Last month, we participated in ad:tech New Delhi, India’s #1 marketing and media technology event. MediaMath Country Manager, India, Pranjal Desai sat down with Matterkind Business Head Paras Mehta to discuss how we’re working with Interactive Avenues, a leading online digital marketing agency in India, to deliver advertisers a modernized ecosystem across all channels that’s transparent, fair and effective.
What marketers want
What marketers are seeking from the advertising ecosystem is pretty simple yet thus far elusive to achieve at scale: performance. This isn’t off-the-shelf performance as we’ve historically thought of it—clicks—as we know incomplete metrics like this can be doctored by fraud and can’t be tied to true business outcomes. Rather, marketers are seeking the type of performance that actually drives business results, like return on ad spend, return on investment and sales.
To get there, marketers need clean programmatic pipes, processes and partnerships. In other words, an advertising environment that is brand-safe, fraud-protected and transparent. This type of ecosystem shows marketers where their ads are running, helps them understand their audiences in more detail by layering in additional insights and offers single-view reporting. It also allows for the seamless execution of innovation and the ability to test and learn to future-proof for the post-cookie world.
How does transparency influence performance? The cleaner the inputs into programmatic pipes, the cleaner the outputs. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. Fraudulent, low-quality supply and ad spend that has gone through too many low-value intermediaries or partners that take too much of a cut leads to sub-par or inflated results.
Why is transparency important?
Watch what our partners AdColony and Lotame have to say below.
How to create a better future
Getting to the desired future state comes by way of three components:
1. Buy-side and sell-side mutual benefit
The buy and sells sides have gotten far too disintermediated from each other, to the point where they’re often even at odds. But both advertisers and publishers are working towards the common goal of getting consumers to engage with what they are putting out on the internet to generate revenue. Good quality advertising helps monetize good quality content and vice versa.
How do you bring both sides closer together again? Through bi-directional data-sharing between buy and sell side, in addition to sharing the goals each has for a given campaign.
2. Clear roadmap for industry to evolve and grow
The industry is changing too rapidly for any technology company to rest on its laurels. Being a fast-moving innovator in key growth areas like connected TV and identity is critical, in addition to offering flexible, modular tech paired with consultative professional services to maximize use of platform features.
3. Unmatched transparency
This means full visibility into all fees, via log-level impression data that aligns performance data with all media cost data—SSP fees, DSP fees, audience fees, serving fees, measurement fees—for all pathways.
“As an SSP, transparency reporting is our biggest USP,” says Amit Rathi, Country Manager, South Asia, at AdColony. “We ensure that parameters like brand safety, viewability, quality traffic are catered to.”
“Transparency is very important for a data partner or a publisher,” says Gaurav Seth, Managing Director at Lotame India. “Unlike media, where the ads are served on the website, with data, the ads are served on an external network of websites and applications. So, it’s very important to know how many impressions have been served, and that’s why transparency is important.”
Watch what our partners AdColony and Lotame have to say about the future of the digital ecosystem below.
Delivering results through an innovative, flexible and transparent ecosystem
Through better transparency, reporting and updated platform tools to run advertising campaigns and easily take action on insights, MediaMath is working hard to help marketers get the results they deserve. “We work very closely with MediaMath on a number of campaigns where we see MediaMath can either help with a solution which otherwise doesn’t exist in the market, or we are confident that with MediaMath we will be able to deliver equal if not better value for our clients,” said Mehta of Matterkind Business on behalf of Interactive Avenues. The value MediaMath brings to the agency includes:
- Flexibility to deliver performance
- Compatible with the wider ad tech ecosystem (SSPs, DMPs, brand safety partners)
- Seamless data integrations
- API-based reporting
- Best-in-class support
The promise of programmatic as an automated, agile and transparent market can be realized through partners that value full visibility into its inner workings and how they impact performance. We look forward to continuing to work with our partners and clients in India to make this the rule, not the exception.