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Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

Talking Cross-Device at Advertising Week

November 22, 2016 — by MediaMath

Now that we consume content across channels and devices, marketers have had to re-strategize how they tell their brand stories. What is the future of how we deliver content across these enviornments?

LinkedIn Hub host Maha Awad sat down with our own Philipp Tsipman, VP of our ConnectedID cross-device solution, at Advertising Week in October to learn about how technology has evolved to enable marketers to tell these more connected stories. Tsipman mentioned that 2016 has been exciting as the technology to enable omnichannel storytelling across channels and devices has eventuated after years of hype.

“You have a good story. You needed the solution to execute on it,” he said. Now, Tsipman said, it’s about looking at the data anad the consumer path shoppers are taking to purchase your products to help shape your story.

Watch the full video interview here.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

5 Key Ways LATAM Can Maximize the Potential of Programmatic

November 15, 2016 — by MediaMath

Last week, we released a report with comScore called The State of Programmatic Buying in Latin America, which analyzed the challenges and opportunities for advertisers, agencies and publishers to consider in order for programmatic to reach its full potential. The research was based on 52 individual interviews with marketing executives across brands, agencies, publishers and technology providers in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil. We’ve compiled an infographic with five key takeaways for the LATAM region to consider to meet their programmatic potential. Feel free to share with colleagues, partners and clients doing business in the LATAM region.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

5 Questions About Programmatic Creative

November 11, 2016 — by MediaMath

As a MediaMath partner in programmatic creative, we help advertisers leverage customer data and brand content to personalize ads for maximum relevance to consumers. How exactly does this work, and what are the finer benefits to advertisers? Below, we answer these and other commonly asked questions about programmatic creative so that you can further explore if this solution is a fit for your brand.

What is programmatic creative?

Programmatic creative allows brands to serve smarter, data-driven creative and to streamline the creative build process to maximize efficiencies. By integrating data, machine learning and automation in the creative process, programmatic creative enables marketers to efficiently deliver more resonant brand experiences in their digital advertising.

How does programmatic creative benefit advertisers?

These capabilities allow advertisers to efficiently generate relevant creative at scale, which consistently yields significant increases in performance.

Benefits include:

Increased relevance of each creative through data-driven personalized messaging across the entire funnel
Unified creative and media execution—serving the right creative to the right person at the right time
Leverage existing first- and third-party data assets to tailor messaging to your brand’s users and audiences
Lower operational costs of creative development

What type of clients are a good fit for programmatic creative?

Programmatic creative benefits all advertisers but is particularly well-suited to benefit advertisers running high-volume campaigns that incorporate multiple creative variations or tailored creative based on dynamic triggers such as product feeds, first- or third-party data, local weather or audience segments.

What are some examples of programmatic creative use cases?

Prospecting Idea Starters

Feature weekly top products in a carousel unit
Show different ads based on the weather or geography
Manage updates to promotional messaging through a single always-on campaign
Feature different products on different sites using contextual targeting
Fine-tune creative messaging with third-party data (e.g. audience, sports scores, etc.)

Remarketing Idea Starters

Connect consumers to past shopping behavior with last product seen
Remind user of abandoned cart items
Feature trending products by DMA
Run promotions for loyalty customers with first-party data
Leverage advertiser’s recommendation engine in media execution

Featured Campaign: Tennessee Tourism

Approach: Spongecell and agency of record developed Tennessee Department of Tourist Development’s Matchmaker Campaign, featuring over 2,000 personalized vacation video spots tailored to consumers’ online behavior, likes and interests and targeted to consumers exclusively within driving distance of Tennessee. TDTD leveraged Spongecell’s programmatic creative technology to effortlessly compile thousands of 45-second vacation videos, which were built from combining 8-second attraction videos from its vast library.

Results: In only two weeks after campaign launch, TDTD saw a 46 percent increase in web traffic and 12,000 trip itineraries were created. The campaign’s innovative approach to data-driven storytelling was awarded a Silver Lion in Creative Data Enhancement and a Bronze Lion in Data Storytelling at Cannes 2016.

Does use of programmatic creative enhance performance?

Both marketers and audiences agree—the personalized messaging made possible by programmatic creative has a powerful positive impact on campaign performance and brand perception. Spongecell clients running programmatic creative have seen an increase in in-store revenue and conversions as well as other KPIs such as engagement rate, website traffic and click-through rate.

When senior marketers worldwide were asked to list the leading benefits of programmatic creative, 56 percent responded higher response and engagement rates and 47 percent responded more timely and relevant interactions, according to eMarketer. Similarly, 46 percent of polled consumers praised personalized ads for reducing irrelevant advertising.

It’s no secret that technology is making it possible to be able to execute personalization strategies in a scalable way.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

What’s the State of Programmatic Buying in LATAM?

November 9, 2016 — by MediaMath — 1

When it comes to programmatic media buying, Latin America represents a region of contrasts.

For instance, it represents just 3 percent of total programmatic spend, making it is the smallest global programmatic region. But it’s also rapidly growing—by the end of 2016, it’s expected programmatic buying in LATAM will have grown by 198 percent, and increase four-fold by 2019.

Today, comScore and MediaMath released results from a new study, The State of Programmatic Buying in Latin America, which analyzed the challenges and opportunities for advertisers, agencies and publishers to consider in order for programmatic to reach its full potential. The research was based on 52 individual interviews with marketing executives across brands, agencies, publishers and technology providers in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil. Key findings of the study include:

There is a perception that there are very few marketing professionals in LATAM with expertise in digital topics; professionals knowledgeable about programmatic buying represent a minority.
Drivers and barriers for programmatic media buying in LATAM are thought to be determined by the interaction and coordination of programmatic sales partners with agencies and publishers. Their collaborative efforts contribute to the positioning of programmatic among advertisers.
Data gathering in LATAM is believed to have started two years ago. A limited number of brands currently use their first-party data to drive their campaigns. Second-party data is less well known, and it is considered a concept mainly used by providers. Third-party data is seen as a business in the process of development that will strengthen brands’ marketing strategies.
Programmatic buying in LATAM is expected to have a consolidation stage based on better understanding and acceptance from advertisers, who will then raise the expectation of transparency and accountability to providers.

To read the in-depth results and also see recommendations that marketers who do business in LATAM can take into consideration as they head into 2017, download the study here.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

Full-Funnel Programmatic: An Untapped Opportunity for Marketers

November 4, 2016 — by MediaMath

Roughly a year and a half ago, I was lucky enough to begin my foray into the ad tech ranks at MediaMath. Since day one, I have been learning and earning an on-the-job master’s degree on the subject “the future of advanced digital advertising.” Before MediaMath, I ran global ad revenue for a content publisher, which gave me a unique, yet one-sided, view of the ecosystem, where most (nearly all) of the dollars we touched were upper-funnel, oriented towards soft brand-building KPIs. It was a stark contrast to the tougher merit event-oriented KPIs of down-funnel metrics that programmatic is often held to. Never on the publisher side had I experienced a whiff of customers requiring multi-touch attribution, dynamic creative optimization or data onboarding—all staples in programmatic, particularly within the lower end of the funnel.

One of the things that brought me to MediaMath was the belief that all media will be transacted with data (and via platforms) within a relatively short aperture of time. I have witnessed this play out in the buying markets in earnest over the past four years, at rapidly accelerated rates. That 100 percent of digital ad spend isn’t already transacted in this manner is rather confounding, given how much more bang a marketer gets for each buck.

Why aren’t all digital dollars activated programatically? Because not enough marketers are doing full-funnel programmatic. To me, this means beginning the customer conversion journey with a programmatically-served, brand-centric message at the top of the funnel, creating a truly brand-oriented touch point, building brand affinity and cultivating customer intrigue, across all channels.

The advantages of full-funnel programmatic are huge!

Let’s start with simple reach and frequency management. Imagine a world where individual publisher buys no longer run in conflict with each other and are actually performance-managed by a platform which eliminates the waste of beating the same consumer over the head. There are additional advantages such as the ability to:

Share data across all channels, providing marketers a single identity of a user that drives one conversational thread with that individual.
Deliver and dynamically optimize relevant messaging informed both by consumers’ previous experiences and their activities in other channels, in real-time, over time and across channels.
Continuously optimize spending within and across the media mix in alignment with ongoing business performance, and more easily and accurately attribute performance credit.

All of this bubbles up to improved operational efficiency and budget optimization!

Changing Tactics

So why aren’t more marketers doing this? Here are a few reasons—and how marketers can change.

Programmatic platforms have done a fantastic job of enabling marketers to put their own first-party data to use in a media activation capacity. But as we’ve learned, while wonderful and a marketer’s best asset, first-party data doesn’t scale. To date, programmatic using first-party data has meant predominantly down-funnel metrics (CPA, ROAS and ROI) predicated on low-hanging fruit such as site remarketing, the act of re-targeting those in-market users who have already surfed your pages. What has historically been missing is the ability to scale first-party data for use in prospecting efforts.

How to change this: Marketers really need to first find out how to layer their rich first-party data with second- and third-party data sources so they can successfully both remarket and prospect, then use a powerful DMP that can manage, smartly segment and analyze this data and then activate these audiences in media through an integrated DSP.

More sophisticated marketers are already utilizing programmatic to service both those attractive in-market consumers (via remarketing) and out-of-market consumers (via prospecting tactics), branching off from purely down-funnel metrics and also optimizing toward those consumers who behave like your in-market consumers, but have yet to demonstrate interest toward your brand. Remarketing and prospecting present opposing challenges. With remarketing, you can easily justify spend against this population; the challenge is usually that you have plenty of money to spend on these users, but there simply are not enough of them. With prospecting, you don’t have the “hand raising” signal of knowing who the attractive users are, so you are effectively trying to limit the near-infinite pools of users and impressions down to the small subset that represents the best deployment of your budget against your goals. You cannot justify spend against the entire population; the challenge is usually that there are too many opportunities, but most don’t hit the ROI bar, so you have to limit your spend against them.

How to change this: You need an omnichannel programmatic platform with an intelligence engine that can tell you which opportunities to bid on, and how much, depending on your KPIs so that you run your campaigns in line with both the needs of your budget and your business goals.

Even more sophisticated still, top marketers are leveraging prospecting and remarketing tactics, plus CRM re-engagement, putting to work their customer files to both re-engage lapsed customers, as well as to find more of those types of customers. For instance, as the holidays are approaching, you can consider creating segments based on what customers purchased last year and/or what you know about them and serve personalized ads based on these attributes. The problem: many marketers use disparate point solutions to not only manage these different types of tactics, but also their different marketing channels.

How to change this: Platforms that manage all these efforts (PRO, REM and CRM) are most likely to succeed for marketers, as pitting multiple platforms against each other is ultimately going to provide unfavorable results long-term. Sophisticated marketers have figured this out, particularly in the early adopter retail and digital native verticals.

By the end of this year, the US programmatic ad market will surpass $22 billion, according to eMarketer. That already represents 67 percent of total digital display ad spending in the US and will be 100 percent very, very soon. Once marketers bring full-funnel programmatic together into one omnichannel platform, they will see the value of putting more budget toward digital and realize results from their marketing spend that will be outsized from where they are today.

DIGITAL MARKETING Media PROGRAMMATIC Technology Trends Uncategorized

Monthly Roundup: Top 5 Most Popular Blog Posts for October

November 3, 2016 — by MediaMath

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

• #4 How Mexico Can Accelerate Its Programmatic Growth

• #5 Opinion: We Need to Talk About Value

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

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

October 31, 2016 — by MediaMath — 1

This post originally appeared on IBM’s THINK Marketing blog.

Millennials, whose purchasing power by 2020 is expected to increase 133 percent, from $600 billion to $1.4 trillion, are big on ad blockers.

A study of 2,700 US internet users ages 18 to 24 conducted by Anatomy Media and just published in eMarketer revealed that most have installed an ad blocker on at least one of their devices. Forty-six percent said they block ads on their desktop and 31 percent on their mobile device—14 percent block on both devices. And with more than 200 million Americans accessing the internet via multiple devices in 2016, it’s likely ad blocking software downloads will continue to surge across both desktops and mobile.

What is it about Millennials in particular that makes them block ads in droves? Research on 1,000 Millennials we conducted in July 2015 might provide a few clues:

55 percent are more likely to click on a mobile ad over a desktop one, which might explain while 15 percent fewer block ads on mobile over desktop
81 percent are likely to click on a native ad over a banner ad, showing a clear preference for more seamless, non-disruptive advertising experiences
Eighty-three percent are bothered by remarketing ads

What can advertisers do to prevent Millennials from blocking their ads? It’s important to remember that ad blocking is a symptom of a wider issue around consumer sentiment. The overarching problem is that customers aren’t enjoying their advertising experiences. They want advertising that is more resonant, relevant and easier with which to engage.

Programmatic technology can help broker a more personal advertising experience with the right data, analyzed in the right way and executed in an integrated fashion that lets you coordinate and adapt, as consumer needs and states across the purchase lifecycle change, messaging across channels, not in silos. This is how an antidote to not just ad blocking, but overall customer disconnection with advertising, emerges. A couple of more detailed ways programmatic can help:

Data: Get a handle on all of the first-party data in your organization, then onboard it and see if you can enhance it with second- and third-party data to better personalize your messaging to key customers and prospects. A data-management platform that helps you create custom segments that allow you to rapidly adapt messaging before activating in media is key.
Cross-device: Being able to recognize users regardless of device—of which Millennials have many—helps you execute a more consistent strategy across screens.
Paid and owned media: Marrying paid and owned media offers a single, 360-degree view of customer behaviors across a broader range of marketing touchpoints and improves the delivery of more relevant messaging, at scale.
Omnichannel: Omnichannel execution through a single platform provides better storytelling across all channels, in a fluid, non-disruptive way. Marketers can take into consideration a consumer’s interaction in a given channel and adapt their strategy to other channels to create more relevant and consistent messaging.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

eMarketer Interview—Cracking the Cross-Device Dilemma: A Must for Cross-Platform Attribution

October 21, 2016 — by MediaMath

In terms of tactics that occupied the time of US digital marketers in 2015 vs. what they expected would occupy their time in 2016, cross-channel measurement and attribution grew by over 20 percent, according to an August eMarketer report. But as marketers well know, adopting measurement practices and implementing the best attribution models is often a slow and pain-staking process, and one that involves multiple business units outside of marketing to get right.

In a recent interview with eMarketer’s Lauren Fisher, our president of technology Ari Buchalter spoke about MediaMath’s focus on attribution capabilities and why cross-device is a crucial part of the puzzle. Here is an excerpt of the interview below:

eMarketer: Where do most marketers stand on transitioning to more advanced attribution solutions?

Ari Buchalter: It is safe to say that every sophisticated marketer understands the challenges inherent with the old way of doing things vis-a-vis last-touch modeling, cookie-based solutions and so forth. We are at a point where everyone agrees on the problem and is trying a series of solutions, but is hitting the limitations of those solutions and trying to figure out how to deal with that.

Over the past five years, the solution has been to build custom, multitouch attribution models that are either delivered by a third-party player that specializes in this sort of thing or to build a model yourself. But many folks are now facing challenges with the fact that the people who build these models are often not connected back to the real-time execution systems or the systems that decide how to spend the money.

eMarketer: What do marketers do then?

Buchalter: We see a lot of frustrated marketers that have models they know are better than what they had before, but the insights end up trapped in PowerPoint or Excel, and the only way they can [take] action is to make very high-level, aggregate decisions like, “I’m going to spend less on this part of my plan and more on this part of my plan.” It’s a shame, because those models are actually built off log-level, granular data.

So what we try to do is focus on the integration point that allows you to take the granular output of those models and plug it right back into the machine learning and systems that can [make] decisions on that information in real time. You can take the outputs of your multitouch attribution and have those weights move your bidding up and down, in real time, based on the characteristics of that impression. We call that “closed-loop attribution,” and that’s something we think is critical to get out of this PowerPoint and Excel paralysis.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Events Technology Trends Uncategorized

How Mexico Can Accelerate Its Programmatic Growth

October 19, 2016 — by MediaMath

Earlier this year, we secured an earned speaking opportunity at one of the biggest advertising and marketing events in Mexico, IAB Conecta, organized by IAB Mexico. The event had around 1,700 attendees, including agencies, brands, publishers and technology firms. Our very own founder and CEO Joe Zawadzki took the stage to talk about how Mexico can leapfrog programmatic adoption.

Joe shared his experiences in the industry and showed the progress the US market has made in the past 10 years, offering advice on what has worked and what hasn’t so other markets can adopt programmatic at a faster clip. Those areas include domain expertise, better training and holistic education for all levels in the business.

“The amount of work that needs to get done in order to do programmatic well, it’s not one person anymore,” Joe said. “It’s not your one programmatic person inside of the agency or the small team anymore. The real reshaping that has to happen right now is along a whole bunch of different dimensions.” These dimensions touch platform operations and data science, among other areas, Joe said.

To hear what Joe had to say about how Mexico and other markets can accelerate successful adoption of programmatic, watch his full presentation below and on YouTube here.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

MediaCrossing Trades in Disparate DSPs for Single Omnichannel Platform to Boost Performance, User Experience

October 18, 2016 — by MediaMath

In an increasingly digital world, today’s consumer regularly uses multiple devices, creating both challenges and opportunities for modern marketers looking to seamlessly and relevantly engage with people wherever they are. The thoughtful marketer is leaning into this change, embracing omnichannel approaches to media management and measurement to better understand and satisfy consumer needs.

Digital media agency MediaCrossing knew that omnichannel was the way forward to increase performance for their clients. Specializing in data-driven digital media management, the agency initially had multiple DSPs in place to manage execution across video, mobile, display and social. The result was a siloed approach that limited cross-channel control and insight, led to a lack of transparency around costs and created workflow and other operational inefficiencies. In their quest for a single unified solution, MediaCrossing looked into MediaMath’s omnichannel platform for activating data and engaging audiences across devices with greater ease.

To learn more about how MediaCrossing migrated from various point solutions to a single omnichannel platform and the powerful results they were able to achieve, download the full case study here.

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