEBUCKET operation is the largest case of SSAI spoofing that has been uncovered to date. According to our internal data, near its peak, nearly 28% of the programmatic CTV traffic White Ops has visibility into, or around 1.9 billion ad requests per day for the month of January came from this single operation.

In January 2020, 66% of programmatic CTV-related SSAI traffic and 15% of programmatic mobile-related SSAI traffic that White Ops protects was a part of this scheme. When we look at the devices the operation used, we see various CTV devices alongside the mobile traffic. The top spoofed devices in this scheme are given below. The fraudsters even spoofed GoogleTVs, which were discontinued in 2014 and replaced with the AndroidTV.

This operation masqueraded SSAI servers by generating traffic for fictional edge devices (specifically CTV and mobile devices) into the ad tech ecosystem. To do this, the operation used:

More than 1,000 different user-agents, around 500 of which only appear in this operation
More than 300 different appIDs from various publishers
At least 2 million spoofed IP addresses from 30+ countries, where over 99% of those addresses are located in the United States
About 1,700 SSAI server IPs located in 9 countries generating the traffic

In order to fully understand the magnitude of the ICEBUCKET operation, it’s important to have a sense of how SSAI works, the role it plays in programmatic advertising on CTV platforms, why SSAI spoofing is so difficult to detect, and what makes SSAI spoofing such an attractive target for fraudsters.

What is server-side ad insertion (SSAI)?

Server-side ad insertion, or SSAI, was developed by publishers to create a better end-user ad experience. Ads are “stitched” into the fabric of video content so that there aren’t delays or hiccups caused by launching an ad player. SSAI is commonly used for advertising on several “edge” device types, such as CTVs, smartphones, gaming consoles, and others. Delivering video ad content through SSAI offers advertisers many benefits, including user personalization and latency reduction.

While SSAI is an elegant solution to ad serving, it’s still in its infancy. As with all new technologies, White Ops can see fraudsters finding the holes in the system and wiggling their way through.

Fraudsters have found a way to spoof edge devices to replicate SSAI services.

SSAI spoofing, the key fraud technique that ICEBUCKET’s operators used, occurs when fraudsters send out a bunch of ad requests from data centers for “spoofed” or faked edge devices. The data center source is expected for real SSAI providers. Rather than show the ads to humans, the fraudsters call the reporting APIs indicating the ad has been “shown”. Often, the information available to advertisers in an SSAI environment is limited to the device user-agent and IP address. This information may be sent in the “X-Device-User-Agent” and “X-Device-IP” HTTP headers, as per the I AB VAST guidelines, or through other similar headers. While falsifying this data is relatively simple, the nuance of doing so convincingly makes this a form of a sophisticated bot attack.

Advertisers pay for their ads to be viewed by a human audience that are open to their products or services. Instead, these fraudsters take the advertisers’ money and pocket it; the ads that are “served” either never see the light of day or are never viewed by a human. An audience of sophisticated bots is really just an empty audience.

The ICEBUCKET operation

The ICEBUCKET operation presented its traffic as coming from a legitimate SSAI provider (based on the inclusion of standard HTTP headers) for a variety of devices and apps, using custom code. ICEBUCKET assembled requests for ads to be inserted into video content for viewers using CTV and mobile devices, but none of those devices or viewers actually exist. The user-agents used in the operation largely refer to obsolete device types that are no longer used in the general population, or devices that never existed in the first place. The IP addresses showed signs of being algorithmically generated to mimic desirable audiences.

These ad requests originated from a small set of Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs). Autonomous Systems make up the back-end routing infrastructure of the internet, in the same way that roads connect traffic between different cities. Each system is identified with a number, the ASN, similar in function to a postal code. While we can’t know for sure the threat actor’s motivation for using these ASNs in the operation, we can make a few comments on possible reasons. The ASNs have:

Weak enforcement from network operators regarding malicious activity conducted from their data center
Cheap Virtual Private Server (VPS) services available
A large number of hosts within that IP space that are vulnerable or otherwise left open for exploitation

It is likely the actor behind ICEBUCKET operated from these ASNs due to their confidence that their behavior would not be caught. Not all traffic from these ASNs are part of the ICEBUCKET operation, as there is non-ICEBUCKET traffic from these ASNs as well.

The ICEBUCKET operation is unique in that a subset of the traffic is being generated to benefit app publishers directly through direct deals. We’ve observed cases where such publishers are mixing up organic and ICEBUCKET traffic in what seems to be early signs of traffic sourcing schemes for CTV traffic. From our observation of this “mixed up” traffic, we have two hypotheses as to why this would occur:

Hiding the operation: By creating a subset of traffic that is not benefiting the operation directly, the fraudsters have created noise around identifying the spoofed apps are then unwitting beneficiaries to the generated traffic.
Fraud-as-a-service: The operation is generating traffic on behalf of the app The subset of fraudulent activity becomes harder to detect, and the operation has an extra revenue source for the scheme.

At this point, we cannot make a conclusive determination between these two possibilities. There is the possibility that both of these options could be at play, depending on the particular subset of the traffic in question.

Freezing fraudsters out

The White Ops Bot Mitigation Platform allows us to protect our partners by stopping sophisticated bots once we’ve accurately identified the signatures of the particular threat. By monitoring for those threat signatures in our pre-bid traffic, we can automatically block fraudulent traffic and ensure money does not go into the pockets of the fraudsters. The platform also allows us to highlight those portions of the ad-tech ecosystem where this operation is flourishing, so our partners can take actions into their own hands.

Spoofing of any kind is designed to make the spoofed entity resemble the victim (a consumer, an advertiser, an app developer – the target depends on the operation). Using several fraud markers, we can distinguish between the real, human traffic and the traffic from these spoofed devices.

White Ops is careful not to negatively impact apps that are victims in fraud schemes just because fraudsters are taking advantage of their appIDs. We work to cut the flow of money to the actual fraudsters, not the organizations they target.

As noted above, ICEBUCKET is an ongoing operation. The volumes shown in Figure 3 have not gone down to zero. The fraudsters are still out there, but we are able to detect them and protect against their attacks; we’re disclosing this discovery now so others can do the same. We have already rolled out defenses against similar operations, and have expanded our collective protection coverage further into the “purported SSAI” subset of our observed traffic. Our detection and prevention techniques are continually evolving to counter emergent threats, as well as to anticipate new ones.

Stopping the ice storm

Since CTV and SSAI spoofing are currently lucrative options for our adversaries due to the high CPMs on CTV consumers, we expect to see similar operations start, or that existing operations may shift from web and mobile toward CTV traffic.

There are a couple things our peers in the industry can do to try to mitigate SSAI spoofing:

Ensure you work with a collectively protected advertising supply chain where there are direct relationships, trust, and full transparency
Consistent appID/bundleID declarations to provide stronger links from app to publisher, such as the IAB app identification guidelines
Consult frequently with your ad tech partners throughout the ecosystem to ensure that this new threat model is well understood by everybody in your orbit
Develop more standards that will increase transparency for CTV inventory such as:
- Expand the app-ads.txt standard to fully support CTV traffic
- Fully adopt json to support visibility into the entire supply chain
- Device manufacturers and SSAI providers should support standards that verify the authenticity of a device (e.g. via cryptographically signing their requests). This would be a great step forward at combating device

We’ve seen actions like this have a ripple effect. When the scheme becomes less profitable, then we have done our job: by cutting into the revenue streams of bad actors, we push them out of the ecosystem. White Ops’ Advertising Integrity, with the help of the partners we work with, offers a collectively protected advertising supply chain to ensure advertisers do not fall victim to the most sophisticated bot attacks in CTV and across the internet.

Education on SSAI spoofing is just the beginning – teams need to start monitoring for this behavior. The programmatic advertising ecosystem needs industry standards in order to “ice” out these fraudsters once and for all.

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Advertising in the News: Achieving Low Brand Risk and High Brand Reward

April 14, 2020 — by MediaMath

At a time when almost everyone is rightly focused on the immediate crisis, the well-being of their loved ones and what may or may not come next, advertising might not feel like a top priority. Marketers in some sectors, like retail, travel and hospitality, are facing far more pressing challenges. And in other verticals where brands are experiencing immense demand for their products and services, resources are rightly focused on infrastructure, production and distribution. Advertising may feel like a nice-to-have when there are far more important must-haves at this time.

Yet, for many brands, advertising matters even more in times of crisis. And in particular, advertising in trusted news can be a win-win for advertisers who, more than ever, need their marketing to perform, and also want to demonstrate their financial support for the news that has become such a critical part of our daily lives. What’s new is that improved tools are making it easier for marketers to safely and intelligently achieve a positive return on investment in trusted news, and the collaboration across the industry around it is unprecedented.

How news has suddenly become more essential than ever

COVID-19 touches us all on a personal level. News has become the most important read of the day. We’re glued to the news. It’s our guide to living through this crisis, and we’re depending on journalists we trust to tell us how to stay safe. But journalists must be paid. And publishing trusted news—a vital public service—costs money to reliably produce.

Advertising is the primary financing mechanism for the trusted news every one of us is consuming in droves. But many news organizations are facing an existential crisis of their own because, just at the time when they have removed their paywalls to ensure all consumers can access important COVID-19 facts, advertisers have doubled-down on news avoidance and blunt keyword blocking. That blocking activity has dramatically reduced ad revenue that these news publishers so badly need.

Why aren’t advertisers flocking to news?

Most marketers are keenly aware that news performs, and it’s no secret that professional journalism is facing difficult economic times. So why aren’t more brands flocking to the news? Among the common answers is the perceived lack of tools necessary to address marketer concerns with brand safety. Fear has led marketers to either avoid news or over-block content.

The good news is that times have changed. Brand safety and suitability tools have substantially improved. They’re far better in contextualizing the page and discerning sentiment from the story. These tools now enable advertisers to eliminate blunt domain- or keyword-level news avoidance strategies, which gives brands the ability to unlock the high performance value of news without risk. Advertisers who do so are doing good for the news sector, which is good for everybody.

How we’re making it easier for advertisers

MediaMath and TRUSTX recognize that brands need a reliable way to gain access to news audiences at scale within suitable news content they trust. To help address this challenge, both our organizations are working together—and with other trusted partners—to lower the risk while making it easier to advertise in news. We’re putting brand suitability at the forefront. Specifically:

MediaMath is partnering with data scientists at Peer39 to give buyers more granular insight, and far greater access to news content that might previously have been perceived as unsuitable (see our April 2 blog on this topic).
TRUSTX is enabling buyers to select 100% brand-safe professional news publishers through a “Special News” Deal ID. With full URL transparency, MediaMath and Peer39 can safely deliver news audiences at scale via TRUSTX without any added brand suitability risk.

In addition, drawing on a year-long partnership between TRUSTX and the 4A’s Advertising Protection Bureau (APB), we are defining what it means to deliver brand suitability in trusted news environments. Together with TRUSTX and others, MediaMath intends to put the recommendations from the APB’s latest report into action on our platform.

What can marketers do now?

Lean into News: Now is the time for marketers to discard legacy news avoidance and keyword blocking strategies in favor of a more precise approach to brand suitability. The 4A’s report highlights that trusted news content is brand-safe. The tools we have available with Peer39 right now have the precision required to match advertisers’ nuanced brand suitability requirements with appropriate context, sentiment and surrounding content.
Help spread the word on COVID-19 safety: This is also a time when marketers can take advantage of a COVID-19 safety awareness PSA matching program that premium news publishers have committed to run. To make it easy for marketers to engage with news content and incent them to do so immediately, TRUSTX and MediaMath are providing a “Special News” Deal ID on the MediaMath platform. What makes it special is that the premium news publishers will donate 10% of impressions spent via TRUSTX, using the Special News PMP, toward The Ad Council and CDC COVID-19 PSA campaign.

These are just two steps that marketers can take now, while MediaMath, TRUSTX and our other friends and partners continue to make it safer and easier to invest in advertising alongside trusted news.

Truly purpose-driven advertising

For the better part of the last decade, our industry has raised the bar when it comes to advertising for good. Marketers have invested in sustainability, and have made it part of their missions to link their brands to purpose beyond profits.

While many marketers have long benefited from the performance potential of professional news, the increasingly unpredictable nature of news made it a risky advertising environment. Fortunately, brand safety and suitability tools have dramatically improved. And the curated, professional news publishers that MediaMath and TRUSTX are surfacing for brands even further limits risk. Which means there’s never been a better time for purpose-driven advertisers to invest in the growth of their brands. And it means there’s never been an easier time to invest in the sustainability of trusted, professional news.

Danny Sepulveda is MediaMath’s SVP for Policy and Advocacy. He’s focused on shaping, implementing and communicating MediaMath’s policies and practices around the consumer value proposition, privacy protection and public policy. Follow Danny on LinkedIn and on Twitter..

David Kohl is TRUSTX’s President and CEO. He’s a passionate advocate for improving the health and vibrancy of the media and advertising supply-chain, and brings more than 25 years of M&E industry strategy and operations consulting to the TRUSTX leadership team. Follow David on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

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Project Purpose-Driven Advertising

April 2, 2020 — by MediaMath

In response to the COVID-19 epidemic, news publications and channels are delivering uncensored information to us in real-time so that we can hold those in power accountable and force them to action. News publishers are also giving us a sense of where we stand and what to expect. It is a critical and foundational function.

But of the roughly half of brands that are still advertising via shifting budget to other channels, many are blocking the rising amount of news content they know people need but that they believe might put their brands next to a negative story. The result of rising advertising inventory supply and stalled demand for it as well as content that frightens marketers is that as people pursue quality information on quality publishers, the traffic is rising, but ads are not meeting those consumers.

It is our aim to help fix that problem. Through a broader initiative called Project Purpose-Driven Advertising that calls for marketers to reenter the market during these unprecedented times, we are partnering with Peer39 to enable marketers to curb the blunt-force decision of avoiding advertising on entire swaths of news through global keyword blocking on our buying platform. We are encouraging marketers to adopt tailored approaches to brand safety relying on data analytics and machine learning to assess the context in which keywords appear. A significant percentage of content that they would otherwise block is actually still safe to advertise on. Many of these stories are stories of human generosity or simply a straight reporting of facts and what people can do in response.

The Peer39 capabilities executed on our platform that clients can act on now should allow for dramatically greater monetization of necessary publisher properties. We are also making that capability available to all marketers on our platform and working with publisher partners on how to best package media for buyers under the program. This calls out the essence of Purpose-Driven Advertising—properly valuing and compensating quality content and financing a healthy media environment while building lasting relationships with consumers. We believe that marketers can profit in the process of redirecting and renewing their investment in marketing towards quality content during this critical time. This project intends to prove it.

The media ecosystem is allowing us to shelter in place while staying connected to others or distracting ourselves by binge-watching something entertaining. Time that consumers spend on streaming services has increased 40 percent. Our platform and our partners enable marketers to address consumers using those services at scale. Now is the time to reenter the marketplace, reengage with consumers, tell them where you stand, and that we will get through this together.

Find out more about how to activate our Peer39 solution for your brand today here.

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Infographic: The Programmatic Marketplace During COVID-19

March 31, 2020 — by MediaMath

We at MediaMath are committed to supporting you, your team and your organization in navigating the turmoil and change currently happening in the world. It’s important to note shifts in behavior patterns, including how consumers shop and consume media, were increasing before the onset of COVID-19 and have potential for permanent behavior changes to emerge. Based on evolving consumer behavior and “presence,” we are seeing a few patterns surface in the way clients are rethinking their strategies to reach their consumers/customers. See some of the insights we’ve gathered from our own platform and third-party research.

Click on the infographic to download a PDF version and head over to our microsite for more up-to-date insights.

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Q1 2020 Events Wrap-Up: Digital Advertising Works When Run Through Accountable & Addressable Pipes

March 27, 2020 — by MediaMath

As we head into what is sure to be a dynamic Q2 in which 90 percent of B2B industry events have been canceled, postponed or converted into digital experiences, we’ve been reflecting on the powerful conversations and content from Q1 events CES, ANA Masters of Data and Technology and RampUp. Even in uncertain times, the major takeaway for us remains the same: when executed through accountable and addressable pipes, digital advertising provides full media-cost transparency, eliminates non-working media and allows you to bid with confidence. Check out some video highlights below.

Wil Schobeiri, our CTO and CPO, participated in a panel on identity with SOURCE anchor partner Rubicon at CES. Wil shared that his prediction for a top 2020 trend is ongoing consolidation in the industry to cut down on the number of duplicative solutions in the space. “I think it’s ultimately healthy and will sort of help all of us and the consumer especially not have to necessarily worry about their data being spread across too many touchpoints that they don’t have control over.”

Next up, our Global Head of Ecosystem Jeremy Steinberg participated in a panel on addressability at RampUp with SOURCE partner LiveRamp, Digitas and Adweek. He spoke with Beet.TV about the continued momentum of SOURCE to make real the industry’s ideal response to “transparency” concerns. “We’re building it, we’ve built the first version of it that we have brands live and running right now, and seeing great outcomes. And now we’re going to keep iterating over time because we want the whole industry to adopt this new framework and this new approach to advertising.”

Speaking of brands who have signed up for SOURCE, one of the highlights of our attendance at ANA Masters of Data and Technology was a shoutout by IBM Senior Vice President and CMO Michelle Peluso about the great results they are seeing running spend through our more transparent, accountable pipes. Our Founder and CEO Joe Zawadzki called for “radical transparency” during his panel “Bringing Transparency to the Programmatic Supply Chain” with representatives from IBM, Merkury, Forrester and TRUSTX. “If you start doing logical things as an industry and you just focus on the long-term as opposed to the short-term, you’re willing to make some disruption to business, you can actually make a huge leap forward in how this industry works,” Joe said.

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The Rise of OTT and CTV as More Consumers Stay Home

March 25, 2020 — by MediaMath

This interview was originally published on VideoNuze.

There are a lot of questions swirling these days about how ad spending is going to be reallocated given the virus’s interruption of live sports. I’ll be publishing a series of short interviews with industry thought-leaders sharing their current experiences and what changes they’re seeing due to the virus. The first interview is with Jeremy Steinberg, Global Head of Ecosystem, MediaMath, which is an adtech company serving brands and their partners (also known as a demand-side platform).

VideoNuze: What are you seeing so far from clients in terms of shifting spending from live content (e.g. sports, etc.) that have been cancelled to AVOD?

Jeremy Steinberg: Brands and agencies are obviously rethinking their marketing strategies. Because we are seeing a significant uptick in OTT viewership as daily consumer behavior is shifting with more individuals staying at home and we have recommended to our clients that they should re-invest their media budgets into home-based channels most specifically CTV. We are seeing budgets pulled from live sports and many other channels including experiential. Quality of the content has never been more critical, as clients across all industry verticals demand the purity of the connections between brands and consumers. They are focused on reaching real people on real devices, as we see consumers purchasing more goods and services and streaming more content at home.

VideoNuze: Anything else you’d add on the shift to CTV?

JS: We are devising strategies to help marketers navigate these challenging times as their customer base moves to 100% digital and CTV is definitely a key component. Although it is not the only beneficiary of our focused strategy this channel is definitely one of the biggest beneficiaries of this shift in spend.

VideoNuze: To the extent CTV is biggest beneficiary, any more info on targeting tradeoffs being made, at least temporarily? Is new CTV spend primarily contextual-based or other attributes?

JS: In addition to reworking channel mix we are also working with our clients to expand or supplement their existing targeting strategies given the changing consumption patterns. We are focused on finding our clients desired audiences always but looking at historical interests and content to determine the most appropriate strategies. There is no one option currently being prioritized, but we are definitely taking into consideration all viewing habits and content types to help work through the right mix that will drive the largest benefit to our clients. I think one other point to highlight is our focus on premium content across all channels as a key priority and focus. This is paramount to the value that SOURCE brings to market and we are holding true to that with CTV strategies.

VideoNuze: Is the virus/spending shift accelerating more clients to gain exposure to CTV and will this have an impact in 2nd half of ’20 and beyond? (In other words, slope of growth curve in CTV ad spend sharper through ’21 or beyond?)

JS: Going forward we believe CTV will continue to be a large priority for us and our clients and can envision the strategies deployed and learnings from these trying times being built into future strategies which should continue to drive growth in this channel.

VideoNuze: What else is MediaMath up to?

JS: We just announced our partnership with Rakuten and its Video On Demand (VOD) platform in Europe, which delivers premium content from all major film studios and distributors to about 90 million households across 42 countries on multiple devices. This partnership, made available through SSP SpotX, will enable MediaMath clients in Europe to extend customer reach from traditional digital marketing to TV and Expand OTT/CTV budgets to capture those audiences.

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