You’ve likely seen stories in the press over the last few weeks about brands taking greater control of their media supply. They’re doing this to proactively keep their ads off media that damages their brand and does not align with their values. MediaMath has been working on a solution to these and related concerns for many months, and the timing couldn’t be better for me to share an update on behalf of the team here on how we are helping our clients better achieve those objectives.
As part of MediaMath’s strategy to continue to make digital advertising addressable, and deliver a hygenic experience that holds all parties accountable for the customer experience, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Curated Market, an offering that takes an audience-first approach to high-quality media buying. Our clients will use the Curated Market to get better reach and win rates against their best customers and prospects, with the promise that those audiences are found on brand-safe environments.
MediaMath has been a leader and innovator in the industry for 10 years now. We launched the first DSP for the industry, built key functionality like automated guaranteed functionality and transparent reporting and, over that time, have integrated with hundreds of high-quality global and local media marketplaces. In addition, we offer a robust toolset that enables our clients to manage their own media landscape. The ability for clients to marry control and access to scale has been important for them, and an investment area for us, and in 2011 we also launched the first private marketplace to allow advertisers to create deals with specific publishers to get privileged access to their inventory.
A huge step forward, but one of the challenges with private deals is that advertisers aren’t necessarily getting access to the audience they care most about: their customers and their best prospects. The Curated Market works to address that problem, by ensuring every publisher that joins the market has the specific audience that our advertisers care most about, as measured by higher win rate and reach. As publishers work to ensure they can navigate the still-complex world of supply-side monetization, MediaMath can offer them higher yield and higher-quality advertiser demand as more of the market shifts spend into the Curated Market.
One of the areas we’re particularly excited about offering is a brand-safety promise. MediaMath clients using the Curated Market will not pay for media if it does not meet the agreed-upon criteria at the publisher level, including if their ads are run on previously determined non-brand safe inventory. We are relying on several standards and protocols to back our pledge, including, but not limited to:
- Focus on large-scale, high-quality publishers
- Privileged access to high-priority inventory in the publisher ad server
- Transparent, validated URLs only
- Integrations with leading third-party verification platforms including IntegralAdScience, DoubleVerify and Peer39, to provide brand-safety filters
- Exclusion of sites or content promoting illegal activity or hateful or distasteful rhetoric
We think this is a great step forward in standing up for marketers, who deserve to know the media they are paying for is running on the best, brand-safe inventory that can reach their best audiences. But it’s not up to us alone. We will call upon our suppliers to take responsibility for their part as well. We must all continue to work to create a better media buying experience, one rooted in transparency and hygiene, the ability to make premium buying addressable and with true accountability for all actors in the ecosystem.