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Focus Your Brand Marketing on Problem-Solving, Not Demographics

July 31, 2017 — by MediaMath

This post originally appeared on MarTech Advisor

Marketers and the digital ecosystem have fine-tuned activation methods that best leverage digital platforms and programmatic technology for direct-response campaigns (i.e., those focused on driving immediate ROI as the primary goal). At the same time, they’ve largely replicated what worked in linear channels, like TV, for branding campaigns. This approach commonly includes focusing activation on maximizing reach against a demographic, executing an unsophisticated supply strategy and failing to leverage measurement against real marketer outcomes to adjust in-flight.

It’s time to move past an approach for branding campaigns that in many cases embrace the lowest common denominator – a holdover from a time when the limitations of traditional channel targeting and execution constrained such campaigns. Every shopper has a problem. The purpose of our branding campaigns is to demonstrate how we solve that problem – reaching consumers who are likely to experience it and maximizing internalization of the message via tactical execution. We will better accomplish this by fully embracing the technological capabilities of programmatic for branding campaigns.

Overhauling Approach to Audience Targeting
The most notable example of replicating practices of traditional branding campaigns in digital is buying audiences and measuring success based on demographics. In traditional channels, this focus was rooted more in history than utility—demographics were the universal mechanism for buying media.

The emphasis on demographics is misplaced. When trying to build perceptions, marketers should target consumers who have a struggle that their product can uniquely solve. That is rarely something bound by demographics. Instead of aligning targeting to the constraints of linear buying, marketers should leverage the full suite of programmatic targeting capabilities to reach consumers likely to experience the struggle they solve for. This includes understanding of consumer interests, where they’ve been, who they are and what they’ve previously browsed/purchased.

Developing a Strong Supply Strategy
There is a belief that branding equals video in digital. As a result, many campaigns are executed in channel silos. For all campaign types, supply selection should be driven by the alignment between inventory type characteristics and the requirements of the brand-consumer interaction.

In most cases, this means video has a primary role in branding campaign execution because of its characteristics as a supply source. Video provides the opportunity to story tell and dramatize the brand’s solution to a consumer frustration or struggle. However, other inventory still has a role under a sophisticated supply strategy. For example, display inventory can play a vital role in fighting message recall decay when sequenced off a video touchpoint.

Better Measurement for In-Flight Optimization

What a marketer selects as the measurement criteria for a campaign has a profound effect on how the campaign is optimized. Common branding campaign measurement has no relationship to the marketer’s strategic intent, including click, completion and demographic metrics. Especially in the case of brand-building campaigns, interim reads from brand-lift research should be the primary criteria by which the campaign manager makes decisions and a marketer judges success. Those audiences and tactic structures that are producing the biggest perception change should prompt bigger bets over time. Percent on demographic target as a success criteria, meanwhile, should be used sparingly or relegated to the past.

Culture People Technology Trends Uncategorized

The Year of the Sophisticated Marketer

December 30, 2016 — by Joe Zawadzki

If 2015 was the year of adolescence for MediaMath, 2016 was accelerated maturity into the responsibilities of young adulthood.

This year, we evolved from an adtech company to an enterprise software and services provider, because the latter is what the market is demanding. Marketers are more sophisticated than ever. We are entering a “post-channel era” where CEOs, CMOs and CFOs are as obsessed as we are with data and outcomes.

With technology at their fingertips to enable 1:1 marketing at scale, with real-time execution, direct connection to consumers and the ability to measure business results over publisher inputs, marketers are increasingly motivated to “make it so.”

Those are our clients. MediaMath’s customers index toward the more sophisticated, and we’ve built our business to cater to them. This drive to move programmatic out of test budgets or a portion of their media investments sometimes requires new business models or team configurations to do so— our work with Coke and MediaCom out of Mexico is a great example of how this can be done with success. Marketers like the folks at MediaCrossing have moved from siloed channel approaches to true single platform allowing omnichannel execution. And with the pipes to hook together paid and owned media systems through great partners like IBM and Oracle, marketers are extending conversations they start with known customers in email across channels and the marketing funnel. From our founding, MediaMath has partnered with these most sophisticated marketers to push the boundaries of programmatic marketing. We want to continue to be seen as a leading “Visionary,” the category in which we were recognized in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs in January.

In the context of this growing client and market maturity, we made some changes internally that were both exciting and daunting.

Early in the year, we unveiled a new product business unit structure around our data, media and intelligence products, bringing our product teams closer to the client. Our data team, which successfully launched our proprietary data business, formerly known as Adroit, then Helix and now as part of MediaMath Audiences, in January and released into general availability our real-time DMP capabilities Adaptive Segments and IQ in November, is helping marketers leverage more of their first-, second- and third-party data sources (including deepened and new partnerships with data providers like Acxiom, PushSpring and Cuebiq) and shape the analytics around them.

Over top these new product business units, we’ve ramped up our professional services capabilities to enable clients to unlock the full potential of programmatic with talent and expertise. Our New Marketing Institute, which is now officially in all regions with its expansion into APAC earlier this year, continues to help clients close education and talent gaps through their certification and training offerings and the Marketing Engineer Program. We also revamped our technology organization, appointing Wilfried Schobeiri as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Steve Steir as our new SVP of Engineering. Wil will drive our technical vision, ensure scalable growth of our systems and push the productization of our API and technology platform while evangelizing our technology both inside the company and externally to the market. Steve will make sure our global engineering team is aligned on the goal of continuously improving people and products.

Coming out of this new product structure, we have the right people in key roles across teams to move the company and mission forward. And there’s a renewed commitment to ongoing evolution and mobility that should smooth the migration of people and resources to the focused set of initiatives that need them at various time periods, varied as needed across geographies. We continue to strive to be a place where people at all stages of their careers want to work, and also encourage those individuals to give back in meaningful ways through the launch of our philanthropic arm MediaMath.org.

From a financial health perspective, our enterprise business grew just over 20 percent in our most mature market of North America and to over 100 percent in LATAM, along with (a return to) overall profitability. And we did that while taking something really good—a fast-growing and high-contribution business unit in Adroit—and blowing it up to free up the amazing talent and differentiated data assets inside to accrue to the benefit of all of our clients, globally, to become something great. Even more intestinal fortitude was required to shift our buy strategy for “batch supply”—Upcast—to build, in order to position it to grow by triple digits in 2017 as mobile and video did this year.

Whew.

What else is to come in 2017? Here’s what I know: the market for what we are doing is getting bigger and the number of credible competitors is getting smaller. Smaller point solutions—from channels like video to standalone DMPs—are getting bought, validating the need for the integrated, transparent enterprise solution that we have been building for close to a decade. Audiences addressable through all forms of media, the centrality of machine learning—these ideas are being embraced after 10+ years to move from fringe notion to “obvious.” We are in the business of transforming marketing through tech and math, and we know where the market is going and are increasingly able to shape its direction.

And yet we will do more. The need for supply chain hygiene will cause some to call for a return to the halcyon days of advertiser, agency and publisher in the same way that the challenge of attribution had many retrench to engagement or reach metrics alone. Thankfully, we have truth on our side. In 2017, we as a company and as a catalyst for the cause must focus on belief and proof, and show it in the data and the results.

To do that, we will continue to invest in innovation and even more in scaled operations and infrastructure, partnering with the most sophisticated marketers and the diverse ecosystem that supports them. We have an amazing team and the industry’s most powerful platform—the table is set. Now it’s up to us.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

Lessons we Learned from Data-driven Marketing in 2016

December 28, 2016 — by MediaMath

This byline originally appeared on CMO.com.au.

In 2016, the power and importance of “big data” finally started to pay off—everywhere around the globe, across all markets and industries.

For businesses, the role of information in supporting marketing and advertising is no longer just about providing learnings. Organisations now look to data for actionable insights and to drive better business outcomes. Increasingly, they are moving towards a smarter and more consumer-centric approach, which can only be done by deriving meaning from data. In a 2016 MediaMath-commissioned research study undertaken by Forrester Consulting, almost 41% of marketers in Asia Pacific said that they have adopted programmatic buying, with 82% of them either satisfied or highly satisfied with their investment in the technology.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s clear that data, and programmatic, is now a central pillar of customer experience, and therefore marketing. As businesses look to jump on board, here are some lessons we’ve learned over the past year that marketers around the world can take with them into 2017.

It’s still all about the consumer

Consumers increasingly expect a more personalised experience. This is perhaps why consumers are voting with a click of their mouse in order to avoid disruptive, annoying or irrelevant advertising. The increased usage of ad blocking technology is a consequence of irrelevant and unwanted advertisements.

To address this issue, marketers are enthusiastically embracing the “customer-centric” approach. Marketers are increasingly turning to data-driven marketing, including the management of customer databases, deployment of predictive analytics, and segmentation to learn more about addressable audiences, and implementation of omni-channel campaigns to have a more holistic view of their audiences. With platforms that recognise individuals across multiple devices, address changing behaviour of consumers, and enable omni-channel execution, marketers can deliver experiences that transcend channels, formats, and devices.

Digital is where it’s at

Web content, social media, search, and online display advertising increasingly make up a greater proportion of the marketer’s arsenal to reach their target audience—and it’s easy to see why.

Consumers from all demographics are now spending more time online. Digital consumers are spending an average of over six hours daily on the internet—which is equivalent to more than half of a consumer’s daily media time. With Asia home to more than half of the world’s internet users, marketers here can take full advantage of this huge opportunity by bridging the gap between traditional and digital in their media mix.

As such, marketers are reporting that digital media is now delivering the greatest return on investment, with the performance of their display advertising, web content, and social media investments making the most strides in the past year. With better performance, cost effectiveness, and operational efficiency, marketers are choosing programmatic to help them boost contextual targeting, reduce waste, and provide timely and relevant content to their audience across multiple devices. Marketing has gone digital, because that is where the consumers are—and are likely to stay.

Untapped potential

While close to three-quarters of marketers globally said that they remain confident in the practice of data-driven marketing and its potential for future growth, going digital requires expertise that can unlock and generate more value from data-driven marketing efforts. In addition, marketers today also generally believe that the optimisation of campaign measurement would be most valuable if it provides deeper insights to inform future campaign planning, media mix modelling, and other optimisation efforts. This is where programmatic comes in, with APAC marketers citing better contextual targeting, faster and more efficient execution and real-time optimisation as the most important benefits of programmatic.

The lesson is that marketers need to not only know the data at their disposal, but also be able to smartly analyse and activate it to get the best return.

The task of navigating more complex data from different media channels, with increasing customer requirements and higher expectations, is a challenge. With digital marketing technology, marketers can derive meaningful insights, enabling marketers to execute better targeted campaigns. The more intelligent the technology, the better the consumer insights, and the more targeted the marketing approach—eventually leading to happier consumers and better business results.

DIGITAL MARKETING Media PROGRAMMATIC Uncategorized

APAC: 2017 Programmatic Trends

December 27, 2016 — by MediaMath

APAC is forecasted to have $1.48 billion smartphone users by 2019, due to a surge in smartphone adoption coming from emerging markets like China and India.

Data Technology Trends Uncategorized

Adtech: Predictions for 2017

December 23, 2016 — by MediaMath

The WARC blog recently ran a post on marketing predictions from industry leaders. MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell was featured—her commentary is included below.

“Programmatic is moving into new territories—TV, audio, print, native. The true ‘programmatic future’ is taking all forms of media and making them addressable and connected at a consumer level. User data is what powers the marketing that allows brands to reach and engage with consumers on a one-to-one level across channels, formats and devices throughout the customer lifecycle. But there’s need for technical convergence and message coherence across channels as viewed from a consumer perspective.

“Consumers, after all, don’t care what channel they’re in; they just notice when offers are off, mis-targeted or annoying due to over-frequency of delivery. And then they block ads. To combat this disengagement with advertising, marketers should commit to improving audience management and better aligning how they execute media across channels. This is how you start having a single view of customers that allows you to communicate more seamlessly and, thus, deliver more customer-centric marketing.”

Read the other predictions here.

DIGITAL MARKETING Education Media PROGRAMMATIC Uncategorized

Webinar Recap: Grovo and New Marketing Institute Talk Microlearning

December 22, 2016 — by MediaMath

This article originally appears on the Grovo Blog.

Just because robots aren’t taking our jobs (yet) doesn’t mean technology isn’t drastically changing the way we do business. Nowhere is that more true than in the marketing and advertising industries. SEO, SEM, programmatic, mobile, social—every time the modern marketer blinks, there is a new ad tech du jour. And with new technology comes the need for new competencies. MediaMath noticed this need early on, which is what led them to partner with Grovo to develop the New Marketing Institute (NMI).

Grovo’s Director of Learning & Innovation, Alex Khurgin, was recently joined by Elise James-Decruise, VP of MediaMath’s New Marketing Institute, for a webinar entitled Technology’s Role in Educational Expansion. Alex and Elise discussed the partnership between Grovo and NMI, how NMI created an effective learning strategy with microlearning, and how anyone can use that framework to build their own effective microlearning strategy for their organization.

If you missed it, you’re in luck! Read on for a recap so you, too, can get started building your own effective microlearning program.

What is microlearning anyways?

There are all sorts of definitions for microlearning out there, but if you want to do it right, you need to do a whole lot more than just create little bits of content and put them in front of people. If you commit to transforming your people, then the true definition of microlearning becomes more specific: a method for changing behaviors through short, spaced out learning experiences timed to points of need.

NMI uses microlearning for training, certification, and their Marketing Engineer Program (MEP). In the ever-evolving world of marketing, microlearning is one of the most cost-effective ways to scale training in new technologies and skills that meets the learner where they are in location, language, learning style and level of experience.

The 4 steps to creating an effective microlearning program:

1. Set expectations

It’s surprising how few organizations take the time to spell out exactly what’s expected of their employees. Define concrete behaviors you expect from any given role or as an outcome to training so that everyone knows what they need to do, when they need to do it, how they need to do it, and everyone at different levels and departments is aware of expected behaviors across the board.

NMI identified their success goals as: expanding program reach to 10 countries worldwide, increasing client satisfaction through their client-centered training approach, getting over 10,000 individuals trained through all of their programs, and celebrating big and small wins. They make sure to take a step back as a team to ensure that they are creating memorable experiences within a training environment every step of the way.

2. Surround the moment

In order to motivate people to engage with and apply training, you need to provide them information at the moment they need it. You can do this by paying attention to when there’s a powerful moment of need approaching—like Black Friday for customer service reps—and placing the learning in advance of that. Or, you can create a moment of need by launching learning with fanfare—like posters or email—and building excitement around it.

NMI motivates learners by listening to the needs and wants of their learners to create timely content, developing a curriculum that supports a structured path to certification, and creating an experiential environment that gives participants hands-on opportunities to put lessons into practice.

3. Make learning stick

Once you’ve engaged people, you need to make sure the learning they receive actually changes their behaviors: from the moment of inspiration—that “aha moment”—through transformation. Giving them quick, digestible lessons that can be revisited, prompting practice through realistic challenges with realistic consequences, providing feedback, and following up with review and reinforcement are all ways to ensure that your learning actually sticks and behaviors change.

With 100% job placement for participants in their 13-week MEP program, NMI has surely mastered this step. Some of their secrets to making learning stick include bridging the gap between knowledge and experience, creating a learner-centric environment, and staying ahead of the industry trends.

4. Improve outcomes over time

Finally, it’s important to create a feedback loop in order to improve your program over time. Take a step back and assess and report how much behaviors have changed rather than learning metrics such as lesson completions. If you figure out what is and isn’t working, you can easily tweak the program to improve outcomes over time.

The idea and development of NMI came from MediaMath’s desire to fill education and talent gaps throughout the marketing industry, so they are always looking for ways to stay one step ahead of the learner. NMI encourages feedback during and after training and constantly updates their content to ensure it is as meaningful and relevant as possible.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

EMEA Managing Director Dave Reed Talks the Evolution of Header Bidding

December 21, 2016 — by MediaMath

MediaMath partner OpenX recently hosted the eighth School of Programmatic event, which focused on the evolution of header bidding. Dave Reed, Managing Director of EMEA for MediaMath, participated in a panel on the impact of header bidding on the buy- and the sell-sides, moderated by ExchangeWire, with Tegdeep Kondal, product director for header bidding at OpenX, and Barbara Agus, director of programmatic EMEA and LATAM, Time Inc. Here is a recap of some of their commentary, which originally appeared on ExchangeWire.

Are buyers and sellers connecting through header bidding?

Barbara Agus from Time Inc., said header bidding is giving buyers the opportunity to access all the relevant users on a given property. This is a fantastic result; however, as a publisher, she is often asked whether she can see real changes in the way buyers are approaching inventory since starting to implement header bidding solutions. According to Agus, this is sometimes the case. At Time Inc., they are forecasting between a 10-20% revenue uplift. But publishers in the industry are often asking how buyers and sellers should be connected through header bidding, with concerns that a lack of understanding from the other side of the fence, for both buyers and sellers, could create confusion: HB might create a distorted and inflated vision of the volume of impressions available in any given auction. “We are sometimes accused of trying to make more money out of the same amount of inventory.”

Dave Reed from MediaMath responded to Agus’ concerns, saying header bidding is one of the most effective tools in bringing clients closer together. “It is often assumed that a higher price for the publisher means advertiser loss, and a lower price for the advertiser means publisher loss, but it doesn’t work that way. Advertisers will pay a lot for value, and that’s the world header bidding is starting to bring in.”

Is header bidding driving increased CPMs on the buy side and is that causing advertisers concern? According to Reed, no. He gave the example of a global client, where CPMs increased, but performance increased even more, which, as an advertiser, you might initially balk at. “It’s not a zero sum game”, said Reed, “as you can make the pie bigger for everyone, if you’re efficient.”

If header bidding is driving improved performance and yield for both advertisers and publishers, what’s the problem? Drawing from her previous experience using this tool, Agus points out that it’s the retargeters that seemed to be negatively affected. “We have seen buyer relationships improve significantly, but for retargeters looking for the cheapest impression to drive ROI, we have definitely seen a rapport decline. Before header bidding, those buyers had first access to inventory with no competition. With header bidding in the mix, they suddenly faced competition and, as a result, they wanted to stay out of the wrapper.” According to Agus, it is in dealing with premium advertisers that we can expect most improvements. However, this should not be regarded as a win/lose situation. According to Reed: “As marketers, we need to get beyond campaign-based buying. Consumers don’t live in a campaign world. Always-on marketing that allows programmatic tracking across devices and across platforms should increase CPMs, as buyers should be looking for quality.”

“Header bidding is bringing buyers closer to sellers”, said Reed, who feels it is helping promote a more transparent marketplace, with fewer walled gardens. Agus agreed, saying buyers have the opportunity to appreciate the value of their inventory, helping publishers understand how to price it better.

Are there concerns with header bidding?

Kondal said that, on the platform side, latency is the biggest topic: “I feel there’s a lot that can be done by publishers; but it’s really the job of the platform to optimise on behalf of the end user. At OpenX, we’re looking very seriously at how we can reduce the time it takes to return bids.”

Aside from latency, Kondal worried there isn’t much focus put on the DSP side; and explained how context should be provided to make them understand which bid requests are coming from header bidding and even ask them what type of auction they would like to participate in. “If you give them more context and control it would be a more balanced playing field on both sides.”

Speaking from the DSP side, Reed was, in general, very positive; but he did highlight that one downside is implementation: “If the publisher implements it, and the DSP doesn’t know the context, and is competing against an open auction, you haven’t achieved very much in grokking the waterfall and getting close to the first impression the user sees.” Reed admitted this isn’t a frequent occurrence, but it definitely happens.

HB is a fantastic piece of technology. When it fails, it is not because of the technology itself, but rather because it has not been fully understood.

Technology Trends Uncategorized

Simplfying Integrations Between Demand and Supply Platforms

December 20, 2016 — by MediaMath

SSPs, exchanges and DSPs aim to connect the world’s demand and supply at scale. Why all the middlemen? Exchanges and other intermediaries exist to minimize the number of direct connections. This saves resources as new integrations between demand and supply platforms are long and intricate. With one exchange integration, a DSP gets access to hundreds of individual supply platforms.

What if integrations weren’t so complicated? If the ideal is to bring publishers and advertisers closer, how can we change the status quo of integrations?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has been successful in standardizing the increasing complexity of RTB transactions with the Open RTB protocol. However, there has been an issue with supply platforms then adopting the IAB’s guiding terms as their own technical specifications. In doing so, they often add their own “twist.” This customization may reflect the uniqueness of the supply or the SSP’s own legacy systems. The issue is that even the most minor customization on the SSP’s end puts additional burden on a DSP’s engineers, resulting in longer lead times and leaving more room for bugs during the integration.

The status quo has been that, due to the unique nature of every integration, integrations at MediaMath were taking one to four quarters from lead time through go-live. This presented the most pain points for regionally-focused or product-specialized SSPs, because upgrading our current exchanges took just as long as new integrations. With dozens of direct integrations for a typical DSP and hundreds of SSPs in the market—plus the IAB releasing a new protocol version nearly every year—upgrading integrations and building out new ones could be the sole job of several engineers and product managers! On the other side, these smaller SSPs are forced to sell their inventory through exchanges, diluting the value of the advertiser’s dollar and limiting partnership opportunities with the DSP. It’s a drain on both sides’ resources any way you look at it.

At MediaMath, we recognized the problems of integration status quo: It’s slow, non-standard and reliant on middlemen. In an effort to make integrations fast and painless, we developed our own RTB specifications. Dubbed LITE Integrations, it is a simplified version of OpenRTB with no pesky custom fields. Combined with an online standardized contract to speed through the legal procedure (which always took longer than the actual integrations), our new way of integrating allows supply platforms to get started immediately and connect to MediaMath’s global demand in as little as two weeks instead of a quarter or more.

We think this could be a game changer in the way the industry integrates. If this process is adopted across the adtech ecosystem, global connectivity and the value of the advertiser’s budget will strengthen while engineering teams will have more resources to innovate.

DIGITAL MARKETING Media PROGRAMMATIC Uncategorized

LATAM: 2017 Programmatic Trends

December 19, 2016 — by MediaMath

With 2017 around the corner, programmatic continues to grow with digital ad spending reaching record highs yet again. We take a look at what’s trending next year in the programmatic scene across North America, EMEA, LATAM and APAC. The LATAM region is expected to see triple-digit growth in programmatic digital display ad spending through 2017.

Data Uncategorized

The Current State of Data in Programmatic

December 16, 2016 — by MediaMath

“Data is central to everything we do in programmatic.”

Data in a programmatic context really means signals that we use to make better marketing decisions. These signals can be behaviors that someone displayed or the types of websites ads were served on. These data sets come together to create a complex mix of signals to help us better target our audiences. It pays to leverage a mix of different data sources that can help you find and engage your best customers. To learn more about how data is currently used in programmatic, watch our video interview with Jacob Ross, GM of Audience at MediaMath.

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