#sonobi

Claudine Cheever, global head of strategy & design at MediaVest, argued that it helps to have agencies and marketers think about programmatic and branding together: “What’s really exciting is that we can begin to look at asymmetrical data sets to make programmatic data more interesting.”

Cheever kind of geeked out by saying she loves working with both creatives and data scientists -- and that sometimes they aren’t mutually exclusive. “It’s imperative that we bring these functions and thinking together. Then we can use data and attach it to creativity and make brands thrive.”

Jordan Bitterman, chief strategy officer, North America, at Mindshare (who I recently interviewed at a true[x] event), maintained that marketing technology is driving a kind of mashup of data that can be used to achieve client objectives via data decisioning.  But Bitterman also said that the creative process within the context of programmatic media is lagging behind.

For those concerned that programmatic squashes the creative process, Bitterman maintained that creative can be optimized in ways that don’t “injure the creative brief.”  It seems that you just need everyone in the room together. Cheever agreed. She wants the creatives, the technologists, and the data scientists sitting at the same table.

Baba Shetty, global chief media officer, DigitasLBi, was pretty charged up: “What's incredibly exciting now is that we’re at a point where we should think about every encounter that a brand has with a person that doesn’t merely represent a lift in purchase intent, but that changes the way that person thinks about the brand in perpetuity."

Now that’s something to think about.  Programmatic media, data and predictive analytics, and all the other touchpoints along the purchase journey can be impacted by understanding consumer behavior across devices, in-store, outside the store, online, etc. Clearly, Shetty is a believer in data-driven decision-making.

The Media Kitchen’s Lowenthal thinks all media will be bought programmatically eventually -- and that doesn’t mean low-level, remnant media.

The company also announced that CRM agency Merkle and DSP MediaMath will integrate JetStream -- as well as key features within their demand platforms -- to deliver audience guarantees to their respective advertising clients.  “The Merkle Sonobi partnership represents a major evolution of marketing.

Through a deep integration of Sonobi's JetStream technology, brands can harness the power of Merkle's comprehensive people-based discovery, planning and buying capabilities to guarantee audience reach at scale and define quality media experiences for their consumers," said John Lee, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer at Merkle, in an email to Real-Time Daily.

Sonobi’s Donahue explained to

Real-Time Daily

how JetStream works. The JetStream platform is able to guarantee the buy, for example, if a retailer wants to guarantee that it is engaging with its most loyal customers. “Publishers’ ad servers don’t generally understand audiences," Donahue says.

"When you buy an audience on an upfront basis, you can get 100% of that audience. With programmatic buying, you may only get 10 to 20% of the audience. It’s a scale problem. When you pre-qualify the audience, and buy that audience in a guaranteed, upfront capacity, our technology allows you to understand the quality of each and every impression,” he adds.

Donahue’s reference to “audience guaranteed” buying -- which means that if a brand wants to buy an audience upfront on a single publisher, like The Huffington Post, for example -- that brand is receiving its most valuable customers upfront on HuffPo.

In addition, header-based integrations allow Sonobi to see every consumer, every page view and every marketable impression, according to Donahue. “We can take a buyer’s audience and their first- or third-party data and look at how much of that audience is on all of our premium publishing brands. You can see the audience there, all the impressions and the number of opportunities that are available in a guaranteed upfront capacity.”

The big takeaway here, according to Donahue, is “there’s a separation in the way people buy media today. It’s either bought experientially ('I want my ads on that particular site’) or it’s bought on a spot basis.” Sonobi offers buying on an upfront capacity in order to build the specific audience(s) that brands want. The hope is that more branding dollars will flow into the programmatic landscape with upfront buys.

“We’re not interested in integrating with a hundred different partners that are providing undifferentiated products or services,” said Montes. “We are looking for market leaders.”

Step one, he said, is a vetting process to ensure quality sourcing.

“While I want to satisfy clients and connect to anyone and everyone, it may not be the best decision for our business strategy,” Montes said. “Fraud throws things into question.”

DataXu started its fraud-free guarantee program on January 1. The company offers a 97% antifraud guarantee, which allows a 3% room for error. DataXu uses proprietary software on top of DoubleVerify’s detection tech to defend itself against fraud. DataXu clients can also opt to tack on third-party fraud detection solutions.

“We know that we won’t be 100% clean,” said Montes. “The challenge of administering it is that once you put skin in the game, RFPs are at stake,” he explained.

If fraud exceeds 3%, DataXu rebates its clients. “We have rebated our clients just about every month since the fraud guarantee has been in place,” Montes said. “Luckily, the amount has been very minimal.”

According to COO Justin Kennedy, Sonobi was drawn to internal initiatives at DataXu to attack fraud issues within programmatic. Sonobi offers buy-side and sell-side functionality around header integrations, and its technology acts as a traffic cop prior to the ad server, allowing publishers to dictate which ads go to which site visitors.

In addition to offering deal ID and antifraud guarantees, Kennedy said DataXu demonstrated a shared strategic vision about the future of online advertising.

“We fit together with DataXu very well in terms of wanting to rise above what the standard is for programmatic,” Kennedy said.

Nick Jordan, SVP of Product, Tapad

"The term ‘ad server’ is used loosely, but in its most literal form, it is the last mechanism engaged prior to an ad being served in a browser. Currently, this is what DFA and Atlas do – not an area that Tapad is investing in today.… In terms of the importance of owning our own ad-serving technology versus buying or partnering, it ultimately comes down to the primary value that the customer needs. Looking at an ad server as a piece of technology that just serves a creative asset, that's not something a company like Tapad would need to build in-house. For us, proprietary [built in-house] technology is focused on developing a richer form of analytics so that it has a native integration with the rest of our technology stack. This is the value-add for customers."

Ben Kneen, Director of Client Success, Yieldex

“It's hard for me to see a world where the ad-serving function isn't a critical component of a digital ad business, if for no other reason than it handles the non-sexy task of targeting and counting toward a billable goal.… I'm not sure I'd be in a hurry to build or own my own ad server unless I had needed some very unique and specific functionality (like connecting into a secure service like a payment system, basing ad selection on some complex search-query parameters, or writing a lot of data to an ad-server cookie) as well as a deep bench of technology folks. I think a lot of publishers who have gone down this road before really haven't been honest with themselves on either the former or the latter. People fool themselves into thinking that building an ad server isn't a big deal, and it's true that the core features of an ad server, like counting and targeting, aren't all that difficult to build. What they overlook is the infrastructure and performance piece, not to mention what it takes to keep your feature set current. That's the real nightmare, and what makes it so difficult to own your own ad server and do it well given the competition. I think you see a lot of publishers walking away from that strategy. Even the guys who were on Dart Enterprise and held on to the very end would rather get on a hosted solution than take it in-house despite the loss of some features.

Natalie Mazer, VP of Strategy and Development, AudienceScience

“In addition to full control in terms of which ads are being served, the ad server also grants full control over ad rotation and sequencing for optimization. Having an ad server as part of the tech stack also allows us to build further capability on top of it. This is important for growing concerns such as fraud protection and viewability, particularly in the video space, where viewability measurement is not available from a third party. It is important [for us to own our] ad server because it provides our clients with full control and transparency into ad delivery and optimization. The other important element is data security. Owning our own ad server provides advertisers with the knowledge that data from advertiser X is not being used by advertiser Y. That kind of unauthorized data sharing is common with traditional third-party ad servers.”

Kunal Gupta, CEO, Polar

“Ad servers are critical to help publishers manage inventory, forecast revenue and generally manage their overall monetization setup. Critical to an ad server is giving the ability for a publisher to understand all types of monetization. I recently met with a comScore Top 50 publisher who shared with me that they have four different ad servers, including one for desktop display ads, another for video ads, another for mobile and a separate solution they are building internally for custom ad formats. An ad server is like a wireless network. You expect top-notch service, high reliability, and all the capabilities that will help you do your day-to-day job. However, value creation is done on top of the infrastructure, not the infrastructure itself. It is not important to own your ad server; what’s more important is creating compelling solutions that solve real market problems."

Michael Connolly, CEO, Sonobi