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Data Technology Trends

How Coca-Cola Found Its Best Customers in Mexico Using the Triumvirate Model and an Integrated DSP + DMP Approach

December 15, 2016 — by MediaMath

Coca-Cola, one of the biggest CPG brands in the world, worked towards creating audience segments so the brand could better understand its customers.

With 13 sub-brands active in the market—each with its own goals, segmentation needs and investment capabilities— Coca-Cola wanted to better understand its brand affinity and drive sales in the region. Coca-Cola ultimately wanted to deliver more relevant content and adapt marketing based on what their customers liked, the content they consumed and online and offline locations. At the time, they were not taking advantage of programmatic and instead were doing direct buys.

In March 2015, MediaCom developed the concept of a “Precision with Scale” campaign, in which they partnered with MediaMath to activate the technology company’s integrated demand-side and data-management platforms. In the campaign, MediaCom recommended Coca-Cola shift more budget to programmatic and actively work towards creating audience segments so the brand could better understand its customers. Using a two-phased approach, Coca-Cola was able to achieve buying efficiency of more than 7 million Mexican pesos vs. non-programmatic buying in addition to other impactful results.

To learn more about how this brand, agency and tech provider partnership delivered the right solution for Coca-Cola, watch our video interview and download our full case study here.

Culture People Technology Trends Uncategorized

MediaMath’s Next Tech Investment

December 14, 2016 — by MediaMath — 4

If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from my experiences in the tech industry, it’s that fostering better technology for our clients and building a great environment for our people go hand-in-hand. Since my startup, tap.me, was acquired by MediaMath in 2012, I’ve dedicated myself to evolving the state of our technology while advocating for a “people first” culture by continually testing our level of comfort in the pursuit of continuous improvement.

Now, as MediaMath’s newly appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO), I want to take it further by driving our technical vision, ensuring scalable growth of our systems, and pushing the productization of our API & Technology platform while evangelizing our technology both inside the company and externally to the market.

My focus has been on building teams with a culture driven to experiment, move quickly and communicate clearly while building the best technology products possible to our customers. But I won’t be doing this alone. I’m thrilled to have a partner in MediaMath’s new SVP of Engineering, Steve Steir, who values the idea of investing in people first, in order to build great technology. Steve comes from VCE with a long career leading engineering teams, and like me, he’s passionate about recruiting the brightest minds he can find and unleashing them on the technical problems at hand. His proudest accomplishments are the cultures that he has established that made work fun and invigorating.

Together, we are going to redouble our efforts to put people at the front of the software development lifecycle.

Our philosophy is simple: people are most productive when they are happy. We believe it’s the job of our managers and executives to make and keep our people happy by fostering an environment where the work is rewarding, impactful, and friction-free. To make sure that our global engineering team is aligned on the goal of continuously improving people and products, I’ve created a manifesto to achieve exactly that:

Be honest – Ask questions, call BS, embrace feedback and recognize success.

Experimentation requires embracing failure – Success requires experimentation, and experimentation requires failure.

Be Relentless about efficiency – Automate everything. Eliminate busywork and overhead. There is a delta between work and production, reduce this delta!

Failure is a constant so build resiliently – Optimizing against MTTR (mean time to recovery) is more important than optimizing against MTBF (mean time between failure). Automation and impact isolation makes this possible.

Now to the tech.

Over the last few years, we’ve refocused our approach to development by aligning ourselves into service oriented teams, each developing their own microservices, while investing in internal platform substrate to reduce friction and sprawl. We expect this approach to ultimately lead to a more flexible and interoperable API product, benefiting API and UI clients alike.

As CTO, I’ll be driving our technology forward with three main themes in mind:

Open Platforms – Modular. Composable. Self serve. MediaMath believes in the value of the connective ecosystem, realized through transparency and interoperability. Everyone benefits when our product is built API-first.

Scaled and Dependable Technology – as a global company, we need to have the resiliency and stability to support enormous levels of throughput and budget. Our customers rely on us to power their businesses, and as engineers and technologists, we must keep them at the front of our mind at all times. Operational Excellence is paramount, and we spearhead this via “DevOps” applied and a great SRE practice.

Usability – we meet our most sophisticated clients at the level that they work at. We also need to meet our clients that are new to programmatic where they are, with easy to use, packaged solutions that solve client solutions out of the box.

With that said, a transformation of this scale for an engineering team of more than 230 people is a huge task for me and Steve but we share a relentless focus on assembling the best engineering talent in a culture that promotes creativity, efficiency and empowered decision-making.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

3 Marketing Predictions for 2017 from Joe Zawadzki

December 12, 2016 — by MediaMath

This piece originally appeared on MediaPost’s RTBlog as written by reporter Tobi Elkin.

Real-time marketing: You can already integrate real-time media and one-to-one dynamic creative at scale from a technological standpoint. What we’re missing is a broad sense of best practices, and standard configurations of people and processes that allow marketing departments and agencies to move forward with confidence. What’s the right next message for a specific audience segment as they move from awareness to consideration? How often should it see a high-impact video unit on a mobile device vs. one on a Samsung wall? How does one use native [advertising] to fill in the frequency curve?

Programmatic media: If we consider 2017 the 10-year anniversary of when programmatic hit the scene, we see that we’re coming to the end of a building-block phase. Now that we’re hitting a maturity phase. In 2017, we’ll need to think more about creating standards through industry associations and the globalization of business to tackle thornier problems. For instance, marketers will need to better align incentives and move away from pre-defined budgets. Companies will need to reorganize to better enable advancements like the convergence between paid and owned media, which currently sits in two separate teams in most businesses. We’ll see new business models and processes to create collaboration across multiple entities: market service, media, technology, and data.

Attribution: Next year may finally be the year of attribution. (Full disclosure: I’m like Mary Meeker and mobile on this issue—it’s going to happen, and when it does, it will go quickly. I just keep hoping and expecting it to have happened already!) Marketers are signing up for outcomes, not inputs inside of their own organizations and are increasingly asking ‘Who watches the watchers’ and ‘Who grades the homework of a dynamic and diverse supply chain?’ Programmatic, when it’s executed correctly, is attributed based on the impact on specific business goals. It enables marketers see through channels and partners to the consumer behind all of the screens.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

How to Prove Your Marketing Efforts Led to Actual Revenue

December 9, 2016 — by MediaMath — 1

As a software company for marketers, we’re constantly thinking about how to innovate our own marketing efforts. It’s important to us that we practice what we preach, and that means taking an omnichannel approach to engaging with our prospective customers. In B2B, we’ve seen email become an incredibly crowded channel for lead nurturing, so we’ve integrated additional channels such as our website, paid social and display into our nurture strategy. Our VP of Revenue Marketing, Danny Essner, was recently featured on a podcast to discuss how we’re extending lead nurturing beyond email. Take a listen to learn about how we’re using these channels in concert to reach our target customers.

Data DIGITAL MARKETING Media PROGRAMMATIC Technology Trends Uncategorized

Marketing Wiki: Machine Learning

December 8, 2016 — by MediaMath

Machine learning describes the practice of a computer adapting without having to be programmed. The more data that’s fed into the computer program, the smarter it gets. It can make better predictions and continuously evolve without the computer engineer having to make adjustments to the code based on the outputs. Machine learning influences lots of things in our world today, from internet search to voice recognition software.

Machine learning also plays a critical role in marketing!

How does ML learn to improve its performance through practice? As the program gains “practice” with the task, it gets better over time, much like how we humans learn to get better at tasks with experience. For example, an ML program can learn to recognize pictures of cats when shown a sufficiently large number of examples of pictures of “cat” and “not cat.” Or a real-time bidding (RTB) system can learn to predict users’ propensity to convert (i.e. make a purchase) when exposed to an ad, after observing a large number of historical examples of situations where users converted or not.

Why can’t humans do the job? Some things are just outside of our human capabilities, like trying to predict which types of users in what contexts will convert when exposed to ads. Marketing folks might have intuition about what conditions lead to more conversions. But the problem is these intuition-guided rules can be wrong and incomplete. The only way to come up with the right rules is to comb through millions of examples of users converting or not and extract patterns from these, which is precisely what an ML system can do. Such pattern extraction is beyond the capabilities of humans.

So does this mean ML will take our jobs? No. In fact, machine learning is increasing the number of job opportunities in the field of Data Science. Plus, humans will always be needed to understand the goals and motivations of their clients and the nuances between them.

What’s an example of how an ML program works? Say you’re an ad campaign for a new shoe on the New York Times website. Every time a user visits the website, an ad-serving opportunity arises, and given the features of the ad opportunity (such as time, user demographics, location, browser type, etc.). You want to be able to predict the chance of the user clicking on the ad based on previous data about the anonymous user. A ML program can improve its performance at some task after being trained on a sufficiently large amount of data, without explicit instructions given by a human. And with 500 billion ad opportunities every day, the machines are getting really smart, really fast!

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

The Bloomberg of Advertising

December 6, 2016 — by MediaMath

The following interview was conducted by Jair Lopez for the publication Expansión while our CEO Joe Zawadzki was in Mexico for the IAB Conecta event earlier this year. The interview has been translated from Spanish.

Joe Zawadzki left the world of finance to dedicate his life to advertising and what he achieved was to create something that marketing desired: quantitative analysis, a dynamic market based on data and the use of technology.

His arrival to the marketing industry was almost accidental. The Harvard graduate began his career as an investment director in New York, a role that allowed him to develop his expertise in the world of numbers and calculations.

After a decade of representing agencies and brands at Fortune 500 companies, he visualized that advertisers lacked what other sectors, such as finance, were already adopting: technology, data, analysis and best practices for applying all three.

Zawadzki revolutionized the marketing industry: he created the first DSP platform that integrated an algorithm that allows advertisers to buy impressions in the best places, in order to achieve great conversions. In summary, he gave intelligence to the sector by making better decisions. Among his contributions we can find his TerminalOne DSP, similar to Bloomberg, that leverages advanced machine learning to enable marketers to make the best advertising decisions.

In an interview with Expansión, MediaMath’s CEO discusses how technology has changed the industry and his perspective for the next decade. For Zawadzki, technology will be a benefit for brands or agencies who adopt it, and for those who don’t, it will be a threat.

EXPANSION: How has technology changed advertising?

Joe: Software is changing everything. Ten years ago, the marketing industry began to develop an interest in technology. One of the examples is programmatic advertising, that merged two concepts, technology and marketing, and how we automate processes for having millions of impressions in phones, tablets, screens or audio platforms, like Spotify.

Today, the software allows marketers or agencies to press a button and know on which screens they must be appear to reach target consumers.

E: So, what is the future of advertising?

JZ: The future is programmatic advertising, I am sure about that. I believe that, in 10 years, most cases will be based on content and on the relation between a brand and the customer. The technology is there, consumers are demanding it and so are the brands. It will be the industry’s responsibility to shape it.

E: Why is it the future?

JZ: Because it really serves business goals. In the past, what programmatic and technology can do now wasn’t available. You have metrics about how many visitors, clicks, if someone engaged with the advertisement in real-time. The first step is to set goals and, second, to analyze what is relevant and the key metrics necessary to know if the campaign is working or if we should change it in real-time.

E: Today, is it impacting brands and advertisers?

JZ: We have clients that launch products using programmatic advertising only. (In the future) it will be 10 times more than that. Every piece of advertising will be personalized for the user.

E: Is technology a threat for agencies and brands?

JZ: I believe that all traditional media will move into digital. Think about television; people are moving towards on-demand TV. Think of smart phones that didn’t exist 10 years ago; tablets, six years ago; and social media, such as Snapchat, two years ago. Customers are changing their behavior, and advertisers are thinking about how to deal with it. It will be a threat if you don’t respond well to those changes.

E: What other technologies will be relevant in the future?

JZ: Definitely, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, but I think that we are in early stages in relation to marketing. It’s going to take some time for people to feel comfortable with artificial intelligence and automation.

E: How will these tools be used in advertising?

JZ: If you think about it, the objective of advertisers is to create a connection with the consumer. What he/she cares about and how to identify the product that he/she desires. What is he/she watching? Artificial intelligence will solve the difficulties of decision making. It will be the same as when you go to a store where you bought a blue shirt and the salesperson offers you a tie that makes a match. The user will be amazed, and he/she will buy again.

E: What do you think about the use of technology in the advertising market in Mexico?

JZ: That is something that excites me. A lot of things started in the US and were quickly adopted in other regions, like the UK. But Mexico is doing pretty well, as you are seeing this transformative opportunity. In the last few months, we have seen the beginning of the adoption of new practices and the opportunity to be innovative, not just in advertising, but also in general.

E: How relevant is the region and the Mexican market for MediaMath?

JZ: The market is making some great investments focused on what we are doing, and Mexico, definitely, leads the LATAM market, the fastest-growing region. The market is investing, and we see great adoption of the technology and programmatic advertising.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

Happy Consumers Lead To Successful Marketers: MediaMath CMO

December 5, 2016 — by MediaMath

This byline originally appeared on BandT.

Whether you’re an agency looking to constantly create compelling content which won’t force people to switch off, move away, ignore or, even worse, block your clients’ ads, or a publisher looking to maximise the value of your inventory, the role of programmatic—automation of process and decisioning through technology –doesn’t change.

It is to deliver the right content to the right people in a fast and seamless fashion.

Today, consumers are voting with a click of their computer mouse to avoid disruptive, annoying or irrelevant advertising, and advertisers and publishers need to answer their call for a better, more relevant experience. According to industry predictions, $41 billion dollars’ worth of ads will be blocked in 2016[1].

That suggests, loud and clear, that people are not overwhelmingly happy with the way that ads are delivered, or the content that they are being presented with in those ads.

It should be a sharp wake-up call to brands and their agencies that consumers want more—from both the people that are making and distributing ads, and from the media companies through which ads are delivered.

The answer is, on one hand, beguilingly simple: the data and technology needed to deliver great marketing experiences is, today, there for the taking.

But how to take best advantage of it is the real question: how to pull together the right data, analysed in the right way, executed in an integrated fashion across channels, with dynamically optimised messaging and creative as user needs and states change?

Let’s look at the component parts in more detail.

Better consumer insights come with clearer intelligence on your audiences, and that can only be done by better utilising the resources at hand. There is a host of valuable information at our fingertips, spread across all the data touchpoints in a consumer’s journey, from web browsing history, social media, customer databases, to even hyper-local targeting.

The power now lies with marketers to harness that information, and utilise it in a way that delivers a more personal experience to potential customers.

A robust data management platform integrated with an omnichannel media buying platform can help you better onboard, segment, analyse and activate data—whether it be yours (first-party), a partner’s (second-party) or a third-party’s data asset— across channels and devices. The ability to activate data right in media enables you to link audience profile data with media behaviour for smarter, better informed planning and buying.

Now that we have the power to learn more about our target audiences and find them across channels, we need to focus on creating ad experiences that are adaptive to changing consumer needs and states across the purchase lifecycle.

An omnichannel media platform enables holistic frequency management that ensures users aren’t bombarded daily with a high cadence of ads, whether it is the same ad over and over or a host of disconnected messages all from the same advertiser.

It also enables better ad sequencing to help marketers tell a story across channels that evolves as the user does; for example, by creating an emotional connection through a video ad that is followed with a related call to action in a display ad.

Consumers are already voting with a click of their computer mouse to avoid disruptive advertising, and advertisers and publishers need to answer their call for better, more relevant experiences. As marketers, it is essential that we take on the responsibility of delivering a better consumer experience.

If we do, we will be rewarded in the form of happier, more engaged, more loyal customers and, in turn, positive long-term business results. If we don’t, we risk losing consumer loyalty and trust and ceding ground to our savvier competitors.

The capabilities now available through programmatic marketing provide the foundation for making the entire advertising ecosystem a more enjoyable place to be. It’s up to you what you do with them.

DIGITAL MARKETING Media PROGRAMMATIC Technology Trends Uncategorized

Monthly Roundup: Top 5 Most Popular Blog Posts for November

November 30, 2016 — by MediaMath

From utilizing full-funnel programmatic to looking at how data is increasingly playing a role in the world of marketing, check out our top 5 performing blogs for the month of November.

• #1 Full-Funnel Programmatic: An Untapped Opportunity for Marketers

• #2 Infographic: Programmatic Expansion

• #3 The Future of Data in Programmatic

• #4 5 Questions About Programmatic Creative

• #5 Why Millennials Are More Likely to Block Ads — and What You Can Do About It

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

The Reign of Programmatic

November 25, 2016 — by MediaMath

“It no longer makes economic sense to send a message to the many in hopes of persuading the few.”—Lawrence Light, former CMO, McDonald’s

Marketers are excited by the opportunities to interact with consumers across channels and devices. Increasingly, they are realizing the power of programmatic—the automation of process and decisions, driven by data and powered through machines, to deliver business outcomes. But in a landscape like Brazil, with economic uncertainties and lack of market maturity, how do marketers start to harness the full power of technology-enabled media buying?

In August, our CMO Joanna O’Connell presented on “The Reign of Programmatic” at the IAB Brazil Adtech and Data Summit. The crux of her speech was that Brazil can open itself up to the same transformation that allowed programmatic to become mainstream in the US. Namely, it was the areas of media, data, intelligence, talent and platforms that opened the door to the buy-side shifting from publisher-driven to marketer-driven, from guesses to true audience targeting and from siloed to unified media execution. To learn more about how O’Connell recommends Brazil take advantage of the programmatic opportunity, watch the full video of her presentation here.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

Optimizing Ad-tech And Mar-tech Channels: Near-Term Trends

November 23, 2016 — by MediaMath

This byline originally appeared on MediaPost.

The convergence of ad-tech and mar-tech has, in theory, been happening for years. We can now technologically hook together systems powering paid (ad-tech) and owned (mar-tech) channels to deliver more relevant, seamless marketing experiences across these channels.

But just because these integration points now exist doesn’t mean that marketers are taking full advantage of them. To break down the barriers between mar-tech and ad-tech inside their own organizations, marketers need to break through the challenges and misconceptions that are keeping them from taking the steps toward adoption.

Here are a few trends I expect to see as we head into 2017 that will get marketers closer to the future state of true paid and owned convergence.

Consumer demand for more personalized experiences will separate leaders from laggards

The flattening of commerce and long tail—an e-commerce concept where the internet has enabled super-specific and special interest items to be available for sale at scale by pretty much anyone (think Etsy)—has magnified the importance of customer experience. Pre-ecommerce, if you were the only store in town selling collector comic books, for example, it didn’t matter if your customers had a terrible experience because there was nowhere else for them to get their comics. Now, the consumer has a multitude of options and, with that, all the leverage in evaluating everything from on-demand services to products at the right price point.

So, ecommerce has leveled the playing field from a competitive standpoint, highlighting customer experience as a key area to differentiate and a very dangerous area in which to fail.

Mar-tech and ad-tech convergence helps in a number of ways. First, it offers an ability to see and better understand customer behaviors across a broader range of marketing touchpoints through a single, 360-degree view of them. Second, it improves the delivery of more relevant messaging, at scale, to improve business outcomes and better delight these customers—meaning you’ll stand a better chance of reaching, and converting, consumers with your specific offer and value prop.

Bottom’s up and top down will be the next evolutionary steps

Part of the reason more brands aren’t extending, for example, email campaigns (via mar-tech) across paid media (via ad-tech, such as in display or video) is because there is no single role or team inside most marketing organizations to do it. There are still huge organizational challenges—the paid media and owned media teams very often don’t talk to each other, for one—and it’s unclear who owns what.

Change will happen from the bottom up. The paid media team will increasingly realize that spending acquisition dollars on recent purchasers is a waste of money and will want to suppress those purchasers from media campaigns. How to do it? Engage the CRM team, who owns customer data. Gap bridged. And when people like this see little moments of success, like improved conversion rates or better efficiency of media spend, they will use those wins as a springboard to try more stuff.

Marketers pursuing a DMP strategy, for example, will find it necessary to have conversations with their peers across their organization—in CRM, legal, analytics, IT– around where data lives throughout the organization.

It will also come from the top down. Nothing moves an organization faster than executive support for and leadership through change. You’ll see more leaders at large brands pushing customer centricity as a business imperative.

Easier cross-implementation of technologies

Managing email used to be really clunky. Now it’s seamless. As technologies in the advertising ecosystem continue to mature, becoming increasingly smart, user-friendly and expansive in scope, there will be more time and energy devoted to cross-pollination across those worlds. It’s a natural next step. As a live example, we will see more built-in functionality inside of mar-tech platforms that enable email marketers, who don’t naturally live in the world of programmatic, to extend email campaigns to paid media easily through a single UI.

Identity will become a foundation for executing campaigns across mar-tech and ad-tech

If you’re going to have a relationship with a consumer, you have to know that it’s that consumer wherever that consumer is, regardless of channel, ad format or device. This means identity must become the basis from which you build your marketing plans and inform how you interact with your consumers. Identity comes into play with mar-tech and ad-tech because the more you know about a consumer, the smarter your conversations with them will be. You can start a conversation with a user in email, and continue it in display, knowing their shopping and content consumption behavior across all the devices they use. Marketers will see improvements both in their ability to accurately measure their marketing efforts that span channels and devices, and in their ability to effectively target across them. As a practical example, having a unified view of identity eliminates excess frequency against the same users seen across browsers and devices (where, in a traditional cookie-based world, they would not be seen as a single user).

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