MarTech Series Interview with Bichoï Bastha, Chief Revenue and Business Officer, Dailymotion

 How will cookie based targeting and advertising and marketing evolve given today’s changes to the adtech and martech ecosystem? Bichoï Bastha, Chief Revenue and Business Officer at Dailymotion weighs in with a few thoughts:

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Tell us a little about yourself Bichoi…we’d love to hear about your role, a typical day at work?

My role at Dailymotion is CBO (Chief Business & Revenue Officer). At Dailymotion, I support and oversee various teams that work to provide the best solutions to our advertisers and to help them achieve their marketing goals through our end to end brand solutions. I also work closely with the rest of the product and engineering teams to expand Dailymotion’s proprietary ad platform capabilities and to launch innovative ad solutions. 

We’d love to dive into your thoughts on the evolution of third-party cookie based advertising / marketing and what brands need to be focusing on more as policies change?

The AdTech market has been using third-party cookies far beyond its initial purpose and it was obvious that this would be abandoned sooner or later for a more precise and more “privacy friendly” identity solution. This process was accelerated when Google released their announcement explaining why they would be sunsetting third-party cookie tracking on Chrome. Since then, consumers have become increasingly more aware of their privacy online. There has been an on-going conversation centered around digital identity and how brands and publishers are going to be able to effectively reach their audience while still protecting the consumer’s privacy. And that is the big question. 

We are confident that advanced brands or publishers like Dailymotion, who have focused for years on building a direct relationship with their users, will still be able to activate their owned first-party assets. As policies are changing, brands need to be searching for alternative methods of targeting consumers. At Dailymotion, we think that part of the solution relies on contextual targeting, where we have been massively investing for years to strengthen our video content understanding and machine learning algorithms serving our ad targeting offering.

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How according to you can marketers drive better impact with deeper contextual targeting: a few best practices that you feel needs to be followed more strongly? Also, a few marketing technologies that you feel can drive impact here?

It should be remembered that contextual targeting has always been, and will continue to be, the basis of media planning and is already the most used and effective strategy online. 

But if this traditional and user-friendly targeting strategy is becoming even more popular today it’s for three reasons. The first is because of regulation and browser limitations. The second is as a result of technology improvements. The final, and most important, is this targeting strategy drives proven results and new opportunities for advertisers to address their targets by:

• Allowing brands to offer enriched experience that drives message receptiveness and consideration due to relevancy
• Brand suitability: by only placing ads next to brand-appropriate content they can control their image
• Improved KPI: Granular contextual targeting drive higher engagement rates 
• Future proof vs browsers restrictions and privacy regulation, answering consumers concerns and states regulations.

As a leading video platform, Dailymotion has developed proprietary AI technologies that are going beyond most contextual solutions available in the market. Our capacities do not only rely on words. They also rely on natural language processing, computer vision and audio signals to feed our content categorization solution with extra layers of metadata from videos themselves.

Our superior contextual intelligence solution relies on 3 decisive pillars: accuracy of the models, granularity and scale.

As consumer privacy policies undergo change; impacting the way advertisers and marketers drive their strategies and outreach: what are some trends you feel will impact the future of this space?

The future of this field is still under construction, moving fast, and different alternatives are continuing to emerge. Actually, the whole online advertising industry is focused on this topic, trying to find sustainable solutions. 

Advertisers and tech companies were focused on end-to-end user targeting and tracking but now have to act more responsibly and come back to fundamentals: content, user attention etc.… Brand suitability and finding the right platforms with the right content for campaigns will become the starting point for every strategy.

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It is worth noting that these restrictions will also impact advertisers as it will limit third-party audience measurement, attribution, and campaign. This may also have a strong business impact on the open web, as it will most likely participate in reinforcing wall gardens dominance as they already control web access and own the biggest share of personal data. Ultra-dominance and the fact that those companies are judge and party is to me a concern. That said, the actual shift is healthy, more future-proof and is an improvement with a new way to think how the AdTech industry is using personal data.

Take us through some of your most successful targeting campaigns and learnings that came from it?

One that comes straight to my mind is the recent campaign we worked with Mozilla Firefox to promote their privacy friendly browser among a selective audience. We helped the tech company to improve user engagement by optimizing both dimensions: targeting and creativity. Regarding creativity we enriched user experience with a twist. In addition to their classic video ad, we opted for one of our custom proprietary ad formats called “fast impact”. This unit allows users to skip the ad but are then exposed to a custom end screen for 3 more seconds. This unique unit is designed to fulfill both user and advertiser expectations allowing users to skip but with better brand message recall. We also played with the skip button replacing the “skip ad” call to action with “skip ad, not privacy”. 

As for the targeting, we adopted a 100% contextual approach. To ensure we were addressing non-existing Mozilla Firefox users, we only featured the campaign on competitive browsers. We then deployed a sophisticated contextual targeting strategy combining hyper relevant contextual targeting. We applied an extra layer of content targeting on top of the whitelist of tech, gaming and lifestyle domains to make sure the ads only appeared before videos that were related to specific topics linked to technology and privacy (GDPR, privacy, personal data…). Targeting the right audience on highly accurate content resulted in a very high engagement rate with an average CTR of 3,2% more than doubling the one observed on their standard in stream preroll.

To know more about this campaign and our contextual intelligence solution based on content targeting please visit Dailymotion’s site. 

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