By Bob Lord, IBM Chief Digital Officer, and Joe Zawadzki, MediaMath Founder and CEO
Let’s talk about how far digital marketing has come and be proud of that for a moment.
Twenty years ago, it was just an idea. Then, 10 years later, programmatic marketing heralded a necessary move toward a better marketing future fueled by data, powered by technology and driven by math.
Today, advertising can be found across connected screens, all controllable with a touch of a button. Ads get billions of impressions a day, touchable through APIs and UIs, which is something that was impossible just five years ago.
Marketers are breaking down organizational silos where collaboration across brand, agency, tech, media and data is finally seen as not simply necessary, but right. Real-time machine learning is used for more than half of every dollar spent in digital, where a 100-percent programmatic future is on our doorstep. Data-driven marketing is moving from one way to do marketing to the way marketing is done.
Still, the reality is we need to go much further.
If you listened only to the press, you’d hear a cacophonous cry of “fake news, fake traffic, fake metrics.” You hear that the infrastructure that manages the now billions of dollars flowing through digital marketing pipes isn’t up to the task anymore. Pixels, redirects, JavaScript and headers are the stuff of a startup industry, not the foundation for mature marketing at scale. Perhaps worst of all, experiencing that moment when kids see an ad and exclaim, “Ugh, I hate advertising.” This, above all, is a daily reminder that we can and must do more.
If marketers really want to pay off the promise of marketing as an engine of business, the connection of thought and deed—the 3 percent of the gross domestic product that powers the other 97 percent, that enables the free internet, that consumers don’t hate and could even learn to love—to move from rendering banner ads to driving business, they know they need to change.
MediaMath and IBM saw in each other something important: a shared worldview, a desire to do better and the will and capability to make it happen. So we’ve partnered to take the next evolutionary steps together. What does this mean? It means we’ll work to:
- Develop infrastructure that connects brands, consumers and all of the companies in between in a way that is enterprise-class, open and smart.
- Infuse AI into real-time marketing decisions across all channels, arming the marketer to do her job better with insights as opposed to reports.
- Delight the human behind the screen with advertising people don’t just tolerate, but appreciate as entertaining, informative and meaningful.
By providing marketers with a neutral, security-rich computing environment and giving them the ability to maintain ownership of their data through the IBM Cloud, marketers will have the insights they need to deliver the campaigns consumers want.
MediaMath and IBM are building the foundation that makes great marketing that moves at the speed of human beings possible, and we are incredibly excited to see what you make of it.