TechBytes with Dan Rosenberg, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, MediaMath

Dan Rosenberg
Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at MediaMath

MediaMath recently published the report, “The State of Consumer-First and Omnichannel Marketing,” in partnership with Econsultancy. We spoke to Dan Rosenberg, Chief Marketing & Strategic Officer, MediaMath, to understand why CMOs should read the report and how it will help them build or buy a technology stack.

Tell us about your role at MediaMath and the team/technology you handle.

I oversee the Marketing and Strategy functions for MediaMath. I joined the company back in 2011 and have led various teams across the organization, including Product Solutions, Business Development, Corporate Development and Enterprise Sales.

As CMO/CSO, I lead the Marketing team in communicating MediaMath’s vision and unique offerings to a range of audiences, including advertisers, agencies, ecosystem partners, press, investors, government agencies and employees. In addition, we strive to be a “lighthouse” marketing team in our right, using our own unified DSP and DMP platform and partner technologies to execute and demonstrate best-in-class B2B marketing. All our digital campaigns are run through our platform, and each gets a full treatment, including blog posts, emails, social promotion and paid ads. I also lead the Strategy team in synthesizing a range of inputs to develop, document and share MediaMath’s multi-horizon strategy.

Why did you decide to publish the report “The State of Consumer-First and Omnichannel Marketing?”

We decided to call out our consumer-first philosophy as a market theme at the start of this year as we saw the rise of adblocking, mistrust of advertising and impending GDPR legislation as symptoms that we are not delivering the best advertising experiences to consumers. We believe that consumers can love marketing again, but first we need to understand what is turning them off from the ads they see and figure out how to both respect them with the right approach to identity and data privacy and delight them with personalized experiences coordinated across channels and devices at the right frequency and sequence, accounting for their recent and past behaviors and actions. Our report, in partnership with Econsultancy, examines how global marketers are responding to this dual challenge and opportunity so we can help them identify how to rise to the occasion to put consumers first.

Why should a CMO read the report? How does it help CMOs build or buy a technology stack?

CMOs should first read the report because the respondents that took the survey are their peers — more than half are senior-level marketers from around the world. It’s a true window into how their peers are thinking about marketing best practices, media channels, identity, omnichannel and emerging opportunities such as artificial intelligence.

The report can help them plan key functions by highlighting the gaps in their current technology stack. We consistently found in the results that marketers want to do so much more but are being held back from being able to execute. For instance, the ability to dynamically segment audiences was identified by 67% of respondents as one of the top three capabilities they hope to have over the next five years when it comes to improving the advertising experience for consumers. But they are not actually prioritizing the data quality improvements or technology integration required to enable this capability — reduced data loss and latency ranked lowest in the report when it comes to the perceived benefits of integrated technology. Dynamic segmentation through an integrated platform lets you connect the right message to the right consumer more quickly and seamlessly across touchpoints. In general, any data loss, which can occur when data management is siloed from media buying, decreases the accuracy of audience segments, often resulting in consumers being shown an ad for something obviously irrelevant to them or, on the other extreme, something they already bought — one of the reasons for their frustration with advertising.

What are the key challenges to successful MarTech-Adtech integration?

Two things. First, many marketers are trained to be good at one or the other. You might have the right team staffed against your CRM and marketing automation systems, but that team may not have the deep experience required to run end-to-end digital campaigns that include paid media. Historically, there hasn’t been a common role that oversees both stacks, to ensure that processes and data are synchronized across them, and this siloed organizational approach is where marketing teams get tripped up.

The second is, even if you do manage to connect your AdTech and MarTech stacks, odds are you still have an overwhelming amount of data, formats and creative concepts to manage, make sense of and put to work. That’s where marketers need AI, which collects all the right data — even the unstructured kind — from all the right sources and extracts actionable insights at astonishing speeds so that we can make better decisions faster than ever. And it gets better or “smarter” over time as it learns from new data and your systems, processes and decisions. This is the foundation of the work we have been doing with IBM’s Watson to integrate true AI into programmatic and bring together their MarTech stack with our AdTech stack.

It’s those bold marketing innovators that add AI to the adtech+martech equation who will win — today, tomorrow and well into the future.

How does MediaMath enable CMOs to decide and justify the ROI on this integration?

We’ve always been about bringing real, measurable insights to marketing. It’s in the name “Media + Math.” We’re constantly adding more capability to measure more data points and success metrics both online and in the physical world. Our platform delivers insights such as ROAS and Lift Measurement natively, and clients can also connect to third-party measurement partners such as Marketshare.

Could you elaborate further on the term “Integrated Martech” for CMOs who already use DMPs, CDPs and Programmatic ad exchanges for MarTech/AdTech campaigns?

Full integration means integration across all key layers of the marketing stack:

• Identity: Recognizing users across touchpoints with a cross-device and cookieless identity layer.
• Data: Identifying your best customers and prospects through an integrated DMP.
• Media: Reaching those audiences in the best environments through an omnichannel DSP.
• Optimization: Optimizing spend to real business outcomes with an intelligent bidding engine driven by advanced machine learning.
• Analytics: Analyzing before, during and after campaigns to ensure a continuous feedback loop of actionable insights across media buying.
• Integration on one layer or the other is great, but integrating AdTech and MarTech across all layers — that’s the holy grail.

Customer Data Integration Spectrum:

• Companies using limited/no identity resolution
• Companies using siloed data sources
• Companies that are connecting limited and/or digital customer behaviors and marketing
• Companies that are connecting digital and offline customer behaviors and marketing

Marketing Activation Spectrum:

• Companies activating in disconnected AdTech and MarTech stacks (operating completely independently within each of their activation channels)
• Companies with partially integrated MarTech or AdTech (examples: sequential marketing within programmatic channels, connecting Pinterest to MediaMath for sequential marketing)
• Companies with partially integrated MarTech and AdTech (examples: sequential marketing with email and MediaMath)
• Companies with mostly integrated MarTech and AdTech activation

Is GDPR the biggest disruption that AdTech has ever seen? How do you help customers get to the right side of GDPR?

No — GDPR is an opportunity to do better as an industry, to have conversations with our consumers with the goal of putting their needs first. If the question is about how we help our own customers comply with GDPR, we start first with having a top-notch data privacy and governance team led by our Vice President of Data Policy and Governance, Alice Lincoln, CIPP. Over the last eighteen months, Alice has led the IAB EU working group that authored the Transparency & Consent Framework, a set of policy and technology standards developed in collaboration with IAB Tech Lab in preparation for the GDPR and, in an expanded purview, she is leading our consumer-first initiative.

Danny Sepulveda also recently joined MediaMath as Vice President of Government Relations after two decades working with the US Senate and representing America abroad on digital economy issues and is now helping to shape and communicate MediaMath’s policies and practices concerning privacy and consumer protection.

Advertisers and brands are our clients, and they are happy when the messages they want to send reach high-quality audiences on high-quality publishers in ways that the user enjoys. GDPR is aligning advertisers and brands with the advertising technology ecosystem to focus on putting the consumer first, clearly and explicitly articulating the value proposition.

What metric should one rely on to decide on the ‘satisfaction level’ of technology for Marketing and Advertising?

Our mission is to empower marketers to delight their customers and drive real business outcomes. The metrics will be different depending on their goals, but we commit to helping marketers identify the true KPIs that will drive true outcomes such as sales.

Would you like to be invited as a speaker at a tech conference that we partner with?

Yes!

Thanks for chatting with us, Dan.

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