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Joe Zawadzki Talks New Hires and the Future in Ad Age

September 10, 2015 — by MediaMath

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In an interview last week with Alexandra Bruell in Ad Age, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki outlined the newest appointments to the MediaMath Executive Team and Board and what these leadership changes mean for the future of MediaMath. The full article is reprinted below. 

Hires this year by MediaMath, one of the few large independent ad tech companies that hasn’t gone public or sold, suggest that it’s gearing up for change, beit an initial public offering or more aggressive growth as a still-private player.

Most recently, Rich Schmaeling joined MediaMath this month as CFO, filling a post that had been vacant since Jeannie Mun left in March to join an e-book startup. He had been a consultant at Media General and before that was CFO at Lin Media, which Media General merged with, and VP-finance at Dow Jones, where he worked on its integration with  News Corp.

His arrival follows Peter Piazza’s appointment as general counsel in June, succeeding Brian Miller, who left in March. Mr. Piazza had been deputy chief legal officer at Nielsen.

Both were chosen partly because they had been involved in M&A deals and understand how large private and public companies operate, according to MediaMath.

And Richard Beattie was named to the newly created post of senior VP-commercialization for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in January; he had held an international role at Oracle.

MediaMath has also expanded its board, handing seats to Jeffrey Rayport, professor at Harvard Business School and founder of Marketspace, and Bill Wheaton, head of media content at Akamai.

The company’s demand-side software helps advertisers serve video and display ads across mobile devices and desktop computers using data and analytics software.

Mr. Schmaeling can help the company along any of several possible routes, according to MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki. “We absolutely wanted someone who could handle any of the range of options that help us thoughtfully reinvest profits in order to continue to scale the business, and do it in more geographies with more departments, and in an overall more complex business,” Mr. Zawadzki said. “We want to make use of his public market expertise so the notion of an IPO, and living as a public company, is not foreign.”

But an IPO is not imminent, much less the the only option. MediaMath may remain private, Mr. Zawadzki said. Selling to a behemoth, a third possible scenario, is the least likely move for MediaMath, which would rather be a buyer than the seller, he added.

“We did six acquisitions last year,” Mr. Zawadzki said. “We plan to continue to be acquisitive.”
Mr. Piazza will support those goals, as “someone with very strong general counsel chops in terms of building a really good commercial team and also being really good at M&A,” said Mr. Zawadzki.
MediaMath’s investments in the near-term will likely expand its cross-platform ad-buying and analytics capabilities, spanning not just desktop and mobile but TV, digital signs and radio, among other media, he said.

MediaMath, which says it employs over 700 people, increased its gross revenue excluding refunds and discounts to $470 million last year, up from $322 million in 2013, according to Mr. Zawadzki. In May, the company raised $84 million in equity and another $120 million in debt lines, which Mr. Zawadzki calls a “bit of an abnormality.”

“Last year was certainly a building year in terms of acquisitions and global expansions,” he said. “We’re largely growing organically and scaling it that way, versus constantly requiring financing.”

There’s been a cloud over ad tech since the flurry of ad tech IPOs between 2013 and 2014 left Wall Street unimpressed. Early this year, Ad Age reported that four out of seven hot ad tech companies that went public during the IPO flurry were trading below their opening prices.

Some large ad tech firms such as like MediaMath are looking to invest in broader capabilities through M&A, and large marketing technology companies like Salesforce are investing in ad tech companies to bolster their own capabilities.

Programmatic ad tech has grown beyond its start in unloading unsold digital inventory, Mr. Zawadzki said, and now helps marketers determine which audiences to buy and how much to pay for them as part of larger business objectives. “We’re in the early phases of the long-term transformation that’s happening,” he said, “about how programmatic and the use of technology and software is ultimately changing the nature of an industry.”

CareersPeopleUncategorized

From Clothing to Coding

September 8, 2015 — by MediaMath

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In 2012, I left college with a sociology degree and a resume almost exclusively focused on field hockey. Thanks to good timing and previous connections, I found what I thought would be a strong career starting point in an entry level position at Tommy Hilfiger. “Do what you love and a career will follow,” I’d always been told. What could go wrong?

It took two years for me to realize exactly what would go wrong. While my love for fashion continued, the feeling did not transcend into my work. I wasn’t the glamorous Meryl Streep from The Devil Wears Prada hand selecting runway styles. My merchandising role confined me to a cubicle where I analyzed sales, planned promotions, and placed buys. The reports needed to complete my duties didn’t evolve with the style seasons. The illustrious world of fashion quickly became worn, redundant, and frustrating. I realized I wanted a job that provided constant growth, difficult challenges, and unpredictability. It was time to look elsewhere.

After some investigation, I concluded that I loved the variety and technological-focus of marketing, but needed to find a place that was open to innovation. I started looking online for new jobs but was hit hard by the seemingly impossible catch 22 every career changer knows. How do you gain experience in a new field when entry-level positions require experience? My first thought was to go back to school. Fortunately, I only got as far as buying the GMAT books before I stumbled across the MediaMath website. As soon as I found the Marketing Engineer Program, and I knew that I’d found my answer. This program was the entire package – I would receive the necessary ad-tech training and exposure needed to get my foot in the door. And the icing on the cake was they encouraged applicants with unrelated backgrounds!

The six months I spent in the the program allowed me to build connections, learn without judgment, and create my desired career path. Our ten-person cohort rotated through over eight departments, where we developed our soft skills and technical knowledge. While the program was heavily focused on campaign management and optimization, it also provided us with the ability to explore other fields. This is how I connected with Jon Pollack, a Vice President on Product and my unexpected guide through the technical terrain.

The Marketing Engineer Program strives to place every participant in a full-time role at MediaMath or one of our partner companies, but Product was not a traditional endpoint. When initially weighing the possibility of this unique path, it seemed like a suicide jump to go from clothing designers to software engineers. I wouldn’t be able to add value to the engineers by telling them their code would look better in a certain color. I was honest (maybe to a fault) about my interest in Product but my fear of lacking the technical background possessed by so many of my peers. However, Jon was extremely encouraging. He stressed that if you start off with the right materials (communication skills, an eagerness to learn, and the ability to comprehend technical concepts), you can rework them to create what you want. He agreed to do a trial run where he’d give me lessons if I committed to doing extra work outside the program.

Straight away, he threw me headfirst into coding, reasoning that it would be beneficial down the road. Starting off, I was intimidated and it was a struggle, to say the least. I didn’t know the difference between interactive and script mode, which forced me to retype every command in my terminal whenever I forgot a colon or an indentation. Eventually, after a lot of trial and error, textbook lessons, and sessions with Jon, I gained a basic understanding of loops, conditionals, and functions. As the lessons continued, I also learned about the inner workings of the ad-tech world (a much more complicated place than what I found in fashion) and I gained a deeper appreciation for the complex problems the backend teams are consistently solving.

While I’m far from being a hardcore coder, I have worked with Jon to write Python scripts that analyze global deals and parse through bid requests thus saving me from the time-consuming redundancy a manual process would have caused. Looking back a year, I wouldn’t even have put this in the realm of possibilities. Thanks to the Marketing Engineer Program, I was able to drastically and successfully change careers. Through this program I found an incredible mentor who continues to teach and challenge me everyday. In the end, I was able to swap buying clothes with buying media and I couldn’t be happier!

DataEventsTechnologyUncategorized

ExchangeWire interview: Unleashing The Economic Power of First Party Data

September 7, 2015 — by MediaMath

As part of ExchangeWire’s ‘Road To ATS London’ TraderTalk, Dave Reed, Managing Director of MediaMath EMEA, explains how MediaMath works with advertisers to leverage third-party data to build out new business models. Reed also discusses how advertisers and agencies are looking to onboard offline data to maximise the impact of their online marketing, and considers how in some ways offline is now the new “online”.

Read the original article here and watch the video.

TechnologyUncategorized

‘The Future Agency’

September 3, 2015 — by MediaMath

At MediaMath, we believe the agency’s role as a partner in the triumvirate is a very important element for any ambitious marketing organisation. Brands should leverage on agency partners’ knowledge in trading best practices, cutting-edge tools, pooled media buying, and data co-ops to get the most out of their media investments. Additionally, progressive agencies can support brands programmatically through proprietary modeling and optimisation approaches and data-driven creative services.

Watch the video as Ian Perrin, CEO, ZenithOptimedia ANZ, shares his views on why the ‘open agency’ approach is strategically significant for business. Investing in programmatic know-how is also equally important as it ensures future business sustainability.

Ian was interviewed live at the Future of Marketing event at the MCA in Sydney, Australia on 31st March 2015.

TechnologyUncategorizedVideo

Optimizing for Video Ad Completion: A Retail Case Study

September 2, 2015 — by MediaMath

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With online video ad completion rates growing year over year across devices, it’s becoming clear to marketers that online video advertising is a channel that can’t be ignored. That’s why programmatic video advertising is so appealing to marketers. One MediaMath client, a major office supply retailer fundamentally understood the effectiveness of online video advertising, and was primarily concerned in optimizing their video campaigns for video completions.

The retailer used MediaMath’s TerminalOne platform to optimize their video advertising campaigns. Key features and capabilities of MediaMath’s TerminalOne video offering include:

• Unmatched global scale from major exchanges, private marketplaces, YouTube, Facebook, and local international inventory (which refers to local language sites that are typically produced in that country/region with local content and have the country domain)

• Mobile video supply with access to tens of billions of global monthly impressions for mobile video inventory across the industry’s top supply sources

• Data management targeting and measurement that allows marketers to easily onboard their CRM data and 3rd party data for use in video advertising campaigns

• Video specific audience measurement that allows marketers to seamlessly align TV and digital media plans to gain maximum exposure

• Goal-based optimization that empowers marketers to optimize campaigns to any measurable goal

• Global campaign management that enables frequency capping and budgeting across video, display, social, and mobile for more efficient media buying

• Robust brand safety tools, including pre-bid brand safety from MediaMath OPEN partner Integral Ad Science

The client worked closely with the MediaMath team to realize their campaign goal: to optimize performance towards the cost per 100% video completion. They also hoped to increase daily completed views overall with the same spend levels– ultimately improving their CPA.

Utilizing MediaMath’s TerminalOne, the client was able to:

• Optimize campaigns using daily auto spend caps, frequency management, and setting strategy budget pacing

• Leverage MediaMath’s data providers and partner technologies to contextually target videos, target specific websites, and create tiered bidding setups based on targeting types

• Tailor video creatives to contextually target on relevant websites

As a result of their partnership with MediaMath, the retailer saw a performance increase in video completions and at the same time, gained insight into strategy level performance across contextual categories and bidding tiers. Through video completion remarketing, the office supply retailer was also able to increase their display reach and performance.

What are your goals for your own video campaigns? Learn more about how TerminalOne can help you achieve them.

DataTechnologyUncategorized

Dagens Media interview: Maximising the Potential of Programmatic

September 1, 2015 — by MediaMath

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Diana Dalsgaard, Director of Platform Solutions EMEA at MediaMath, was recently interviewed by Swedish publication, Dagens Media. Below is an English translation of the original article.

Programmatic trading continues to expand throughout the Nordics. But despite its rapid growth, marketers frequently view the technology as complex and intimidating.

Representing 50% of total spend last year, Sweden is the largest user of programmatic technology within the Nordics and CEE regions. While the programmatic market is relatively mature, and is diversifying from traditional open exchange models and RTB into private marketplaces and premium programmatic, Nordic marketers are struggling to keep pace with the influx of industry terminology and the new solutions available. Education followed by continuous learning is needed throughout the programmatic ecosystem to increase adoption of marketing technologies and ensure that they are delivering optimum results.

So how can marketers ensure they are maximising the potential of programmatic?

Adopt a customer-centric approach
Programmatic is more than the technology behind automated media trading – it enables marketers to manage the increasingly fragmented customer journey. To benefit fully from programmatic, Nordic marketers need to adopt a customer-centric approach. The modern consumer expects brands to identify and remember them across all channels and devices – recalling their previous purchases and anticipating future needs by providing targeted recommendations and relevant offers. Marketers can achieve this by leveraging the first and third-party data they have available to deliver cohesive, personalised messaging across all channels throughout the consumer lifecycle.

Align programmatic KPIs with business goals
Marketing departments are under increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI and other business performance metrics. Programmatic makes marketers more accountable for bottom-line results as the campaign KPIs that programmatic marketing operating systems optimise to are measurable against key business goals. These goals aren’t always directly financial – they may be promoting loyalty and retention throughout the customer lifecycle, or increasing brand awareness or engagement – but they must be measurable. Programmatic should become a central part of the business culture around which the marketing strategy is built.

Promote programmatic understanding
Increased education around programmatic and the benefits it can deliver encourages openness to adoption within an organisation. It is largely the responsibility of technology providers to educate, engage, and empower digital marketers by promoting a clearer understanding of the technology and sharing their knowledge and expertise. Improving the industry’s knowledge of programmatic will ensure marketers are aware of its benefits, which include:

•    Efficiency: Programmatic provides a highly efficient way for marketers to reach consumers individually and at scale, cherry-picking consumers across channels and devices in an individualised, sequenced way. The 720 weekly media-buying decisions that one full-time employee could traditionally make can be increased to 840 billion decisions using a programmatic marketing operating system.

•    Reach: Programmatic allows marketers to adopt a truly omnichannel marketing approach, with access to digital media inventory as diverse as mobile, video, search, display, social, print and connected TV. It also enables marketers to expand their reach by identifying and targeting look-alike audiences.

•    Insight: Today’s marketers have access to more data than ever before, allowing in-depth analysis to enable audience segmentation and contextual targeting. With a programmatic marketing operating system, marketers can activate consumer insight to better understand their consumers, their path to purchase, and the messaging that is most relevant to them.

Understanding these benefits will advance the entire ecosystem, and strengthen the relationships between marketers, their media buying or trading organisations, and technology providers themselves. Connection and collaboration between these three parties will ultimately allow the industry as a whole to work towards two common goals – driving marketing ROI and advancing digital innovation.

The tide in the Nordics has already turned towards programmatic and is rising fast. Marketers who want to do more than simply stay afloat need to make programmatic central to their digital strategies and a key part of their business culture.

EventsUncategorized

NMI Boot Camp Hits the Road

August 31, 2015 — by MediaMath

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It’s time for your back-to-school marketing work out! The New Marketing Institute is opening registration for Fall NMI Boot Camps New York City today, so it’s time to get in shape with training sessions that will not only put your knowledge of Digital Marketing to the test but will push you to your limits and challenge everything you thought you new about marketing.

Last June saw the launch of our first ever Boot Camp workshop, a 1-day intensive training session guaranteed to give you the knowledge needed to navigate the brand new world of programmatic marketing. More than 30 marketers attended from a variety of backgrounds and education levels. Traditional marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, college students, and career changers rubbed shoulders and shared sweat as they frenetically absorbed the everything they could about this brand new marketing landscape.

This season, we are taking Boot Camp on the road, with events in Boston, London, and NYC coming up this Fall, with registration for London and Boston opening in the upcoming weeks. Like any good work out, you’ve got to to step it up to get stronger. In addition to the content we cover in our certification courses, these 1-day boot camps will include a gaggle of new skills. By the conclusion of the course, participants will be able to:

  • Use essential digital marketing concepts to a variety of  business models.
  • Map the key players and roles of the tangled digital marketing ecosystem.
  • Apply the most current trends on social advertising to campaigns.
  • Learn best practices for running mobile, social, and display campaigns effectively.
  • Gain a thorough understanding of the digital video ecosystem and the technologies that are unique to video advertising online from in-stream functionality to pre-roll advertising, to programmatic TV and beyond.
  • Build long-term relationships with professionals in programmatic companies across the space.

Friends don’t let friends skip leg day! Don’t skip the training day that will give you the tools to navigate the programmatic world – sign up for Boot Camp before September 21st for early bird pricing!

CareersPeopleTechnologyUncategorized

Tackling the Programmatic Skills Gap in France and Abroad

August 27, 2015 — by MediaMath

Damien Alzonne, Director, Platform Solutions for MediaMath France, was recently interviewed by French publication Viuz about the significance of programmatic skills in an increasingly fast-paced digital industry, which continues to innovate. In the interview, Damien discusses how to combat the programmatic skills gap for marketers, MediaMath is not only launching programmatic training in France, but rolling it out across the globe.

Below is a translated summary of this interview – you can also view the original interview in French here. 



Viuz: Why has MediaMath launched this programmatic training project? 



Damien: MediaMath noticed that in France in early 2011 – with the growth of programmatic – it was proving difficult for the company as well as our own clients to recruit the right talent. We believe that learning should be at the heart of corporate strategy and arming your employees with the skills necessary for not only personal development but ultimately business success and ROI, in a demanding and constantly evolving industry, is essential.

So, we decided to implement training through the “New Marketing Institute” (NMI), a MediaMath company – with the aim of evangelising the sector and programmatic advertising practices. The idea was to develop a strong educational centre that goes beyond the inner circle of specialists and thereby extends to the broader public – with the value of upholding best practices and keeping in line with the level of service and support that MediaMath offers its customers.

Simply put, we are launching this training because there are not enough marketers with programmatic trading skills, which impacts recruitment and development of the industry. Our goal is to prepare the new generation of programmatic marketers.

Viuz: Describe what sort of training is offered?



Damien: The training programs can be completed online or in person with a view to become certified, enabling MediaMath employees, customers and anyone else who is interested in learning about programmatic. To date, over 5500 certifications have been issued, so more than 1500 in 2015!

NMI offers three modules and certification levels:

The first module is an Introduction to Digital Marketing and focuses on the evolution of digital advertising to programmatic, a general explanation of the sector, stakeholders and procurement models and also provides an introduction to the most basic aspects of online advertising, starting with the vocabulary.

The second module is divided into two stages, ‘TerminalOne for Beginners’ looks at MediaMath’s Marketing Operating System TerminalOne ™ and offers an introduction to the platform that covers campaign setup, strategy setup, pixels, targeting, and the basics of reporting, while ‘TerminalOne Advanced’ is a deeper dive that explores yield optimisation, insights, campaign strategies, “The Brain” and advanced reporting tactics.

The third certification module, ‘Omni-Channel Certification’ is a multi-module certification course on the technologies that marketers need to know in order to be truly literate in the programmatic space. We provide three separate tracks on tactics that go beyond regular display: video, social, and mobile. We recommend mastering each omni-channel offering to gain full-funnel knowledge of the digital ecosystem.

Another NMI offering is the “Marketing Engineer Program”, which aims to train young graduates by immersing them in a department rotation for six months, many of which result in employment at MediaMath or with our customers.

Viuz: Tell me about future projects.



Damien: We are launching an initiative to bring us closer to colleges and universities to incorporate programmatic marketing in higher education.

The idea is to offer access to our tools in TerminalOne to allow media students and future traders to manage their first budgets (such as marketing activity in their school).

Aligned with this, we are developing bridges between the New Marketing Institute and professional training institutions to offer relevant training in programmatic – and as such we are building a “Train The Trainer” program to also prepare future trainers as programmatic experts.

DataEventsTechnologyUncategorized

MediaMath at dmexco 2015: Bridging Worlds with Programmatic Marketing

August 26, 2015 — by MediaMath

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The countdown to one of the biggest digital marketing events has begun – dmexco! The internationally renowned event which brings together over 31,900 trade visitors, 807 exhibitors and 470 top speakers from across the globe, provides the perfect platform to engage with peers at the cutting edge of digital marketing and innovation, and MediaMath is delighted to be returning once again.

This year under the motto “Bridging Worlds”, dmexco will build key bridges to the digiconomy on September 16th and 17th. In both parts of this event — the Expo and the Conference —dmexco will connect present and future business worlds, new business models, the Internet of Things, disruptive technologies, and extraordinary ideas that are relevant for marketing, the media, advertising, and customer communication.

A theme that is rather apt for us at MediaMath as we help our clients and partners to drive their programmatic strategies – connecting the ecosystem whilst bridging the online and offline worlds to drive connectivity and greater engagement between brands and their customers through dynamic 1-2-1 advertising.

Want to find out more – then speak to us at dmexco…

MediaMath at dmexco 2015
You will find us at Stand D-019-E-018 in Hall 7, where our experts will be on hand to answer any questions you might have on how we can empower you to drive and achieve business goals with the power of programmatic marketing technology.

We are currently booking meetings for 16th and 17th September – so if you would like to discover how you can reengineer your marketing, request a meeting with us. Or if you prefer, pop over and see us during the event and we will be more than happy to discuss any questions you have.

Stand party
It’s not all work though – come along to our stand party on Wednesday 16th September from 6:30pm where we will be serving prosecco, beers and nibbles. It will be a great opportunity to network with peers and our friendly MediaMath EMEA team so join us and let’s toast to another successful dmexco.

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