Q&A Archives - Clearcode

Data Clean Rooms Explained: Q&A with Clearcode and Aqilliz [VIDEO]

Mike Sweeney — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 02:27:45 +0000

Data clean rooms have exploded in popularity as a result of the decline in third-party cookies and mobile IDs in programmatic advertising and AdTech.

In this video interview, Michael Sweeney, Head of Marketing at Clearcode, asked Gowthaman Ragothaman, CEO of Aqilliz, a series of questions about data clean rooms.

Get in contact with Michael and Gowthaman on LinkedIn

Michael Sweeney, Head of Marketing at Clearcode
Gowthaman Ragothaman, CEO at Aqilliz

Below is the transcript from the video interview above.

Michael Sweeney: Hello, everyone. My name is Michael Sweeney and I’m Head of Marketing at Clearcode. And in today’s video, I’m joined by Gowthaman or Gmen, for short, who is the CEO of Aquilliz.

Today we’re going to be talking about data clean rooms.

Welcome, Gman. Thank you very much for joining me.

Michael Sweeney: Tell us a few words about yourself, Aquilliz, how you started, and then we’ll jump into some questions about data clean rooms.

Gman: Thank you. I think everybody knows me as Gman. I’ve been in the ad industry for the past 30 years.

Three years back, I quit WPP to set up this company with the specific conviction that the marketing and advertising tech industries require a distributed ledger solution because that was getting decentralized, and there is the need for a decentralized solution. And that’s the germ of the thought. Aquilliz is borne out of that conviction.

So we stand for distributed ledger or blockchain for marketing solutions provider. Data clean room is one of the solutions that we offer.

Over and above that, we leverage clean rooms for many things, including cross-media measurement and attribution solutions.

That’s what Aquilliz is all about.

Michael Sweeney: Regarding the topic of data clean rooms, it’s a fairly new topic, especially within the programmatic advertising industry. And there are different types of data clean rooms? In your words, what is a data clean room?

Gman: In my view, a data clean room is a place where data owners make data sets available for collaboration, which means it should be cryptographically secure.

It ensures that whatever is being done with the data, they’re able to record, maintain, and update those capabilities.

Essentially, a clean room is a place that gives the certificate that this data can be collaborated.

Michael Sweeney: What is the difference between a centralized and a decentralized data clean room?

Gman: If you look at it today, there are quite a few clean rooms in the marketplace. All the current solutions are built for an enterprise for the purpose of maintaining data. So it offers them an enterprise A, or a company A, or a brand A, or a publisher A a clean room facility where their data is safe and maintained and kept for collaboration purposes.

When do such companies want to engage with each other, let’s say a brand A and publisher A, or a brand A and a data provider and a publisher, and more than two or three participants, each of them will have their own clean room, by logic, because that’s how the current leaders built; But when they are all collaborating together, they cannot be putting all the data in another centralized repository.

It has to be in a place that is owned by all of them or is made available to all of them for the purpose of clarity, trust, and transparency.

But it’s where the differentiation comes in.

A centralized clean room means another entity is taking the data out from the respective location into a central server of their own location, and then they take the responsibility of processing the data on their behalf; In the liability shifts from the data owner to the processor. But we don’t know how the record is being kept and pushed back.

That is where, in my view, a decentralized clean room essentially means that it uses the techniques of distributed ledger, and whatever data is being used and processed is made available to all the participants who contribute. Otherwise, the current system is not scalable. It is one plus one. Maximum one plus two. But then, if I had a partner with more than two participants, centralization would not help.

That’s the difference.

Michael Sweeney: I’d love to learn more about the decentralized part, specifically how you handle that and how the process works, as you said, for example, between a brand and a publisher.

But maybe some of these questions may be asked when we talk about some of the main uses of a data clean room.

Many people would have noticed data clean rooms have started to emerge. With all the changes in privacy over the past couple of years, specifically with the end of third-party cookies in browsers, such as Safari and Firefox and, third-party cookies and Google Chrome and not too far away.

Michael Sweeney: What are some of the main use cases or applications of a data clean room in not only advertising and media, but also potentially in some other industries as well?

Gman: Medical industry is one which is now extensively using this today to understand patient data a lot better. The patient data are sitting in multiple sources. It helps to resolve records in a privately compliant manner without disclosing sensitive things.

Real estate is another industry that is using it very effectively right now.

And if you extend this logic, whenever there is a supply chain, and wherever there is a value chain that is happening over a period of partners in the supply chain, you will necessarily end up having a clean room.

Somebody is getting the data, they are adding value to it, and they want to know what value others have added to it and rightfully command a price for the job they are doing. But that core data is not being used for any other purposes.

And that is why today, that industry is desperately looking for such a solution. Privacy is at the heart of it. Consumer data is being abused beyond control, and the supply chain needs to be transparent in the value exchange that it is offered to the system.

Clean room will become an essential component of any partner who is part of the digital advertising supply chain. Very, very soon.

Michael Sweeney: Staying on the topic of programmatic advertising, I think a lot of the typical use cases that people think of when they hear data clean rooms in programmatic advertising and digital marketing is the measurement part, right? Something that happens after an ad has been shown.

Michael Sweeney: Are there applications where data clean rooms can be used for ad targeting, audience targeting, and measurement as well?

Gman: Yeah, I’m going to talk about what we are offering.

We see there’s three broad buckets.

One is pure play insights which helps the participant to learn about the consumers a lot better and they’ll help you with the use case as well.

Second bucket is advertising or activation, where the clean room capabilities can be used for safe and secure personalized advertising.

The third one is the measurement or attribution. Bucket split into one.

In all the three use cases, clean rooms are becoming critical and are gathering all the three use cases.

I’m going to refer to some of our partners as well, so it helps to bring it to life.

For example, we are working with one of the leading sports franchise in India, IPL sports franchise, and they have a sponsor ecosystem of all the sponsors of the team in the jersey, beverage partner, so on and so forth.

So they want to create a layer out of configuration where the sponsors can share their first-party data to all the other member sponsors of the franchise in a complaint manner, which helps them to know about the sports fans a lot better. They know about the fans much more because they are all part of the same sponsors ecosystem.

And that helps upselling and cross-selling solutions amongst the sponsor ecosystem.

It is extremely useful in the world today because the sponsorships can go beyond simple vanilla spins and sponsor details; It can bring it closer to the sports, the fan, and the consumer. That’s a fantastic use case.

So it is about insight. It’s about knowing the fan a lot better. And it’s not about advertising, but it’s about simple marketing. You see this initiative, right?

Even in such a situation, the clean room works very well.

The way we do it in this case is we install a node in each of the participants’ native location, so the data doesn’t leave the premises. Nobody pulls in data into a central clean room. The fan data remains with each of the sponsors and a query is made to understand attributes about the fans from all of them that sits in the federated layer of the campaign. And then it is pushed back to all the partners for any further activation purposes.

This helps in the participants knowing very well that the data is not being abused for any other purpose. That’s the purpose of the decentralized data layer.

That’s on the insights side of it.

Many brands can use it.

Any of the CBD brands or any other brands, can bring the other partners in the ecosystem.

I’m just saying it’s not a case in point, but it’s a brand I worked on for more than two decades in my earlier life. Let’s say PepsiCo.

Pepsi can partner with their voting rights partner, then Pizza Hut, Domino’s or any of the other sponsors. Together, they can generate more insights about their own consumer than what they have today.

That’s a very powerful proposition for a clean room. Simply on insight.

Decentralization ensures that the number of partners can be as many as you want. So it is not one, not two, that’s one wanted from being a centralized clean room. Otherwise, why would ten companies give the data to one company? Doesn’t make any sense. That’s on insights.

On activation, which is where we are currently working with Airtel. Airtel is one of our strategic investors. We are also working with the Zee broadcasting in India, and with a few other publishers as well.

When cookies are deprecating and there is no way you can identify your own consumer, your first-party data is your only source of knowing who your consumers are. Clean room helps in that transparent manner and the compliant manner share your brands data with the publishers data to understand your consumers better and say: Hey, there’s a match.’ So I will use your platform for retargeting or create lookalikes to push ads to that platform.

It also helps in more publishers coming together to offer the marketplace in the decentralized platforms. It is what we are trying to do in India right now. That’s the activation use case.

Last but not least, the measurement, which is my personal favorite and one which I really love. As a planner in my early life I always struggled to allocate my money across the platforms. Each one of them are their own Walled Garden. They would take care of their own attribution and say ‘I am the best.’ But a brand who spends $400 across five sets platforms still don’t know how to allocate the money between these guardians, right?

Which is where WFA and the industry is really looking at cross-media measurement solution. And we are partnering with Ipsos in the Middle East in offering cross-media solution to the industry using the clean room technology where each of the publishers shared their publisher logs in the complaint manner.

Then virtual IDs created to then do duplication to give the brand a real cross-media measurement solution.

To me that’s the most powerful one of the three, Mike.

While the first and second use case is good to do, nice to do. But if my planers had, I would say just ensure that we offer something to the industry where the brands really get their money worth on true return, on investment, on measurement.

So measurement is the heart of the problem. And if we can fix it, we unlock so much money in the industry.

Michael Sweeney: Definitely. You know, as you mentioned, it’s critically important, the measurement part and this is really one of the main challenges with the whole end of third-party cookies, IDs, and identity in general.

Gman: That’s right.

Michael Sweeney: Certainly other, all the other areas are impacted as well. But measurement, as you said, is the key for planning, for understanding whether campaigns worked or not as well.

Michael Sweeney: A moment ago when you were talking about the different applications of a data clean room, you talked a lot about first-party data. Let’s say you’ve got a brand and a publisher that want to come together use data clean room like Aquilliz. What would they need in order to make that happen?

Michael Sweeney: A lot of companies already have a lot of first-party data that they collect. Obviously, a lot of companies are starting to invest a lot more in building up their first-party data strategies and collecting it more than ever before. But what do they actually need to tie that all together? Is it some kind of ID that needs to be at a match up?

Gman: At the very basic level, I think a device ID, or a mobile number, or a email address is what is one of the three key-connecting attributes that can be used on both sides of the partnership.

Many publishers today don’t even have that. They are comfortable with the way consumers are logging into that website without actually logging in – they just check in.

The publishers are also looking at finding some kind of an identity resolution solution that helps resolve the signals to say: Hey, these are my consumers,’ and they create their own ID. The proprietary ad that represents that consumer base.

That can also be tagged on to these three variables that helps in creating cohorts or lookalikes not better, because it need not be only extremely determinist match from the clean room. We can find a decent attributes when we are talking to each of the partners apart from the three persistent identifiers, what kind of programs they watch, what kind of movies they like.

There are many other attributes: volume of consumption, value of consumption… Any other attributes can also be added to that repository which can be queried on both sides to find them and match.

Today people use third-party cookies for chasing or tracking the consumer on the other side, but still it is 50% efficient. People think that we are tracking, but we are not tracking very, very well. We all know that data is only half efficient.

When the cookies go away, it is almost going to be at near zero. You’re going to shoot at the dog, you’re going to be blind in identifying consumer.

Any kind of these attributes that can be matched is still better than shooting in the dark. And any kind of attributes we imagine still be better than the current third-party cookies that are being matched, because it never was really delivering its promise.

So, to answer to your question, it is email address, mobile number, or a device ID plus any other attributes that we can bring in is more than enough to find the corresponding consumers for insights and activist.

Michael Sweeney: You mentioned some quite interesting points there — even when we look at some of the IT solutions that are on the market, many of those use things like email addresses, phone numbers to create IDs. It’s certainly not been done the same way from a privacy perspective as it is in a data clean room, cause there’s no real decentralization. You can set the things to be collected. There’s encryption, but there’s still this missing piece of all the other parts, like decentralization or privacy.

Gman: It’s a very important point, Mike, thanks that you brought it up.

So whether it is GDPR, CCPA, our personal data protection bill in India and in Indonesia, and any other market, the fundamental question that everybody is asking for or requiring is: as a data owner, they need to maintain a record of what’s been done with that data to beam. And that needs to be made available upon request either by the consumer or by the regulatory authority.

That record can only be maintained in a distributed ledger because you are sharing it with your partner.

Let’s say I am G-man and then I am a telco user and I’m also a public publication reader. When I am found on both the databases and they phoned me and say: ‘Hey, this is Gman tracking’, then both the publisher and the telco needs to update the record that Gman was phoned and tracked and sold out.

That is not simply possible if it is not on a decentralized ledger because there has to be somebody else and neutral layer that maintains that record who does not have any other intent of monetizing it. And that’s very important.

I remember when we were working with Project Rearc on IAB Tech Lab years back when we’re setting these regulations, this was the first and most important thing.

It has to be a neutral entity that maintains the record of processing of activity and does not have any motivation of monetizing it. That can only happen if it is a further layer.

That’s the connection with which Aqilliz was built. I just want to bring it to life during this point.

Michael Sweeney: I remember when we spoke previously, you mentioned that you utilize blockchain for as part of this this ledger. If you go back a few years ago when blockchain first came out, a lot of people in the industry were talking about the potential applications of blockchain in programmatic advertising, potentially using it for real-time bidding.

It’s interesting to see real-life application of blockchain and to see it being used in such an appropriate way.

Generally, how blockchain technology is used, it’s not necessarily used to run auctions, but, as you said, to provide a path to show records in this ledger.

Gman: It is a great story, Mike.

Years back everybody thought blockchain will jump into cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, they said: ‘Hey, what are you going to do with tokens in advertising?’

We steer clear of it. It is a pure SaaS platform. We are not putting the impressions or the consumer data on the public blockchain.

It’s a distributed ledger, a permissioned ledger built for a specific participant to do whatever they want to do with it. And at a periodic level, a merkle proof or a hash is only being put on the public blockchain.

So we have built a very patented hybrid platform, which has got the patent in both the U.S. and Singapore right now. We are not a Bitcoin company, know it’s all about blockchain, and that’s why it’s clear to see that distributed ledger technology rather than a blockchain technology.

Michael Sweeney: It’s always good to tread distinction. You don’t want to get caught up in the whole ‘crypto net’.

Gman: In any case.

Michael Sweeney: You said that in order for a publisher and a brand to work together, they need to have some kind of common idea, with an email address and phone number. What’s the general process in terms of encrypting those IDs and ensuring that their privacy is maintained? What does that process look like?

Gman: Ideally, the industry universally uses SHA-256 today as an encryption technique, which is a one-way encryption. It ensures that when you’re decrypted, you get the same results back again.

We use that for matching purposes. By default, our technology ensures data is encrypted. You never get your digital data out.

The processing log also tells you that you encrypted it.

Then when we are matching it, and it matched on the encrypted field and when pushed back to the respective participants for activation, they decrypt it and then they activated it.

That is also put on the record as proof of activity.

We give them a full-fledged provenance ledger for both the participants so that they know this data was encrypted, matched, insights, generated, activated and pushed.

So that’s the advantage of the platform. It is encrypted, and it enables encryption.

Michael Sweeney: Is it possible to decrypt this? I think a lot of people, especially non-technical people, when they hear of encryption, if they know that I send email addresses encrypted and then it spits out some random string of letters and numbers, is it possible to then decrypt that? Or is that once it’s encrypted, that’s it, you can’t decrypt it?

Gman: You cannot decrypt. Only the source, only the owner can decrypt it.

Michael Sweeney: What kinds of channels are you working across currently? What are some of the clients that you mentioned before? What are the main channels where they are using a data clean room?

Gman: Our current focus is on publishers who are offering this as a solution to go to brands, to say: ‘I can offer you a better targeting purposes’

They have rich depository of first-party data, but clearly what platforms and CTV was written off though.

In any other means of targeting, this gives them much better targeting because brands can have their own first-party data set up in their own premises, they can match it and then serve an ad on the OTT platform, which is very, very deterministic and it’s in its nature.

So it is predominantly publishers who are the first set of people who are showing a lot of interest.

And as I told you, sport franchise is another one which is showing interest in terms of understanding consumer insights and fan data. That’s the second one. I think that’s where we are today.

The reason for… I wouldn’t say slow adoption. The reason for whatever state in terms of adoption is because many of them still don’t have first-party data, or many of them don’t have a structured customer data platform that offers them their data and in a manner that can be used.

Those are intermediary headwinds for adoption. But that’s a question of time. And everybody now knows that they need to maintain their database in their own devices.

Michael Sweeney: It’s interesting you mentioned before that a lot of the companies that are using your data clean rooms are publishers.

I think we’ve seen this with a lot of the other solutions that have been developed in response to the end of third-party cookies, whether it’s, the seller defined audiences… A lot of it seems to be led by the supply-side.

So, I guess, a lot of the companies, agencies, brands on the buy-side are still very much relying on the third-party cookies. And maybe we won’t see as much movement until they’re completely gone and they’ve got no other option.

Gman: There is still the state of denial that one day it will happen.

Till the proverbial cookie totally crumbles. Life goes on, but some of them are getting ready for the world because the winter is coming.

Michael Sweeney: Yes, exactly. Getting closer and closer. Even though Google has delayed it a few times, there will come a point where there won’t be any more delays. They would just go.

So, I wanted to ask you about the IAB Tech Lab. I think it was a month or two ago they announced that they will be working on some standards around data clean rooms. I understand that Aquilliz is part of this group.

Michael Sweeney: What kinds of things would you like to see in IAB Tech Lab Standards or definitions of data clean rooms?

Gman: We’re not discussed at the bottom, but I would say it’s more from an individual or a personal point of view that we need to standardize the provenance ledger.

I would say the consistent way in which the participants can see how the data is being used, which can be simply shared to the complaints authority to say: ‘This is what we have been doing with the data’

The best way to show it is that know if you go to any of the product that is a barcode and then that shows you the specifications of the of the product and it is like a stamp, right? We need to get to that level of sophistication to have some kind of an immediate ledger that shows that your data is being used and it is being used like a trail of information.

I think that, to my mind, it needs to be standardized because each one can generate an audit report.

Another one is like we talked about encryption. Consistent format of encryption and standards on encryption, and how it needs to be maintained.

It can even be a kit which can be given to all the publishers to say that: ‘Look, This is an encryption kit. You need to just be certified with the encryption kit.’

So, yeah, these are my two initial thoughts. I’m sure if you’re listening, you will say: ‘Yes, let’s get down to it!’

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, definitely looking forward to those standards from the IAB Tech Lab to see what comes out of that.

Michael Sweeney: The last question I have is about AWS launching a data clean room. Tell us a little bit about what this announcement is? What it means for brands, publishers, etc.? Also, what does it mean for the data clean room providers that are on the market?

Gman: I woke up in the morning with this news. My immediate reaction is ‘wow!’ I think even before the industry has begun, it is getting commoditized.

We already have quite a few players offering data clean rooms today.

Amazon coming with its data clean room solution is a fantastic thing. They have a natural product extension capabilities of offering these clean room solutions.

And in fact, many of the other solution providers, let’s say, if I ignore Azure and GCP, all the other clean room providers, the Infosum, Habu, LiveRamp recently, there are quite a few people there. All of them use any one of this cloud solutions provider to offer the clean room solution. The cloud essentially sits with these three big guys.

If the the big guys already offer this solution as clean rooms, it is interesting to see how this entire clean room solution is going to play out in the longer run, because encryption can become standardized. The ledgers can become standard in the longer run.

So, what is the actual role of a clean room? Apart from generating insights, offering activation or measurement?

I think I’m seeing an accelerated… It’s like watching a movie in fast-forward to the end. You had it available that it’s going to lead to.

That was my initial reaction.

It’s a good thing because there is no category awareness. All of us have been trying to sort from a rooftop to say: ‘Hey, it is important! It is important the world to see it evolves. I need a clean room!’

The category building and awareness is definitely good from this.

From our perspective, we see it as extremely complementary. We already use AWS today as our federated layer because Amazon offers blockchain solutions. so our node installations and our federated layer are already built on innovative solutions today.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you ask the Amazon team, they will say: ‘Hey, a AWS is different from Amazon advertising. We are two separate companies. We deal with that separately.’

Amongst them they are still two separate enterprises and it is just a technical solution coming from their technology team.

It’s a very good news. For us it is even better news because we are already working with them as federated layer partner. This helps us in building adoption faster.

Michael Sweeney: Was there anything else you wanted to add? Any other final points or anything?

Gman: Not really, Mike. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity. Thank you for giving me time. It’s a much needed solution for the industry.

I’m wishing you all the very best for doing a fantastic job of bringing awareness to these solutions from Clearcode.

Michael Sweeney: Thank thank you so much for the kind words and likewise, all the best with you and your ventures in the data clean room space.

We’ll leave a link to our LinkedIn accounts in the bio in the description below. I know you’re very active on LinkedIn talking about data clean rooms.

So and once again, thank you very much for your time and we’ll speak again soon.

Gman: Thank you, Mike.

The post Data Clean Rooms Explained: Q&A with Clearcode and Aqilliz [VIDEO] appeared first on Clearcode.

Insider’s View: AdTech & MarTech Q&A With Steve Dunlop

Mike Sweeney — Wed, 01 May 2019 12:11:26 +0000

“One of the main reasons why personalization works is because humans like to hear things that we recognize and that feel familiar, such as our location, time or weather.”

When radio moved from analog to digital, it opened a whole new world of opportunities.

For the latest edition of Insider’s View: AdTech & MarTech Q&A, we caught up with Steve Dunlop, Founder and CEO of A Million Ads, who saw one such opportunity and decided to run with it.

You can connect with Steve on LinkedIn.

Tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up founding A Million Ads

My background is in engineering. At university, I studied all different types of engineering, from structural and civil to mechanical and electrical.

My first real job out of university was working as a strategy consultant for a small, boutique telecoms-and-media company called Spectrum.

I’ve always been fascinated with radio and audio, so after about six years at Spectrum, I moved to Manchester and worked as a producer for a rock-music radio station called Xfm.

It was at Xfm where I learned the art of storytelling through audio – using voice, music and sound effects, rather than visuals, to tell a story in a short space of time.

Then in 2013, I started working for the UK’s largest radio operator, Global Radio, as Head of Strategy and Development.

Part of my job was to migrate the old-school analog broadcast setup to the new world of digital media to more effectively compete with companies like Spotify and Pandora.

One of the main projects I worked on at Global was launching the digital audio exchange (DAX), which allows advertisers to buy digital-audio inventory coming from devices connected to the Internet, such as smartphones.

So if you were listening to the radio in your car, you’d hear a broadcast ad, whereas if you were listening to the radio on your iPhone, you’d hear a digital ad.

The move to digital-audio ads provided advertisers the same opportunities as digital ads in other media, such as targeting, segmentation and audience-buying.

However, I noticed that the 30-second broadcast ads that people heard in their cars were exactly the same as the digital ads people would hear on their phones, meaning advertisers weren’t taking advantage of this new opportunity to personalize the ads, despite having the possibility to do so.

I started looking around to see if anyone had already come up with a solution to this, but it turned out that nobody had.

So in the summer of 2015, I decided to quit my job and set out to solve this very problem.

That’s how A Million Ads was born.

What is A Million Ads and what does the company do exactly?

A Million Ads is a dynamic creative and personalization platform for digital-audio ads.

The solution is actually quite simple. A Million Ads takes some information known about the user and delivers an ad that sounds like it was made especially for them.

For example, based on the person’s time zone, we can tell whether its the morning, afternoon or evening, and what day of the week it is.

We use location data to determine which city you’re in, which also gives us information about the weather at the time. We also know which device you are using and how many times you’ve heard a particular ad, so we know which stage of the campaign you are in.

All of this makes it possible to create a unique ad that feels like its speaking to each individual user.

As most people listen to audio services via headphones (Spotify says it’s roughly 70%), it creates this very intimate connection whereby we’re able to deliver a message straight into someone’s brain almost.

We feel that this was a huge and untapped opportunity for which we have the solution, so we built a tool that allows advertisers to design and create these ads.

How are you able to create so many of these highly personalized and dynamic ads when the incoming data changes all the time?

The way it works is that you record small parts of an ad and then match them together to create a complete ad.

So, for example, if it’s the morning and you’re in Manchester, the first part of the ad would be broken up in the following way:

Part 1: “How’s your morning going…”

Part 2: …in Manchester?”

We record the different versions of these parts and then our system mixes them together, along with music and sound effects, to create a great-sounding, complete ad that matches the environment the user is in.

Here’s an example of what the recording session looks like:

100 thousand ads in one hour! from A Million Ads on Vimeo.

By recording all these different pieces, it’s as easy for us to create a million versions of one ad as it is for us to create one.

It sounds like advertisers can get quite specific with the messaging and produce a lot of variations. What’s the biggest number of versions of one ad your company has ever created?

The biggest number of variations for a single ad that we’ve ever created was around 8.3 million.

This particular client had 400 store locations and 20 different products that they wanted to advertise. When you multiply that with other variables, such as the days of the week, weather or temperature, and the time of day, you can see how quickly it is to get this large number of variations.

If an ad is made up of many different pieces, how are you able to deliver these dynamic and personalized creatives to the user as a complete creative?

So the actual delivery is done through the Video Ad-Serving Template (VAST).

Once upon a time, ad servers and demand-side platforms (DSPs) would send a static audio file in the ad/bid response, but now, many audio-enabled ad servers and DSPs allow advertisers to insert VAST tags, so when a DSP wins the impression, we are called to retrieve the creative. We look at the available data in the bid request and decide which ad to send back.

From there, we respond back with all the usual tracking tags and also an MP3 or OGG file which will be rendered into the audio player.

All that happens at ad-tech speed, usually around 20–30ms.

We know that dynamic ads in the display world perform better, but is it the same with audio ads?

We’ve found that the more personalized the ad, the better it performs, and we’ve got plenty of data from our clients’ campaigns that prove this.

One such example is a campaign from British Gas. In order to really test the impact of the personalized and dynamic ads, the energy giant added conversion pixels to its website to see which ad delivered the most conversions – the plain, static version or our personalized, dynamic one.

It turned out that the conversion rate of the personalized and dynamic ad was 2.4x higher than the static one.

One of the main reasons why we feel personalized and dynamic audio creatives work is because humans like to hear things that we recognize, such as our location, time of day or weather.

Which DSPs are you connected to?

We connect to the audio-specific platforms like Triton Digital and Adswizz, as well as the major DSPs that are now enabling audio in their products, such as Adobe.

In addition to that, we work with many of the music-streaming, internet-radio, and podcast publishers around the world.

Who do you work with to create these ads?

Although our clients are advertisers, agencies, and brands, we typically work with producers, creative agencies and audio specialists who use our platform to produce the ad – i.e. create the scripts and add in the various audio elements (voice overs, background music, etc.).

We also have an in-house creative team, so we sometimes create the ads ourselves.

What are your goals as a company over the next 12 months?

One of our main goals is to continue educating brand advertisers and agencies about the opportunities of digital audio and, more specifically, how dynamic creative and personalization can deliver higher conversion rates, more sales, etc.

We are also updating our studio tool to add AI-assisted creativity features as well as releasing a podcast-specific version of our tool, just for podcast advertisers and producers.

Finally, we will be releasing a video-enabled version of our tool to allow advertisers to truly personalize their video advertising.

The post Insider’s View: AdTech & MarTech Q&A With Steve Dunlop appeared first on Clearcode.

Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Greg Blackman [Part 14]

Mike Sweeney — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 13:22:27 +0000

For many in the Ad Tech industry, 2016 will go down as the year of header bidding. But despite the hype, popularity, and wide-scale adoption, there are still a number of questions that linger.

So for our latest edition of Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A, we caught up with Greg Blackman – CEO and co-founder of Bidfluence – to talk about all things header bidding.

You can connect with Greg on LinkedIn and follow Bidfluence on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the Ad Tech industry?

I got started in online advertising by crashing one of the original Ad:Tech conferences in San Francisco. I handed out my resume at an after party at one of the local nightclubs to Ad Tech companies. It worked and I started my career working for AskJeeves before it was changed to Ask.com. 10 years later, I ended up working for some very respectable ad tech companies, including AdKnowledge and OpenX.

Then in 2016, I founded Bidfluence.

2. What specifically does Bidfluence do and how does it fit into the larger online advertising and marketing picture?

Bidfluence is an ad exchange that aggregates both server-side and client-side demand and is flexible enough to work within PreBid.js as an adapter, ad server or server-side connection. Our vision is to do our part to clean up a lot of the violations we see on both the buy and sell sides.

From an ad quality perspective, we’ve created multiple protections to seek out and eliminate endemic issues, such as auto-redirects, in-banner videos and AQ latency. This is all done in real time in a live environment and helps ease the game of whack-a-mole, which publishers are unfortunately still playing today.

By aggregating the demand and implementing these ad quality controls, we provide publishers with a very safe way of accessing demand at scale. This also helps to fill historically difficult impressions.

3. As a company that works closely with publishers, what does the adoption of header bidding look like?

The move from waterfall over to header bidding is very use-case specific.

Large publishers, specifically in the US, were the first ones to start using header bidding, but they haven’t fully committed to only using header bidding. Most of them today use a combination of header bidding and waterfalling via their ad server (typically DFP).

We’re finding that most other geographic locations that support programmatic are moving in this direction as well. Smaller publishers are also starting to leverage header bidding through a completely pre-configured 3rd-party wrapper or by reaching out directly to the players on the PreBid.js list.

4. Are publishers happy with the results they’ve seen from header bidding and do they have any concerns about moving away from the waterfall and towards header bidding?

The publishers that have adopted header bidding have been happy with the results as there has been a large revenue lift for pretty much all of them.

However, the move from the waterfall towards header bidding brings new concerns and begs some initial questions, such as – what does this new configuration look like, how long is the time out, how many players are there, who are they?

There’s a whole new world of questions that opens up when a publisher adopts header bidding.

5. Moving the bidding to a server seems to be the next logical step, but are many publishers moving towards the server-side implementation. If yes, what’s driving the change?

Revenue is still the number one value proposition driving integrations. Because server-side integrations allow for more companies to compete in a more efficient manner, there should theoretically be higher CPMs. So, yes, we as an industry will eventually move from client-side integrations to server-side ones.

However, I wouldn’t say that true server-side header bidding is here yet. Even the largest publishers are still working through the nuance of configuring their client-side wrapper configurations. Someone will create an easy way to provide effective yield management server-side in a unified auction. Today, only the most advanced publishers are building their own solutions.

The biggest thing slowing down the transition is the technical burden of creating a system that is capable of handling OpenRTB end points. Some of the other issues that haven’t been worked through yet are loss of cookies, discrepancies, and the cost of handling the influx of server requests.

6. How do you think the issues found in server-side header bidding (e.g. transparency and cookie loss) should be, or will be, addressed over the coming years?

Well, we are actually working on some products that will tackle some of the issues associated with server-side header bidding. So I’m going to reserve my right to answer that question at a later time. Please stay tuned.

Click here to read our previous Ad Tech & MarTech Q&As.

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Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Niklas Nikolaidis [Part 13]

Mike Sweeney — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 07:08:12 +0000

Multiculturalism brings with it a number of opportunities, such as access to specific skills and knowledge, economic growth, and a chance to learn about and discover other cultures – just to name a few. But for advertisers and marketers, multiculturalism also opens the door to a niche market – one that they can enter with great success, if done correctly.

So, for our latest edition of Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A, we caught up with a man who knows and understands multicultural advertising from both sides of the advertising equation – Niklas Nikolaidis.

Niklas is the founder of Joinville – an independent trading desk specializing in multicultural and global online advertising.

You can connect with Niklas on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the Ad Tech industry?

I worked as a Marketing Manager for various US and UK companies and ran heavily with SEM and display campaigns back in 2004 and onwards. Having done that for a couple of years and with bigger and bigger budgets, I realized there was a need for a niche digital entity with the skills I had acquired.

So in 2008, I quit my day job and started a digital agency/affiliate network selling ad space through CPA deals. I thought affiliate marketing was what every advertiser wanted. Boy, was I wrong…! :)

As client campaign briefs got more and more complex and global, I realized that direct media buys would not deliver the results and ROI our clients needed. So I started looking at programmatic advertising (this was 2011) to pinpoint the users and inventory we needed. Google let us in as a certified partner for AdX in 2011 where I started trading. Back then, demand-side platform (DSP) UIs were breaking all the time and geo-targeting worked badly. Luckily, this has improved a lot.

Since 2011, I’ve led a team of media traders and yield managers optimizing on both sides of the auction. This gives us a unique understanding of the relationship between the buyers and sellers in the programmatic marketplace, as we also monetise publisher inventory through aggregating different SSPs and direct advertisers.

To simplify vertical audience targeting, we built our own audience platform, Mundo, and integrated it on top of several DSPs. It now has hundreds of users from all continents.

2. What specifically does Joinville do and how does it fit into the larger online advertising and marketing picture?

Joinville’s programmatic buying arm helps clients and agencies buy media, execute and optimize campaigns targeting multicultural (ethnic) audiences. Those buys are facilitated via DSPs and individual direct site buys.

We started as a programmatic trading desk for multicultural advertising in 2011 as we saw an increased demand for marketing services catering to companies and organizations selling and communicating to the fast-growing multicultural communities.

At the time, we were only able to access programmatic inventory either directly on ad exchanges like DoubleClick AdX or on US-based DSPs, which had very little non-US inventory available as they were mostly looking at US impressions.

To scale client campaigns rapidly, we built up databases of high-performing sites, apps and video platforms suitable for multicultural advertising together with setting up publisher marketplaces for specific audiences.

In a nutshell, Joinville targets these hard-to-find vertical, cultural audiences (ethnic) and serves them with the right message in the right context.

3. As a company that specializes in multicultural advertising and marketing, what are some of the challenges companies face when expanding their advertising and marketing activities into new countries and cultures? And more importantly, how can they overcome some of the initial hurdles?

What is interesting to see is that some countries like Turkey, Poland and others have Internet users that are very reluctant to act on ads. Click rates and engagement levels tend to be lower across the board for those countries and have been so during my time in this industry. So culture, history and also country-specific traditions matter when trying to penetrate certain markets.

Color usage can also be very sensitive in specific countries – in some Asian countries the color yellow is seen as a sign of illness, in Latin American countries red is historically a reminder of their colonisation.

There are some easy-to-miss details that could disturb or destroy a company’s go-to-market strategy if they don’t pay attention to them. Running user testing pre-launch is an easy way to avoid these problems.

4. What have been some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen in online advertising and marketing since Joinville started in 2011?

Adtech overall has improved a lot since 2011 with major transparency improvements overall; deal ID functionality is now streamlined between platforms. Combating ad fraud is now a priority, even though it should be even more prioritised, and machine learning is becoming more mainstream both in reporting, automation and targeting.

To me, the sell side is a much more dynamic area where header bidding is paving the way for a unified auction and as a way to eliminate all the manual steps previously involved in an auction.

Finally, I also see blockchain technology starting to emerge as a serious alternative for identity management and user verification for the years to come.

5. How does the multicultural marketing and advertising market in the US compare to the one in Europe? Is one doing better and/or growing faster than the other? And why do you think this is?

The US adtech sector and programmatic advertising is, in my opinion, 1-2 years ahead of the rest of the world. Both in the actual QPS horsepower needed to enter the market but also in overall market maturity for data-driven media buys.

The same applies to multicultural marketing where the sheer market size (120 million people are considered multicultural in the US) is 3x bigger than, for example, in Europe. So data sets, audience lists and campaign requirements are much more sophisticated in the US than elsewhere.

Click here to read our previous Ad Tech & MarTech Q&As.

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Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Frans Riemersma [Part 12]

Mike Sweeney — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 07:31:11 +0000

There are a number of reasons why marketing campaigns fail to produce the desired results. Sometimes the targeting is off, the content isn’t attracting enough attention, but often it’s because the marketing strategy was poorly implemented and executed, or worse, there was no strategy to begin with.

Having the right strategy, implementing it correctly, and being agile are sometimes all it takes to produce the right results and keep teams focused and motivated.

And no one understands the importance of this more than Frans Riemersma, co-founder of Boardview.io. Frans and the team have created a tool that helps marketing teams better adapt, visualize, and execute their marketing strategies.

You can connect with Frans on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the MarTech industry?

Both marketing and development are my passions and playground. Guess where I ended up? Optimizing marketing environments, of course. I have been doing so for over 20 years for multiple Fortune 500 companies. In total, I have been involved in over 200 MarTech projects, and counting.

I have optimized marketing operations environments by redesigning processes and implementing tools. Romek Jansen and I have developed a method to implement MarTech stacks in a shorter time period and with higher adoption rates.

We explained our approach in our book, Marketing Resource Management; The noble art of getting things done in marketing. Efficiently, in 2008. The book presents a MarTech canvas to quickly plot marketing technology stacks in order to optimize the overall MarTech stack, known as the Ten Functional Areas of Marketing.

2. What specifically does Boardview.io do and how does it fit into the larger online marketing picture?

Marketing teams generally lack a plan. During my 20 years in the field, I’ve learned that marketing strategy plans are either absent or abundantly tracked in a plethora of disconnected files.

Consequently, other departments have no idea what marketing is doing. How could they? There is no shared up-to-date plan. To them it feels as if marketing does not even know what they are doing within their own department.

Boardview.io presents marketing teams a visual representation of their strategy. It shows the goals marketing is currently working on, like Content Marketing strategies, Lead Generation strategies, Social Media strategies, etc. Working with a goal tree takes marketing from being task driven to being truly goal driven.

Goals can be quickly updated during weekly meetings. Goal progress can be easily shared within and across teams by sending a weekly infographic via email. Now, everyone can track what marketing is doing and how they drive value for the entire company. We have seen CEOs starting to love their CMOs! Even sales managers fell in love with our users from marketing teams.

In addition, Boardview connects with Zapier so you can integrate it with task management tools. This allows marketing managers to make their strategy actionable. Marketing staff now know how every task they perform adds to the success of their company.

Boardview.io connects the boardroom to scrum boards, so to speak.

3. What have been some of the biggest changes in online marketing that you’ve seen over the past 5 -10 years?

Enterprise software is out. MarTech stacks are in.

The shift from enterprise software to MarTech stacks is fundamental. In marketing technology, adoption has always been the biggest hurdle to take, even if all the features are there. There is an instinctive resistance against big tools that are forced upon the staff and require elaborate training.

People prefer to pick their own tools to execute the tasks that come with their territory. A B2B tool should be as intuitive as a B2C tool. Using integration tools like Zapier and IFTTT, the apps people are already using can be easily connected.

4. In your opinion, where do teams generally go wrong when developing and executing their marketing strategies?

Contrary to popular believe, strategy should not be carved in stone. Back in the old days, CMOs would write their plan once per year and execute it throughout the next 12 months. Those days are over in the current agile era.

In volatile markets, the only constant is change. You learn new things every day. To stay in sync with the market, they should be updating their strategy constantly, but they don’t.

Also, managers don’t break their strategic goals down into monthly or even weekly goals for their staff to work with. Inevitably, their staff will start to feels lost.

As a result, meetings are often endless, confusing and overcrowded. Agile goal management helps to get things right. Having a 30-minute weekly standup discussing strategy progress is all it takes.

According to research (see the graphic in our post), sending goals and action commitments to a friend creates public commitment and also correlates with higher goal achievement.

Agile scrum boards have proven helpful for the staff. Likewise, agile strategies help managers to get the control without ending up “micro-management by spreadsheets”.

5. What do you think are some MarTech and digital marketing trends we’ll see in 2017?

An important trend will be that marketing departments manage marketing software like an ecosystem.

MarTech stacks give marketers the flexibility to change tools when required, maybe even per campaign. Some best practises for stacks will emerge, and they will be shared among companies. This will encourage SaaS tool developers to improve their products even further. All for the greater benefit of marketing, of course.

Click here to read our previous Ad Tech & MarTech Q&As.

The post Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Frans Riemersma [Part 12] appeared first on Clearcode.

Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Robert Brill [Part 11]

Mike Sweeney — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 12:11:04 +0000

A lot has changed in online advertising and marketing over the past decade, so who better to talk to about the changes, challenges, and trends of these 2 industries than Robert Brill from BrillMedia.co.

During Robert’s 13+ years in digital advertising, he’s seen it all – from the birth of social media to the rise of programmatic media buying.

You can connect with Robert on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the Ad Tech/MarTech industry?

I spent 13 years in the digital advertising space starting with digital media strategy and then moving into digital activation. In 2010 when programmatic advertising became important to our clients and our business I took an active role in developing programmatic solutions.

My expertise is using demand-side platforms (DSPs) to buy advertising space and set up smart testing strategies while at the same time optimizing for performance and ensuring the numbers tell a business story.

We combine precise audience data points, over a hundred ecosystem partners, and smart algorithmic optimization solutions for advertisers. Additionally, with my background in digital strategy I provide clients with oftentimes holistic digital marketing solutions.

2. What specifically does BrillMedia do and how does it fit into the larger online advertising/marketing picture?

BrillMedia.co partners with multiple demand-side platforms and influencer-marketing platforms to activate digital media for clients. We provide the same powerful digital marketing capabilities that large agencies provide their clients and we make them available to small and mid-sized markers.

We serve large enterprise marketers by developing holistic programmatic solutions. Large marketers often have programmatic solutions already in place so a lot of our work is refining the current relationships and helping them work smarter with existing partners. We bring together groups of specialists to provide an outside and unbiased point of view about pricing, optimization, workflow and an overarching media strategy. Of course, if a client wants us to build a programmatic solution from scratch, we do that too.

3. What have been some of the biggest changes in online marketing and display advertising that you’ve seen over the past 5-10 years?

The marketplace changes every 3 to 6 months. There are new solutions, new players and new opportunities for innovation. So I’ve been working with social media before it was social media, then the evolution of MySpace and then ultimately the dominance of Facebook.

I have also seen the rise of mobile. Every year for the last five years has been “the year of mobile”. We are definitely in the period of mobile and that’s not going anywhere anytime soon. In 2017, three fourths of the $32B programmatic spending is expected to run on mobile devices.

I’ve watched as ad networks were created then competed with ad exchanges, and were then overthrown by the programmatic ecosystem. Some adapted very well and others fell by the wayside.

I think one of the most stunning evolutions in the space is really the ability for large enterprise marketers to take their media buying capability in-house. Usually that was reserved for the largest marketers and the exceptional advertiser. Today, there are some distinct advantages to buying in-house rather than outsourcing that function.

4. As someone who works with large marketing organizations and ad agencies, what are some of the biggest challenges they face currently?

The biggest challenge is the complexity and the sophistication of the marketplace. Sophistication is fantastic because it gives every player a unique and distinct ability to create unique solutions. The complexity makes it immensely confusing and the fact is there are still challenges around baseline marketplace knowledge, terminology, purposeful obfuscation, viewability, fraudulent traffic, and brand safety. Those all need to be addressed and each marketer must create their own unique set of enterprise solutions to handle those issues in the best way possible.

With such a complex ecosystem we’re in the stage where organizations are taking a much more hands-on approach to ad buying. Between agencies, advertisers and outside partners there’s an opportunity for obfuscation, and where there is confusion there is often room for profit. So, it’s very important for large marketing organizations that want to go on the programmatic journey to deploy smart programmatic teams in-house, even if they don’t do the trading directly in-house.

5. In your opinion, what trends do you think we’ll see in Ad Tech/MarTech in 2017?

We’re seeing consolidation. Adobe just bought TubeMogul and earlier this year Krux was bought by Salesforce. We’re seeing that big companies, whether they’re outside players or part of the ecosystem, are scooping up solutions. They are building marketing stacks to compete with Google and Facebook. Facebook bought Atlas as an ad server so they could build an ad network.

I think the other big evolution is the creation and the ability to run not simply cookie-targeted or device-ID-targeted campaigns, but people-based campaigns. Using lists of people who we know are our past customers and interested parties, we can target really precise groups of people by connecting these lists to user IDs. These users can be email subscribers, buyers, people requesting more information, etc.

The targeting can already be done in Facebook and Google, and we’ll be seeing more publishers make this type of targeting available. This is a big leap forward for marketing. There is also a continuing pursuit to self-service innovation. To me, that looks like a pursuit to market parity, further giving small marketers powerful marketing tools traditionally available to large enterprise marketers.

Recently, Facebook made available engagement targeting, which lets us run campaign targeting that has been similar to capabilities in demand-side platforms for years. For example, remarketing to users who have seen at least 50% of a video ad has been available in TubeMogul for many years. So, we are seeing a boom in self-service marketing options available to smaller marketers. I think this leads to opportunities to service the 30MM small business marketers who will want to learn how to leverage these powerful targeting capabilities.

The post Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Robert Brill [Part 11] appeared first on Clearcode.

Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Ari Paparo [Part 10]

Mike Sweeney — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 11:24:44 +0000

For this edition of Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A, we caught up with Ari Paparo – CEO and co-founder of Beeswax. Ari is no stranger to the Ad Tech world, having held VP positions at a number of large companies, including DoubleClick (before and after Google’s acquisition), Nielsen, and AppNexus.

You can connect with Ari on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the Ad Tech industry?

I’ve been in ad tech for almost 15 years. I was part of the team that turned DoubleClick around through to its sale to Google. In particular I built the rich media and video business there from inception. While at DoubleClick I wrote and drove adoption of the VAST standard in conjunction with the IAB. After Google I was the Head of Product Management for Nielsen’s digital measurement group, and later Appnexus.

I am now the CEO and co-founder of Beeswax, the first company to offer a platform for RTB bidding, which we call Bidder-as-a-Service.

2. What specifically does Beeswax do and how does it fit into the larger online advertising picture?

Through my time as an executive in ad tech and an advisor to many venture-backed companies, I saw a common need for sophisticated media buyers to get transparency, control, and ownership over their ad tech stack. The DSP solutions, even those with APIs, are basically black boxes. The homegrown bidding solutions are generally very hard to scale and maintain, with terrible ROI.

Beeswax’s Bidder-as-a-Service gives customers a complete RTB bidding stack in the cloud, for a fraction of the cost and complexity of building one from scratch. We give our customers everything they need from a DSP, including a UI, API, reporting, integration with supply, etc., but then let the customer’s engineering and data science team extend the stack with custom algorithms, data, targeting, and creatives.

Our product is very appealing to the most sophisticated buyers — those with tech assets and unique data.

3. What have been some of the biggest changes in online display advertising that you’ve seen over the past 5-10 years?

Well clearly programmatic has been a disruptive innovation in ad tech. I even wrote an article on this subject in Ad Age. Before programmatic took hold, the world looked pretty different – we were focused on direct-sold rich media units, the IAB was pushing “rising stars”, and there were lots of efforts to make the order management systems interoperate between the buy side and the sell side. After programmatic, all these went out the window.

The exchange environment took order management and workflow off the table and enabled buyers and sellers to optimize in their own worlds. Rich media became old-fashioned and was replaced with dynamic creatives. The data business took off with DMPs, data exchanges, data onboarding, publisher co-ops, and everything else under the sun. Literally, a whole different industry has emerged within the last five years.

The other big change in digital is clearly the rise of Silicon Valley king makers like Google and Facebook. For a while the industry was able to ignore Google and continue to enjoy old-fashioned media businesses as the center of power in digital, but that’s clearly changed.

4. As someone who works with Ad Tech/MarTech companies, what are some of the biggest challenges they face currently?

For venture-funded ad tech companies, the bar for financing and expansion has gone way up. First, businesses that have a media revenue component face 1x valuations on revenue, which isn’t very exciting. For businesses with non-media revenue, there’s a big discount for non-recurring revenue, like percentage-of-media deals. So, in general, you are seeing more exits in ad tech as companies struggle with later round funding.

From a customer perspective, there is a lot of competition and a lot of clutter out there, especially in the US market. So Ad Tech and MarTech companies run the risk of stalling out at $10-20 million in annual revenue, without being able to get traction with larger enterprise accounts.

5. In your opinion, what trends do you think we’ll see in Ad Tech/MarTech in 2017?

We saw Adobe buy TubeMogul last week, so you’ll see a lot more of that type of acquisition, with the major martech/cloud names buying scaled DSPs. I would expect Salesforce and Oracle to make moves, but also potentially a bunch of other traditional tech companies looking to buy into the execution layer of the stack.

The post Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Ari Paparo [Part 10] appeared first on Clearcode.

Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Scott Vaughan [Part 9]

Mike Sweeney — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 11:24:33 +0000

Another week, another edition of Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A. And this week we caught up with Scott Vaughan, the CMO at Integrate, and got his views on the changes, challenges, and trends in the Ad Tech & MarTech industries.

You can connect with Scott on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the Ad Tech and MarTech industries?

I feel very fortunate to be in a unique position in that I am a marketer who grew up in the tech industry. This helped me become very comfortable with technology and what it enabled, especially living through the IT boom in the 90s and 2000s (it looks eerily similar to the explosion MarTech is going through now).

In my current role as CMO at Integrate, not only am I leading a team using MarTech to grow and scale our software business, I get to work on applying Integrate and MarTech solutions with hundreds of B2B marketing teams. This front seat of the rollercoaster position allows us to learn so much, both strategically and tactically, so quickly. The spotlight pressure of this position means we also have to “drink our own champagne”, using MarTech to advance our business. I really enjoy this challenge.

2. What specifically does Integrate do and how does it fit into the larger online marketing picture?

Integrate is a first mover in the emerging field of demand orchestration. Today, B2B marketers waste billions of dollars and resources on manual tasks and misaligned top-funnel program investment that are forced to drive volume over quality in order to hit sales pipeline goals.

Integrate’s software tools, data and integrations sit on top of marketing automation and CRM to automate top-funnel programs, data sources and channels (content syndication, events, inbound lead gen, for example). Our B2B customers, such as Dell, Rackspace, CA and Pluralsight, use the software to also validate, append and enhance data before it is injected into marketing automation. These tools and automated processes ensure lead data marketability and increased pipeline conversion. Many analysts have called this demand orchestration layer at the top of the funnel as the missing piece in the need for a fully automated, integrated funnel.

3. What have been some of the biggest changes in online marketing that you’ve seen over the past 5-10 years?

Wow, there are so many changes and advances. It’s fun and scary at the same time to be a marketer. But from my chair, there is one big shift and one incredibly powerful tool marketers now have in our arsenal. The game-changing trend is the power and knowledge has shifted to the customer/consumer (buyer) instead of the vendor (seller). They are hyper-connected, have access to info and can learn more about your solution with a few clicks or a quick note to their social media connections. This has caused us to make foundational changes in how we market, how we work with sales, and where we spend our time as marketers.

The monster change in terms of capabilities is the availability of data to fuel and inform our marketing effort. This means we have at our fingertips: 1) performance data to guide and optimize our investments and 2) customer/prospect data to better engage and serve our customers. These can radically improve marketing’s ability to directly impact the business. The downside is that when data is used improperly, it can overwhelm marketing teams, or worse, destroy your relationship with customers. These shifts have to be understood and fundamental to all marketing strategies.

4. What do you see as the biggest challenges in Ad Tech/MarTech currently?

MarTech is still in its early stages, so there are plenty of challenges. One of the most significant challenges I see is the lack of marketing technology skills and experience to identify, deploy and optimize the use of MarTech tools. Marketing technology has tremendous value but it’s simply an enabler of our marketing strategy and requirements. You would not have somebody who has their driver’s license suddenly out driving a big rig, or even scarier, hitting the Formula One circuit.

Today, the ability to efficiently and effectively get business value can be challenging, especially when you don’t have the MarTech talent. It becomes even more complicated when you have to integrate multiple technologies, processes and data flows to deliver on the promised value. We are definitely making progress, but we are still learning “on the job” both as practitioners and as an industry. And they are not teaching MarTech in school, yet! The good news is, like all industries that automate and adopt technology, we will get there.

5. In your opinion, what trends do you think we’ll see in Ad Tech/MarTech in 2017?

My purview is B2B MarTech, so here are a few:

1. The industry rush for MarTech “gold” will continue. With CMOs and marketing teams spending on technology, more players and more solutions will come to market. Marketers should not be freaked out and buy into the fear mongering with grand visions of needing to sort through 4000+ vendors. Every growing market has this challenge. My advice is to define the core platforms you use today (marketing automation, CRM, data management systems, for example) and use their ecosystem or providers who are designed to work with your core systems.

2. While predictive analytics – the ability to identify your best customer opportunities – holds tremendous promise, marketers will pull back a bit in 2017 and wait for the first movers to figure it out and for predictive technology to continue to advance. I want to emphasize I believe predictive is core to the future of marketing and marketers need to jump in, test and experiment – go full throttle once you figure it out for your organization. The predictive playbook is just not written yet and most organizations will not be ready in 2017 (including ours). A year plus from now, it will be a different story!

3. Account-based Marketing (ABM) is included in every B2B marketing planning conversation today. After years of putting in systems and processes and relying on inbound and nurturing, marketers will struggle to shift to execute against ABM in the year ahead. It’s not for a lack of effort. Rather, the challenge is that ABM is a big, strategic shift. It takes time to discover and build relationships with decision makers on the buying committee of each target account and marketers will have to tweak and master new techniques and tools. ABM will have a big impact on B2B marketing, but in 2017 marketers will feel frustration in making the shift.

The post Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with Scott Vaughan [Part 9] appeared first on Clearcode.

Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A With Seth Ulinski [Part 8]

Mike Sweeney — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 11:03:57 +0000

So far in our Insider’s View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A series, we’ve featured members from the media, CEOs, and directors – just to name a few. But for this edition of our Q&A, we caught up with Seth Ulinski, Senior Analyst at Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR), to get his analytical point of view on the Ad Tech & MarTech industries.

Seth has over a decade’s experience in the technology and digital marketing sectors. You can follow him on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the ad tech and martech industries?

My career in ad tech started as a campaign manager, which helped me understand the nuts and bolts of ad serving. I’ve worked on the publishing side as well as with tech vendors leading the charge in areas such as programmatic and viewability. I then transitioned to work as an industry analyst and consultant, expanding my coverage into martech.

2. What is the mission of Technology Business Research and what are you responsible for?

Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) is a market research and consulting firm that empowers the world’s leading technology companies with strategic insight, transformational frameworks and market intelligence to scale and drive profitable growth.

As a member of TBR’s Digital practice, I’m responsible for recognizing and understanding key trends across the ad tech and martech landscapes – two major pieces of the customer experience (CX). On the vendor side, this includes capabilities, market positioning and business performance. A few of the key segments I cover include demand side platforms (DSPs), data management platforms (DMPs), and enterprise marketing clouds. The other side involves connecting with enterprise buyers and their agencies to understand factors that impact their decision making when it comes to ad tech and martech investments.

3. What have been some of the biggest changes in ad tech and martech that you’ve seen over the past five to 10 years?

It’s interesting to see the impact of programmatic platforms on the digital ad industry — particularly self-service tools. Through technology, small in-house or external agency teams now have the ability to plan and launch complex global multi-channel campaigns optimized to a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs). Ten years ago this would have required a massive team. Even five years ago this would have required significantly more people compared to today. The scale, targeting and analytics these technologies provide are impressive.

Also, the shift from a desktop world of cookie-based targeting and tracking technologies to a mobile world where device IDs and deterministic & probabilistic methodologies rule continues to have a massive impact on industry stakeholders.

4. What are some of the current trends in ad tech and martech?

While insourcing or use of self-service tools (e.g., DSPs) by marketers is in its early days, I think the trend will continue. The convergence and integration of ad tech and martech will help fuel this, as an integrated stack enables better customer experiences.

Programmatic TV advertising represents another nascent, high-growth area. The ability to combine capabilities in today’s online and mobile realm with linear and cable TV is driving investments by content owners and communication service providers. As an industry analyst, it’s fascinating to see these worlds converge via ad tech.

5. What do you see as the biggest challenges ad tech and martech face today?

From an enterprise buyer standpoint, the vendor landscape is still highly fragmented — choosing partners can be a bit overwhelming, particularly if your team is looking for a best-of-breed tech stack —creating opportunities for IT strategy firms, management consulting firms and digital agencies.

Another challenge is trust and business transparency between clients and agencies — the legacy media-buying model of agencies is at risk, largely due to adoption of programmatic tools. As a result, I think agencies and brands are in the early stages of identifying best practices for today’s programmatically fueled advertising market.

Additionally, the rise of walled gardens limits effectiveness of ad tech and martech platforms. While the industry as a whole favors APIs and openness, a few of the heavyweights (e.g., Facebook, Google) are leveraging unique data sets and/or media to capture advertising and ad tech investment. Placing campaigns on these hybrid vendors typically results in multiple tech stacks being used and/or ad hoc campaigns. This creates challenges in areas such as operational efficiency and marketing attribution.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the adoption of ad blocking by consumers resulting from an inequitable value exchange among consumers, publishers and advertisers. Ad blockers signal today’s advertising model is broken; consumers expect a better experience from digital media.

6. As someone who provides analyses on numerous ad tech and martech platforms, do you see more individual platforms emerging or more of a consolidation of platforms — e.g., companies acquiring others and offering marketing stacks rather than individual solutions?

The fragmented vendor landscape is ripe for consolidation, and we are starting to see both enterprise IT vendors and communications vendors make aggressive moves to own more of the digital consumer experience.

Enterprise vendors will remain acquisitive, as it typically makes more sense for them to purchase a vendor’s tools than try to develop them internally given the speed and innovative nature of the market. However, there is room for newcomers, so I think we’ll continue to see more individual platforms emerge.

In this vein, it’s good to see an ad tech vendor such as The Trade Desk maintain independence and launch a successful IPO in the U.S. market. This gives further merit to ad tech being not just high-growth but a profitable business segment.

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