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In the fall, we introduced a brand new video series called “Re-Making the Brand: People, Processes and Partnerships in the Age of Programmatic.” Off the back of our Tech & Talent playbook, we wanted to explore how brands are driving organizational adoption of programmatic and managing the change that it requires from an operational perspective. We are excited to share our first interview with a brand client, daily fantasy sports provider FanDuel. We sat down with Aaron Dugan, Director, Online Marketing, and Alex Kuwada, Digital Marketing Manager, Programmatic (and MediaMath alumnus!).

Kuwada says his company is already seeing results after changing its programmatic operating model.

“I’d say the wins to date are performance gains, tapping into new supply, audience testing, being able to work with the DMP.”

According to Dugan, brands looking to drive organizational change around programmatic must “understand your business goals and objectives” and then create “a structured roadmap as to how you want to get there or how you can get there.”

“That includes things such as the tech partners that you onboard, the media partners you work with and the structures and functions around your organization.”

People Trends

Looking Back at a Game-Changing 2018…and Planning for a Big 2019

December 18, 2018 — by Joe Zawadzki

As our MediaMath family members gather around dinner tables and living rooms with their natural or chosen relatives this holiday season, they will undoubtedly be asked how it’s going at work. They may yet again have to explain what it is we do in the world of digital advertising and how, yes, we help marketers connect with consumers all over the world across all kinds of digital screens but, no, we are not one of the bad guys who keeps track of your private thoughts or who your friends are or stalks you, Grandma—that’s another company.

To help inform those holiday conversations, we thought we would jot down some quick thoughts about how things are going here at MediaMath. In short, it’s been an amazing year—full of ups and downs and pretty much everything in between. This year, we raised a significant investment of capital to help us position our technology, talent and partnerships well to ride the sometimes choppy waters of digital marketing and to continue growing and competing at the highest levels in 2019.

We’ve made significant strides building towards our product vision across identity, AI and supply over the last 12 months. Those terms are somewhat “inside baseball.” But put simply, it means we are progressing in how we help marketers and their partners recognize consumers on their digital devices, reach them efficiently and appropriately, show them the most relevant messages and enable them to drive real business growth.

Our identity work centers on creating a global, open, enterprise-class, pseudonymous solution that puts the consumer first, backed by support for the IAB’s DigiTrust initiative and partnerships with some of the world’s most trusted and innovative technologies. We are continuing to refactor the supply chain for how an ad gets from concept to screen, with several key initiatives under our Curated Markets product line to foster accountability in media procurement and drive performance across premium supply, including our Guaranteed Viewable Market launch, updates to our native product and a commitment to stop working with SSPs with shady auction practices. We have rolled out further innovations across linear and connected TV, digital out of home and audio to extend the power of programmatic to new and emerging channels. On the AI front, we are optimizing our advanced machine learning algorithm, The Brain, now connected to IBM Marketing’s Watson AI tech to bring more quantitative horsepower into the marketing field, as well as showcasing our platform’s eagerness and readiness to allow other technologies to enrich it and enable clients’ capabilities that have been built on top of it. By partnering with the other platforms in which marketers invest, we can together help our clients reach their customers more effectively in ways those audiences—namely, us as consumers of content and buyers of goods and services both as customers and as clients—appreciate. Look for updates here in the first half of 2019.

It sounds both technical and lofty, and it is, but it is also super exciting and will have real-world applications that will help make marketing that everyone loves.

On the talent front, we elevated some of our best internal rock stars into new leadership slots this year. Take Wil Schobeiri, who is now running a growing and joint tech and product team under one banner. This is a key point of investment and attention because, at our roots, we are a tech company producing tech products. There have been other promotions too, such as Jenna Griffith, now our Chief Operating Officer, Anna Grodecka-Grad, our Chief Services Officer, and Franklin Rios, our Chief Commercial Officer overseeing both our corporate development and client operations teams globally.

We also hired new talent like Jim Sink, our SVP of Global Partnerships tasked with forging stronger relationships with our agency, channel and consultancy partners; Danny Sepulveda, our VP of Government Relations who is helping to shape and communicate MediaMath’s policies and practices concerning privacy and consumer protection; and Jackie Vanover, our VP, DSP, who is driving our platform innovation to help our clients find their audiences at the right time, for the right price, in the right place, with the right message, to delight and drive their business forward. We’re aggressively looking to hire more great talent as we continue to fill and create new roles in our growing endeavor. (Just in case cousin Eileen is interested, send her this link. We hear she rocks.) And to help evangelize and build upon our tech to meet the needs of both brands and agencies, we both revamped our Professional Services team to further optimize clients’ use of our platform with more robust campaign management, education and consulting offerings and developed new and strengthened existing partnerships with major players like IBM, Oracle and Akamai across our product pillars.

What all that upgrading and evolving results in is our continued position as a top choice for clients seeking an independent, transparent, software-based multi-channel platform with a robust product vision and roadmap. Translating for non-ad tech insider Uncle Jim, that means that while many marketers at the world’s biggest brands and agencies are going through big media companies like Facebook and Google to send advertising to people, we have become the preferred choice for those marketers who want to work with a purpose-built technology company like ours that is focused on their needs and that connects marketers and people—and everyone in between—in a way that is open and enterprise-class. That’s why we got highest-in-class grades (the parents should like that) from industry watchers like Gartner and Advertiser Perceptions.

At the same time, we’re also finding ways to make marketing an actual force for good. We are part of the Pledge 1% movement, meaning we’re donating 1% of our time, 1% of our technology and 1% of our profits to support causes that we all care about. (To find out more about the ways in which we’re making this a reality, see our holiday card here). And because we know that those dinner table conversations inevitably turn to concern over how people’s information is being used, stored and distributed, we are working with our trade associations to more clearly understand as an industry how we can evolve to better present our value proposition to consumers and give them greater control over how they are observed in the market. These efforts range from helping construct the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework for the GDPR to working with the FBI to take down a global botnet.

We are riding the crest of a wave of technology that is changing the world of advertising and how people relate to the brands they love. It’s great.

So, after all that, from our family to yours, we hope everyone has a great holiday and prosperous new year. Now, back to dinner.

Trends

MediaMath’s Predictions for 2019

December 10, 2018 — by MediaMath

It’s hard to believe we are a little over 12 months away from the year 2020, the start of a new decade, a milestone year as we mark 20 years into the 21^st century. With programmatic fully into adolescence, we expect to see the run-up to 2020 as a period to “Do Good, Better” (which happens to be one of our MediaMath values) as we learn our lessons from the GDPR, Cambridge Analytica, poor measurement and continual battles with fraud. From AI to identity, a few MediaMathers share their predictions for 2019 below.

Artificial intelligence

“From ‘omnichannel’ to ‘big data’ to ‘artificial intelligence,’ the buzzwords of corporate strategists, CEOs and marketing executives are once again making their cyclical ~5-year shift. As ‘AI’ and its ingredients—machine learning, deep learning, facial recognition, natural language processing— become the words de rigueur of the next few years, we are going to continue to see Moore’s Law-like impacts of technological change.

What this means is that those companies who only talked the talk and did not walk the walk in terms of big data (and omnichannel) strategies are going to be left further behind at a quicker pace, as AI relies on big data. And exacerbating this phenomenon will be the dearth of talent in analytics, engineers, big data and AI, which will lead to further and faster divergence between flourishing and collapsing companies.” — Laura Carrier, VP, Data & Measurement Strategy

“There will be a surge in the use of deep learning techniques by ad-tech companies in all aspects of marketing: customer ad response prediction, audience lookalike modeling, dynamic creative optimization, probabilistic identity tracking, fraud detection and optimal bidding. Deep learning models have been shown to be vulnerable to imperceptible perturbations in data that dupe models into making wrong predictions or classifications. With the growing reliance on large datasets, AI systems will need to guard against such attacks on data, and the savviest advertisers will increasingly look into adversarial ML techniques to train models to be robust against such attacks.” — Prasad Chalasani, Chief Scientist

Connected TV

Whereas two to three years ago TV buyers were saying ‘talk to my digital buyers about connected TV,’ now both sides are saying we should be the ones to control this industry. There was about $10 billion dollars spent last year that’s forecasted to grow, and the industry hasn’t even reached full potential. We need to stop saying that this is the year of connected TV because we are already there. But we’re at a point where buyers are saying I want to be buying into connected TV and buying into addressable TV not as a value-add to their linear buy but as a distinct channel.” — Mike Fisher, VP/Head of Advanced TV & Video

Mobile

“Mobile is not a channel anymore, but the channel of the other channels. Mobile is becoming the centerpiece of overall advertising spend, building the bridge between online and offline through location data ( DOOH, TV, audio, desktop, mobile). We expect a big consolidation of location data providers—they’ll partner with DSPs, TV and DOOH solutions to win market share. We also expect location data improvement of quality vs. quantity as the stakes for accuracy become high with attribution and we dig into the correlation between visits and sales. From a vertical perspective, location attribution will become especially interesting for CPGs, which don’t always have access to sales data, and for retailers as an additional down-funnel KPI for them to drive users to in-store purchase.” — Floriana Nicastro, Director, Mobile Product Solution

Data privacy

“We’ll see continued/increased scrutiny of major first-party data players’ privacy, security, anti-fraud, brand safety and election-related practices, with expansion of that scrutiny to third-party companies, and improved industry standards to proactively address these concerns, along with emerging technologies such as connected TV and IoT.” — Alice Lincoln, Vice President of Data Policy & Governance

“I expect certain browsers to continue to restrict third-party tracking and advertising by default. This tips the scales further in the direction of walled gardens and further fragments advertisers’ views of their customers. This also threatens the marketing dollars that fund free and open Internet content offered by independent publishers. Up to 80% of consumer browsing could be in privacy-enabled browsers by EOY 2019.

I see the advertising industry finding technical solutions to defaulted private settings, and I see privacy advocates ensuring consumer preference is respected. Ultimately, I see industry engaging consumers with consent to continue funding the free and open Internet with advertising and commerce dollars. This is a global thing—it’ll be there next year, on the heels of the GDPR and CCPA.” — John Slocum, VP, DMP

Identity

“Consent management companies, customer data platforms and data management platforms will continue to become critical components for managing the interaction of consumer preferences, personal information and pseudo-anonymous online identities. With DoubleClick’s decision this year to stop populating the encrypted UserID field in DCM and DBM for consumers globally, marketers wanting to maximize campaign effectiveness and achieve maximum relevance for consumers must now explore alternative solutions in earnest.” — Ellie Windle, VP, Global Business Development

Data Media Trends

The Real State of Consumer-First and Omnichannel Marketing By the Numbers

December 6, 2018 — by MediaMath

In September, we released Dream vs. Reality: The Real State of Consumer-First and Omnichannel Marketing, our research in partnership with Econsultancy that assessed the gap between marketers’ desire to deliver compelling, privacy-compliant experiences and what they’re actually doing in practice. Econsultancy surveyed more than 400 global marketers about everything from adtech and martech integration to AI and shared the results in a 36-page report. For anyone who hasn’t read the report or is short on time, we’ve distilled the main highlights into a one-page infographic we’ve released today.

Download the infographic to find out:

The gap between how many marketers see the importance of putting the consumer first and how many actually are
The benefits integrated tech could bring to marketing
The least important benefit of integrated tech, according to respondents

Media Trends

It Takes a Village to Take Down Ad Fraud Schemes

November 30, 2018 — by MediaMath

The global internet and the digital economy have created immense opportunity for advertisers and marketers to leverage economies of scale to help fund and fuel the development of digital services on the web and around the world. We marry buyers of ad space to sellers, with billions of dollars transacted in the process every day.

But along with immense opportunity have come new threats. In the process of building a global platform for innovation and wealth creation, we have constructed an economic target for criminal enterprises to infiltrate, and they have taken advantage of it. This week, we saw American law enforcement, in cooperation with the private sector and law enforcement abroad, take the first significant step to signaling that the jig is up.

After two years of investigation, the Department of Justice announced its first significant takedown of two global criminal ad fraud schemes. Those schemes used servers and malware to violate the security of millions of computers and trick advertisers into buying access to non-existent consumers on fake websites. In the process, they stole $36 million dollars from legitimate businesses.

Multiple individuals were charged and taken into custody abroad. Domains and servers were seized. And those schemes have been shut down. This is more than good news. It signals the increased maturation of the global digital economy both as a tool for crime and as a focus for law enforcement in its efforts to deter abuse of access to a global, open internet.

As societies and jurisdictions around the world grapple with a borderless internet, accessible to the law-abiding and criminal alike, there are important lessons to take away from this case.

First, a communal interest in eliminating fraud allows for industry cooperation. MediaMath was just one of a group of about 30 advertising technology companies that worked with the DoJ to help them understand how the programmatic advertising system works and where and how to capture illegal activity. Ad fraud threatens advertiser trust in the digital economy, in programmatic advertising and in consumer faith in the legitimacy of the system as a whole. It is in all of our interests to cooperate to end it, because none of us alone can do it. And none of us want to be part of financing criminal enterprises.

Second, we learned that law enforcement needs private-sector expertise and information to enforce the law. The expertise of the DoJ and the FBI’s cybersecurity teams is growing exponentially. But as the operators of the private networks and systems over which fraud is executed, the industry has insight and access to information that law enforcement does not.

And third, we learned that law enforcement has to be able to cooperate across borders to stop crime on a borderless internet. The internet is global, and cooperation must be global to work. The list of cooperating law enforcement agencies and entities involved in this takedown ranged from Malaysia to the United Kingdom.

We take the global internet for granted. We shouldn’t. The only way it will continue to grow and thrive is if we can all trust in its security and governance. Our industry can and should support funding the development of skills and capacity-building related to cyber security for law enforcement at home and abroad. We welcome continued cooperation with law enforcement at home and thank them for their service.

Trends

What’s on Agencies’ Minds When it Comes to Consumer-First and Omnichannel Marketing?

November 26, 2018 — by MediaMath

Compared to marketers, agencies are both planning to spend more on technology and less satisfied with their current technology, our research in partnership with Econsultancy shows.

In September, we released the report Dream vs Reality: The State of Consumer-First and Omnichannel Marketing, based on a global survey of more than 400 digital marketing professionals. Seventeen percent of the respondents were from agencies involved with media planning and buying.

The findings show a chasm between agencies and marketers on several fronts, including point solutions, the benefits of DSPs and perceived ad efficiency.

Agencies less satisfied with tech

Most marketers and agencies are spending more on tech this year, but agencies are significantly less sanguine than their marketer peers. For instance, while 63% of advertisers believe that advertising and marketing technologies are insufficiently integrated, 96% of agencies and technology providers believe that to be the case.

It’s possible that agencies have higher standards than marketers in this regard. When asked which layers of their marketing stack are most integrated and where they are planning to integrate in the future, 40% of advertisers said marketing technology followed by data management. Agencies agreed with those two options in lower proportions, but a quarter of agency respondents answered, “None of the above.” Only 10% of agencies saw their clients’ earned media technology as integrated versus 25% for advertisers.

The GDPR affects agencies less

The GDPR, the sweeping data privacy regulations the EU put into place this year, is having “some impact” on marketing practices for 82% of advertisers and 86% of agencies, according to the report. But marketers were nearly twice as likely as agencies and adtech vendors (39% to 20%) to say GDPR had a “strong impact” on them.

Ad efficiency and objectives

The other big differences between how advertisers and agencies responded to the survey were related to ad efficiency and ad objectives.

Ad efficiency was cited as a top priority for 59% of advertisers and 76% of agencies. Meanwhile, advertisers gave similar weight to the importance of customer acquisition (56%), brand awareness (54%) and revenue growth (54%). But agencies and technology providers leaned towards the increased revenues (79%) and new customers (73%) as the overriding considerations.

The takeaway

For both agencies and advertisers, the report exposed a yawning gap between tech’s promise and its reality. Surmounting that gap means not only changing practices, but changing attitudes as well and eradicating the notion of seeing consumers as a means to an end. There is an opportunity now for agencies and marketers to unite the industry around new standards and to look at a new way to create advertising that respects the consumer and which consumers will love rather than merely tolerate. Marketers, agencies and tech providers can work together to achieve this vision.

People Trends

Blockchain Has Lots of Promise, But It’s Still in its Infancy

November 21, 2018 — by MediaMath

“Is it just buzz?” That’s the question Erich Wasserman, co-founder, head of strategic business development at MediaMath used to open an Advertising Week session on blockchain. The answer, from panelists Isaac Lidsky, founder/CEO of Underscore CLT, a blockchain company MediaMath incubated, and Chad Andrews, global solutions leader for advertising and blockchain at IBM, was an emphatic “No.”

Unlike other overhyped technologies, blockchain has some compelling real-world uses. Andrews said blockchain can revolutionize the supply chain by offering a trusted, common version of truth. For instance, a single container of flowers traveling from Madagascar to Rotterdam could have 200 pieces of paper from 30 organizations attached to it. IBM has since digitized the process.

What blew Andrews’ mind was that the World Trade Organization estimates that if the practice was used worldwide, it could raise the world’s GDP by 5%. “Did you say that’s a $3 trillion use case?” Andrews asked.

Blockchain isn’t just for shipping. The idea of providing a final, immutable record has appeal for many industries, including advertising. Lidsky said that blockchain can be used to enforce the rules between buyers and sellers of advertising “and also guarantee that they’re talking to who they think they’re talking to and that they’re buying what they think they’re buying.”

Lidsky added that blockchain isn’t another layer of technology or complexity but a wholesale change. “At this point, it represents an opportunity to change the way business is done,” he said.

Andrews cautioned though that the industry must work harder before it achieves that vision. “If you expect an infant to ride a bike, you’re going to be disappointed,” he said.

Data Trends

The Midterm Elections and Adtech: Let’s Engage

November 16, 2018 — by MediaMath

I assume that most people who work in our sector worry about their country, kids and neighbors during elections. As it relates to work, they worry much more about product development and sale, client relationships, quarterly returns and a market strategy to win the future than they do about how politics and policy affect our prospects. But repercussions for us abound and they are not well understood due to the everyday pressures of running companies and competing in a complex marketplace.

We have to step up our engagement and better articulate and evolve our role in society and markets. We have to inform and assist policymakers in tackling governing challenges relatively new to them, from privacy to competition in digital markets to immigration. Doing so successfully is critical to our ability to continue to grow and thrive responsibly with the support and guidance of citizens, consumers and their representatives.

At MediaMath, we view our advocacy efforts on law and policy as a cooperative joint problem-solving exercise with policymakers. We do not reflexively oppose new law or regulation. Though we believe the ideas embedded in laws in Europe and California need modification and work, we do not attack their efforts to construct baseline rules for data use and protection. We fully understand that people all over the world are asking both market leaders and politicians to rise to the challenge of governing our digital society, and we want to be part of the solution.

Policymakers have struggled from the internet’s inception with everything from how it is changing the way we work and learn to the degree to which it can be leveraged to harm or help us. Constructing a set of policies, law and regulation to give people a sense of job security, consumer protection and control over their lives and information in the digital age is a central governing question for any serious politician. This new Congress and the coming presidential campaigns will struggle with these questions as well.

There are a number of hot takes on what the midterm elections mean for the tech sector at large as a matter of politics and policy. Axios’ David Mc Cabe wrote that “Tuesday’s midterm results will shake up the congressional committees responsible for keeping tabs on the tech industry, setting the stage for new legislation taking direct aim at companies like Google and Facebook.” Others agree with that analysis. Politico reports that both Democrats and Republicans will pursue new privacy legislation, though they say the chances of it passing are small due to bad blood between the parties and the upcoming focus on the next presidential election.

At MediaMath—and, I suspect, at most of the small and medium-sized tech companies that work in this space—we have nothing against Google and Facebook, nor are we their protectors. But as Congress considers bringing these giants to heel, we have to inform policymakers on how any shot taken at them through privacy law or other measures could inadvertently hit the smaller companies in adtech like ours and maybe even entrench the giants politicians seek to tame. Which isn’t to say that new law is not necessary. It’s only to say that it should be carefully constructed and incorporate the views of as many stakeholders as possible. And as Democrats take the House, we have to articulate the value of the advertising-supported internet for people with limited means to access services and information without having to dig into their pockets for a subscription for every website.

We listen for signals from consumers in the marketplace. One of the sources of signal is how their elected representatives express their views of what we do. Adtech is a subset of the larger technology sector and has a unique set of interests. Our business and industry are disproportionately dependent on access to the open internet and the data that is transmitted over it through digital devices from laptops to smartphones to smart TVs.

We can work with policymakers to construct privacy law that gives consumers greater control over their information, penalizes predatory or harmful practices and ensures that consumers are involved in an informed, fair value exchange for access to their data, time and attention. Beyond that, we can work with policymakers to ensure that the internet remains a tool for the small democratization of discourse and commerce. And, lastly, we can and should work to make the digital dividends we are reaping as a sector more accessible and inclusive of more of America. These midterms were not about us, but the new leadership will affect us. Let’s engage.

Media People Trends

How Uber Started Making Ads People Love

November 13, 2018 — by MediaMath

How does a brand with a large focus on mobile marketing drive transparency and incrementality on what is normally a very fraud-prone channel?

For Uber, it took changing its programmatic operating model to shift what its internal team, agency and tech partner were focused on to drive real outcomes for the brand. During AdWeek New York, Bennett Rosenblatt, programmatic display lead at Uber, sat down with Anna Grodecka-Grad, SVP, global head of professional services at MediaMath, to talk about this transformation in the session “How Uber Disrupted the Traditional Media Buying Model.”

In Uber’s case, the brand decided to transform its operations when it began to hit a saturation point with riders. “We’ve pivoted now to running reengagement as our No. 1 tactic for riders in North America,” said Rosenblatt. “Running static banners, hitting users with 20 or 30 ads a week just is not incremental for us.”

In general, Rosenblatt said the brand was often looking for help in navigating the digital media ecosystem. MediaMath helped fill that void.

“MediaMath began to lean in and run those campaigns on our behalf and began to give us those in-house learnings, telling us what was working and what wasn’t,” said Rosenblatt. “And that was really valuable for us.”

The brand migrated to a strategy of in-game ads aimed at low-frequency riders that are likely to get a response. One unit, for instance, is aimed at San Francisco Uber riders and is a lookbook for the top five restaurants for Uber riders in the city.

“Even though we’re Uber and we have 18,000 employees, we don’t have the resources to go super-deep on every campaign. If you’re working with a partner, you should trust them.”

Data Trends

Tis the Season to Infuse Your Campaigns with the Right Holiday Data

November 12, 2018 — by Emera Trujillo

The holiday season is fast approaching, which makes it the perfect time of year to focus on your audience strategy. As your creative team crafts holiday assets, aligning audiences that complement your business goals will ensure your marketing efforts yield great results throughout the season.

Already busy with holiday traffic on site and in-app? Maximize your learnings from recent purchases to reach those customers most likely to buy additional products and services. Marketing efforts that focus on increasing second orders can yield 1.8x increase in purchase frequency, driving significant ROI. Use browsing and conversion data to build audiences composed of people who have made recent purchases, but are still shopping for related products, and reach them with upsell messaging.

Building on the theme of leveraging signals from people who have made recent purchases, another way to extend the utility of your sales data are lookalike models. Powered by predictive modeling, lookalike audiences use key signals from your best customers to find people who exhibit similar interests and behaviors. Lookalike audiences can fuel prospecting efforts and lead to more efficient conversion KPIs. For instance, tactics driven by MediaMath Audiences lookalike models can yield 52% lower CPAs compared to traditional prospecting tactics.

If there’s one audience to make sure you reach during the holidays, it’s your highest-value prospects that have yet to convert. In retail or direct-to-consumer products, that means shoppers with high-value items in their carts that haven’t converted; in travel, that will be browsers who have visited a vacation package several times in the past week but haven’t booked; and in high-end consumer electronics, that audience will make multiple visits to a product details page but not complete a purchase. Whether you exclusion-target your site and app conversions or add logic to your audience segments to avoid converters, reaching these ready-to-purchase prospects is a cornerstone of every holiday audience strategy.

No site pixels or app tracking? Not a problem. Work with the data you do have—the people you’ve reached via recent or currently flighted campaign impression exposure and clicks on creatives. Further your reach by building an audience that has been exposed to at least one of your campaign impressions but hasn’t clicked on any of your creatives. These types of audiences—based on media exposure alone—can be effective tools to reach people at your ideal frequency, without risking creative fatigue. MediaMath Adaptive Segments let you set minimum and maximum frequencies at the creative level so you can automatically flight your creatives to the right audience at the right time.

Holiday campaigns are a great opportunity to make the most of your data and build audiences that drive real business outcomes.

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