Erik A. Requidan
Vice President of Sales and Programmatic Strategy at Intermarkets

Marketers and publishers are driven largely by the after-effect of their content. As brands and businesses shift their focus at leveraging data science and social media analytics to drive their content marketing, it is imperative for advertising platforms to ensure that the content gets noticed and makes connection. Programmatic content is the key to delivering highly interactive and influential content for digital ‘omnivores’.

We spoke to Erik A. Requidan, Vice President of Sales and Programmatic Strategy at Intermarkets, to understand how marketers and advertisers can leverage user-generated content to churn more value out of their marketing and advertising campaigns.

MTS: How are industry benchmarks for premium direct ad placements evolving with programmatic capabilities and newer data privacy regulations?
Erik A. Requidan: Premium direct placements are increasing throughout programmatic channels. Buyers are continuing to demonstrate their desire for premium inventory to be enabled programmatically. This is happening across channels, in native, email, video, audio and TV.

MTS: How should marketers and advertisers leverage a monetization platform to increase their total campaign revenue?
Erik: Today, marketers are using several platforms from start to finish. For example, marketers can utilize data management platforms (DMPs) to access and organize first, second and third-party data. This serves as a media planning/buying tool, which can hook either into an exchange or directly into media supply sources.

There are many confusing statements about what is working today in a marketer’s plan. While fragmentation and lack of a singular standard are keeping us from having an absolutely perfect solution, what we do have is good. Digital media is the most measurable form of media EVER. Our ability to constantly measure the wealth of data is a double-edged sword, but we don’t want to go backwards.

Attribution is constantly improving, so advertisers can understand where their money is working and increase their total campaign revenue returns.

MTS: How do you see User-generated content playing a role in cross-channel video advertising?
Erik: Programmatic video advertising is primed to skyrocket. While long form video content is still controlled by a handful of producers, there is an uptick in shorter-form video content — both user-generated and produced.

As short-form or lower-level premium placements rise, utilizing programmatic tactics with automation and data will be essential to monetize efficiency and efficacy. This happened to several forms of display already — traditional banners, email and eventually native and audio. It will happen for video next.

MTS: Tell us about Intermarkets’ social media integration with native advertising? Would you share a sneak peek into your dashboard analytics for this integration?
Erik: Native is one of Intermarkets’ fastest growing areas of business. Advertisers dedicate specific, increasing budgets for these executions. Advertising buyers who want to engage readers with category or vertical-specific advertisements need a more targeted, different vehicle to reach them. Native is that tool, and our capabilities attract this new variety of advertiser. Engagement rates are often two to three times higher than other advertising formats, and as native offerings continue to improve and be more targeted, the price point is increasing. There is still room for native to scale more programmatically.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Erik.
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