From our CEO Joe Zawadzki taking the stage at IAB Conecta in Mexico to using machine learning for marketing success, check out our top five blogs for the month of October.
• #1 Machine Learning: The Factors to Consider for Marketing Success
• #2 Removing the Complexities Around Cross-Device Technology
• #3 eMarketer Interview — Cracking the Cross-Device Dilemma: A Must for Cross-Platform Attribution
Programmatic is growing, to say the least. Check out the infographic below to see how programmatic will continue to expand in 2017 — including how programmatic ad spend on display will outpace search and what social media platforms support programmatic the most.
What’s behind a multinational eCommerce retailer’s advertising strategy?
Fabio Esposti, who leads the programmatic display team at eBay globally, discusses what his brand is doing in programmatic and how MediaMath helps them run campaigns worldwide.
Watch the video above to learn more about how eBay’s approach to programmatic has changed over the past few years and how automation with programmatic will play a role in the future.
At the beginning of this month, New Marketing Institute (NMI) EMEA held its inaugural Marketing Engineer Program (MEP) showcase event in London. We couldn’t have asked for a better first experience – whether it was through great guest speakers, valuable conversations, or Marketing Engineers telling their stories – we were able to connect with a diverse audience who shared in our commitment to talent and education. But let me start from the top.
MEP is MediaMath’s immersive three-month training program, which aims to develop highly skilled programmatic campaign managers with a solid grasp of the ecosystem and upon graduation, they are able to step into full-time roles within the digital marketing and ad tech industries. Our third London cohort is soon to graduate and the aim for the showcase event was to connect current participants with hiring organizations, from the likes of Affiperf, Omnicom, TVTY and Index Exchange, as well as to elevate the conversations with ad tech and media industry partners around digital skills gap.
The afternoon was kicked off by our excellent guest speakers, including Josh McBain, Head of Innovation at Future Foundation and Kristin Brewe, Advertising Lecturer at University of West London. McBain presented insights from a 2016 research paper on the education and skills required for the future. Besides the interesting data, two things really stood out for me.
Firstly, the future is defined by liquid skills and learning a new skill is becoming a form for younger generations. Secondly, while global technology adoption is only set to grow with the emergence of artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and 3D printing, only 34 percent of young people in the UK are feeling ‘very confident’ about having necessary skills for a successful career.
While UK digital ad spend was at £8.6 billion in 2015, the shortage of digital skills represents a bottleneck for the industry. The problem stems from the constantly expanding range of digital technologies and new skill sets associated with them, and inability of the education sector to keep up with the speed of the industry. As a lecturer, Brewe was well positioned to speak on this lack of awareness among graduates despite the number of opportunities in the digital sector, particularly in programmatic.
So, what are my takeaways? The digital skills gap is real and the industry needs to look for practical ways to address this challenge. Here are my two cents’ worth:
At the end of the day, the industry talent pool is limited and people tend to move around between agencies and tech companies. Why not work together to raise the bar for everyone to benefit from?
Last month, MediaMath redefined the values that we hold ourselves to for our clients, partners, and employees. In this series, Mathletes reflect on each of the values that MediaMath has adopted.
MediaMath inhabits a fast moving ecosystem where our employees need the latitude to make decisions quickly and confidently – we’d rather be responsive and occasionally make corrections than miss those opportunities that drive change in our industry.
Mathletes have the freedom to make big decisions because they also take responsibility for how those decisions are implemented. What does it mean to “take responsibility” for your decisions? It’s not taking the fall or losing your job. It is following through on a solution and continuing to work to make it succeed.
“I would not have changed my decision for leaving a very stable career at L’Oreal with a great trajectory to make the leap of faith to come to a fast growing company, that’s very dynamic and has afforded me opportunities that I don’t think any other company would have been able to offer,” says Brian Murdock, Director, M&A Integration at MediaMath.
From working for one of the biggest cosmetics companies, L’Oreal, to transitioning into the adtech industry, Murdock started his professional journey on Wall Street.
Studying business management with a concentration on finance and investments at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, Murdock always wanted to work in finance. Having a knack for numbers, Murdock’s first job was working in the synthetic CDO market. But in 2008, the global financial crisis occurred.
“With the crash of 2008, I actually lost my job and it was a great time for me to really wake up and realize that I didn’t really like finance and what I was doing.”
His next move? Murdock stepped into the world of marketing for the next four years as a brand manager at L’Oreal as he was always drawn to the strategic side of owning a brand as well as having the opportunity to learn the overall component of how a business ran and operated.
“I loved it,” Murdock says. “I was responsible for building the strategy and making sure that the business was going to grow, be competitive and gain market share. And as a marketer, running a very large brand, I was exposed to not only the evolution but the power of digital media and how that plays within marketing.”
Moving over to the programmatic side, Murdock could see the potential with digital advertising and wanted to be part of the game. At the time, he wasn’t looking to change careers but an opportunity arose at MediaMath. “L’Oreal’s’ a big corporation, that’s how they function, and I wanted to take a risk from a career perspective to really branch out and try a smaller company. Try to take a risk as someone young in my career and be part of that transformation that was taking place within the digital environment.”
In 2014, Murdock joined MediaMath in the product commercialization group where he owned the social portion of the business and was responsible for developing strategies to ensure the social business grew as the company scaled. From there, he moved over to the corporate development team where he worked on the company’s latest acquisition, Spree7 — a leading German digital media consulting and programmatic implementation firm.
“In my new role I was to develop a strategy on how the newly acquired business would fit into MediaMath so I actually moved to Berlin and was there for three to four months, implementing the strategy and integrating the business into MediaMath. That was one of the highlights of my career thus far, I worked with amazing people.” Based in Berlin, Murdock was also able to go back and forth to London to go meet with the team there.
“MediaMath is a very dynamic company. And as we have grown so quickly, it’s very interesting to be in a global role at a global company because it has afforded me the ability to travel to other offices. I’ve loved being able to visit different offices around the world – seeing how different they all are but still having the same values and core components that make MediaMath such a great company to work for.”
This byline originally appeared on IBM’s THINK Marketing.
At last week’s 13th Annual Advertising Week, industry leaders came by the masses to New York City—the world’s media capital—to inspire and share insights on the future of advertising to fellow marketing and communications professionals.
I managed to catch the tail end of the four-day conference last Thursday, never having gone to one since my foray into marketing for the technology space. As a former journalist turned content marketer, I was curious to see how my job as a storyteller would differ now that I create content for a technology company. Turns out, not so much. Here’s why.
From panels discussing the future of video to digital advertising for the post-website era, one key theme prevailed— know your audience. More often than not, marketers are more concerned about the ROI and generating X amount of leads, and rightly so, but the heart of what our consumers are looking for in a piece of content tends to get overlooked. The same approach applies to storytelling in the newsroom. WHY should an audience CARE about the news? Is it relevant? Does it impact their lives in any way? It’s simple. The more you tap into people’s emotions, the more likely you are to drive engagement.
As Alex Hunt, President, The Americas at BrainJuicer and Laura Salant, Senior Director, Research and Insights at Undertone said during the session Key Metrics to Guide Your Advertising Creative: What You Need to Know Right Now, that’s how you can quantify creative. “Emotion builds brands. Emotion drives engagement. The more you feel, the more you buy.”
In the session The Future of Video, the panel discussed how ad blocking has provoked the right type of behavior. Rather than peppering consumers with all kinds of ads and seeing what sticks, create better advertising experiences for them. What was notable for me was when they touched upon the theory of getting away from traditional marketing apparatuses and offering up something which reflects the consumers’ behavior.
For example, Snapchat encourages advertisers to shoot vertical video, which has traditionally been a huge no-no when producing video content. But in a fast-moving digital world, consumer habits have changed, so how you deliver content has to change along with the shifting tide. According to Snapchat, vertical video ads are watched on the mobile app all the way through nine times more than horizontal video ads. This would never have been the case even a few years ago!
The key takeaway from the day’s summit was clear. What’s good for consumers is also good for marketers, and understanding how we as humans engage with content—whether it’s an ad, an eBook or via social—is the key to meeting the customer where they are.
How much advertising can a viewer, listener or reader tolerate before they lose interest in the content? It’s a question that’s constantly being answered as advertising has always been a trade off. Much of the content consumed today is supported in part, or in full, by advertisements. The problem? People tend to hate advertisements. Maybe hate is too strong a word to use, but most people accept advertisements as the trade off to consuming content at a specific price, or more often, for free.
Historically, radio and TV were services provided at no cost to the public and were supported in full, or in part, by advertisements. Programs were cut into pieces and advertisements were slipped in between those pieces to help monetize the content. The upside to content consumers? There was no monetary cost to consume the content. Sure, there were barriers to entry (like purchasing a radio or television) but in general, there has always been free content available for those interested, provided they can tolerate the advertisements.
This concept of ‘free’ content has grown to be more complicated as digital and online advertising has continued to mature. Websites are now able to monetize users in more advanced ways than simply showing an advertisement on a page. Data companies work with content providers (publishers) to track browsing behaviors across the web. This creates an interesting conundrum. In some way, it can help reduce the number of ads being shown, as the content is being monetized behind the scenes. However, it also allows ads to become far more targeted, as advertisers can leverage browsing habits and history to show more targeted adverts to consumers. The ‘creepy factor’ of advertising is something advertisers are constantly struggling with. However, one thing is clear – users are expecting more value from the advertisements they are being shown. By the same token, consumers have more options than ever before on where they turn to for content.
For most, the mobile device is the most personal and most used device. It’s also a device filled with a wide variety of apps used to consume content, that are incredibly easy to switch between. A content experience too filled with advertisements will push a consumer to another app, website, etc. So where is the new balance? The iOS ecosystem alone has created over 1.4 million jobs as of December 2015. These jobs are created and these apps are often supported by advertising. The same value exchange that began with radio, TV and newspapers exists today in the app ecosystem. But the smartphone is the crux of our digital lives and as such – must be treated differently.
If you ask me — we need to start providing true, real and actionable insights and value into the messaging that’s being shown to content consumers. The amount of data that is at the disposal of an advertiser is now tremendous. Let’s begin to leverage it! By bringing in datasets from outside of the standard information seen in a bid request, we as an industry can begin to layer on to provide actionable messaging. Imagine an ad that lets you know the subway is delayed before you leave for your commute, or notifies you that it’s raining and be prepared for traffic. These types of messages provide actionable insights for content consumers.
Advertising works. Entire industries have been built on the success of advertising, but advertising must continue to evolve. As users adopt ad blockers and as content publishers respond by creating pay walls – or mechanisms to block content to consumers unwilling to see ads – a new form of value must emerge.
Advertisers and content publishers alike must strike a balance that keep users engaged with the content, while maximizing advertising potential. If advertisers push users to adblockers, content publishers will be forced to find new ways to monetize their sites and the number of options are fairly limited. For this equilibrium between content consumers and the advertisers/publishers to exist, it must continue to evolve.
Advertisers and publishers must begin a new dialog around value with content consumers. Advertisers need to start providing a new level of value so that consumers are engaged, while publishers create effective content experiences. In other words, advertising must continue to evolve in order to provide new forms and types of information.
Last month, MediaMath redefined the values that we hold ourselves to for our clients, partners, and employees. In this series, Mathletes reflect on each of the values that MediaMath has adopted.
How do Mathletes innovate to scale?
Innovating to scale requires thinking about how to make solutions work across geographies and anticipating problems that have not come up yet. It’s knowing what to focus on and how to empower other people to innovate in useful and productive ways on the edge.
Last month, MediaMath redefined the values that we hold ourselves to for our clients, partners, and employees. In this series, Mathletes reflect on each of the values that MediaMath has adopted.
How do Mathletes obsess about outcomes?
Like most of our company values, these are both a promise to clients as well as an expectation for ourselves. TerminalOne optimizes advertising spend towards media that actually improves a business’ bottom line. In the exact same way, we value actions that drive actual results for our business objectives and the business objectives of our clients. As employees and as partners, we obsess about outcomes. If it doesn’t affect the outcome, it doesn’t matter.
