This article originally appeared in Advanced Television. 

Advertising technology company MediaMath has pledged to clean up the digital media supply chain by committing to a 100 per cent accountable and addressable supply chain by the end of 2020, righting what it says are the wrongs of a digital advertising industry that evolved rapidly over the last decade with no purposeful design.

With the launch of SOURCE by MediaMath, the company suggest the initiative represents a meaningful industry step toward helping brands and agencies reclaim powerful results from digital marketing with less effort, and that the industry must create an environment that is accountable and addressable, and a place where the interests of brands, agencies, content owners, and technology providers are aligned. The announcement was made as the ANA Masters of Marketing Week kicked-off in Orlando, Fla.

“We set out to change marketing for the better,” said Joe Zawadzki, CEO, MediaMath. “Unfortunately, the purity of our industry’s intentions when we built the digital infrastructure have gotten lost in fraud, waste, and irrelevance. It’s created more ads instead of good ads and minimised the value of quality supply in its purest and most transparent form. As some of the earliest pioneers of programmatic, we feel called to help fix what’s broken.”

“Simply put, instead of brands being able to focus on growing and deepening direct customer relationships, much of their time is sucked up with the operational and service burdens of a broken ecosystem,” added Zawadzki. “The supply chain must be rearchitected to fuel growth and health for brands and free creatives to create, and in turn operate a more trustworthy ecosystem with aligned incentives for all.”

According to the company, SOURCE by MediaMath brings brands and agencies closer to the original, pure source of their media and is:

  • Accountable: Real impressions on real media properties. A transparent and fraud-free supply chain from trusted content owners that gives brands full visibility into supply path mechanics and costs, modernised terms of trade, and supply chain technical standards that improve how every piece of advertising functions.
  • Addressable: Real humans that brands can reach with real ads, at scale. A single view of who a brand’s customers and prospects are—and the ability to access more of these audiences—across desktop, mobile, and TV through a consistent, portable user-level ID, always prioritising privacy and consumer respect. Effectively, connecting signal throughout the supply chain allows content owners and advertisers to more effectively communicate their needs and transparently agree upon goals.
  • AI-Powered: Cleaner data using the power of computation to draw meaningful insights and detect real trends from huge data sets in a way that requires less effort to achieve. The power of AI is the ability to make high-quality decisions fast. But for machine learning to work in the way it’s intended, it needs good data – no more garbage in, garbage out. AI enables a cleaner supply chain, empowering agencies, brands and content owners with trusted, actionable and real-time data.

Content owners and technology companies are partnering to create the SOURCE ecosystem, not only providing full visibility into supply path mechanics and costs but building new infrastructure and commercial terms for the industry. MediaMath unveiled in June 2019 its partnership with Rubicon Project to architect a direct and transparent digital supply  infrastructure.

Anchor Ecosystem Partner Rubicon Project joined by Video & CTV/OTT player Telaria, Acoustic, Akamai, Business Insider, Crackle Plus, Havas Media, IBM Watson, Inscape/Vizio, IRIS.TV, News Corp, Octopus Interactive, Oracle Data Cloud, Publishers Clearing House and White Ops.

With the rise of streaming TV capturing a larger share of both traditional TV and digital budgets, the SOURCE ecosystem can, for the first time, define what programmatic TV truly looks like. According to MediaMath, it blends all the benefits of accountable and addressable digital connections with the attention commanded by the largest screen – the TV.

MediaMath’s partnership with Telaria is a complete software platform that optimises yield for leading video publishers, creates meaningful technical connections between buyers and sellers to enhance both sides of the transaction, making every impression accountable and measurable while layering in best-in-class addressable targeting and reach extension capabilities across the digital landscape. This new initiative builds on Telaria’s transparency programme, launched in 2018.

“SOURCE is a movement for the entire industry, propelled by the commitment our partners bring and our shared desire to clean-up the supply chain, and in return we will work to improve the economics around doing so for them,” said Jeremy Steinberg, Global Head of Ecosystem, MediaMath. “For too long, content owners have not been incentivised to protect the quality of their real estate. SOURCE puts brands, agencies, and content owners alike back on equal footing, all sharing a common goal to engage consumers across the globe and earn their trust.”

SOURCE offers brands and agencies a fully accountable media environment and fully addressable audiences. Together, an accountable and addressable environment creates stronger return on investment while lowering brands’ and agencies’ levels of effort to attain those results. The impact extends to insights and the ability to better negotiate across the supply chain with content owners, buyers and technology partners as well.

SOURCE by MediaMath also extends MediaMath’s partnership with White Ops. Announced in June 2019, the partnership protects some of the world’s largest advertisers, agencies and content owners from sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) before it is purchased. The White Ops bot mitigation platform detects, prevents and outwits bot populations of every level of sophistication to provide transparency and build trust and accountability across the advertising ecosystem.

According to the company, SOURCE by MediaMath sets new global industry standards for media performance and significantly improves engagement as brands and agencies tap into a premium, highly-curated supply chain driven by market demand for addressable and accountable audience reach.