Month: September 2022

“There needs to be economic incentives, not just pure altruism, for companies to want to measure the carbon footprint of their digital advertising activity — and then take steps to reduce that,” said an executive at a company that’s devoted to helping digital marketers and media reduce their carbon footprint, who declined to speak on the record. “Our job would be really easy as a company if everyone actually was truly altruistic. But in the current [economic] climate, you don’t want to put your neck on the line to do something that could potentially negatively affect the bottom line of your business.”

Agencies don’t appear to be shy at all about the gains they say they’ve achieved already.

Just last week, Wendy Clark Dentsu International’s soon-to-depart global CEO, posted on LinkedIn that she was “so pleased and proud to share that Dentsu International has been independently verified as carbon neutral, achieving our Scope 1 and 2 objective of reducing absolute emissions by 53% (off our 2019 baseline) and exceeding our science-based 2030 target nine years ahead of plan. This plan also includes our investment in nature-based projects across EMEA, the Americas and APAC to compensate for our remaining scope 1 and 2 emissions. With this notable progress in our own operations, we are adding focus to our Scope 3 emissions, which include our supply chain and the products and services we market.”

(In case you’re not familiar with the 3 Scopes, here’s a quick YouTube video from Climate Now that explains them.)

It’s the Scope 3 part of the equation that’s going to determine if the digital media world can make a difference. A report released last week by ad platform Good-Loop, which surveyed 450 marketers and media agencies about the ad industry’s efforts to limit carbon emissions, started off by citing a BBC stat that says the Internet generates 4% of the world’s global emissions — a number that will double to 8% by 2025. 

Ad exchange Sharethrough is one of many companies partnering with sustainability tools, such as Scope3 and Carbon Direct, in order to measure and act on their carbon emissions generated from the process. With carbon emissions solutions implemented this summer, Frank Maguire, vp of Insights at Sharethrough, told Digiday advertisers are already seeing better performance.

“The stat that really drove it home was that the emissions created from all the servers and everything it takes to surf all the web pages and videos and ads and everything across the Internet creates more carbon emissions than the aviation industry,” Maguire said.

Now advertisers can run this in their buying process to measure and offset their carbon emissions and invest a small amount back into carbon capture projects, Maguire explained, and about 1 million ad impressions is equivalent to 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide. Some of the CPM yield then gets invested into projects through Carbon Direct, so it’s a small cost to the advertiser. But those that are using it have seen their ads perform with a 22% higher click through rate, according to Sharethrough.

“I think that’s ultimately what’s going to drive the tech industry to eventually reach a larger scale of really doing a good job of reducing our carbon emissions is by those with the power to buy throwing their weight in the right way to push the whole industry to be more sustainable,” Maguire said. “It’s good that we’re not hiding our heads in the sand, now that we realize that we’re creating a problem.”

That’s happening across the media and marketing spectrum. Good-Loop found that while 61% of U.S. marketers are currently tracking the carbon cost of their digital marketing campaigns, 56% still rely on estimated figures or calculations for which there’s no standard measure.

And three-fourths of the respondents said the industry needs to do more to tackle carbon reduction. Further, 51% of respondents said their company plans to reach net zero in digital advertising at some point, but only 24% have set target dates and only 2% (like Dentsu) say they have already reached net zero. 

But how can you actually know if you’re net zero if there’s no universally agreed-upon standard for measurement? “There is certainly a feeling of everyone wants to be different, and everyone wants to differentiate [from each other],” said the carbon-reduction executive. “I’m skeptical of all of them [the holding companies]. They all have fossil fuel companies still on their books.”

“What we first need is a standardized measurement framework to assess the pollution of digital media,” said Elisa Boivin, managing director of footsprint, the sustainability division of e-commerce performance agency the Labelium Group. “Efforts should be focused not on proprietary methodologies, but on a common foundation that all industry players can build on and be accountable for. Having a transparent and collaborative methodology is essential to driving change at industry level. 

Can the agency holding companies and independents work together to create one standard? It’s too early to tell — but industry-wide efforts like AdNetZero are a step in the right direction. Alison Pepper, 4As’ executive vp of government relations and sustainability, said credit must be given to the holding companies for the progress they have made. “The holding companies have got a good handle on where they are on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and they have an understanding of what needs to happen by a reduction in offsets,” said Pepper. “Now you’re seeing them turn their attention to the media side.”

For example, Pepper points to efforts like GroupM’s decarbonization measurement initiative unveiled a few months ago establishes a floor from which to push off to reduce the impact of Scope 3 emissions. “If we get to a place in the advertising community where we can at least agree on the floor, that would be a really important step. And if agencies, advertisers, publishers, ad tech platforms all decide individually to commit resources to go beyond, I’m confident that we can at least get to standardization — and then individual companies can take it to the ceiling.”

To that end, GroupM agency Essence in the U.K. just announced it will apply the mothership’s decarbonization framework to its programmatic practice, in the hopes of reducing the carbon footprint of advertising campaigns, and rewarding publishers that address climate crisis issues in their editorial coverage. 

One potential curveball to progress made, at least on the marketing side, according to Pepper, is the Federal Trade Commission unofficially stated intent to revise its Green Guides, which is expected to be a two-year process that when completed will stand for another 10 years, she said. “That’s something that I’m working with agencies on right now to help them understand what that process will entail and how they’ve evolved. They haven’t touched those guides in 10 years, so they’re going to be significantly updated.”

Color by numbers

When artificial intelligence was starting to get buzz, many were worried it would one day replace human jobs. Now that that hype has died down, it seems there are opportunities for robots and AI technology to work alongside people. Research by software vendor Capterra found that marketers report AI or machine learning can help cut corners without sacrificing quality. What’s more, they expect to see AI continue fueling areas like content creation in the future.

• 88% of marketers reported that AI or ML technology saves their company time and money, and 82% of marketers said AI and ML content is just as good or better than human-generated content.
• Capterra reported 45% of marketers spend about half of their time creating marketing content in a typical work week. More than a third are spending about 75% of their time on content per week.
• 69% said the software implementation takes more than six months, but that the training time is much faster.
• However, 35% said risk and governance issues, such as security concerns and data quality, are their top challenges. — Antoinette Siu

Takeoff & landing

• Data and tech firm Neustar said it will incorporate iHeart Media radio data into its Unified Measurement Solution, which employs market mix modeling and marketing attribution. 
• Holding company Omnicom centralized its e-commerce efforts under a new unit called Transact, which will oversee all connected-commerce and retail media activity. Transact will be headed by Frank Kochenash, who joined Omnicom in March.
• Horizon Media’s creative agency 305 Worldwide, hired Leena Danan to be svp, managing director of new business and marketing; Marta DeAguiar as svp of group client service leader; and Alejandra Rubio as svp of head of strategy. 
• Sales-side platform TripleLift hired James Evans to be its chief privacy officer and vp of legal, in what’s likely to be a more important position as privacy regulations tighten. 

Direct quote

“You need to measure at the glass level — not necessarily at the device level or the ad server level — to get the accurate count of what’s actually being delivered to the viewer in the home on the screen. And I think that’s the biggest challenge for the industry moving forward. The problem with measurement at the glass level is that none of the [TV set makers] are working together. My action call to the industry would be to get Samsung, Vizio, LG, Sony, and get all the others to understand that their ACR [automatic content recognition] data is not a competitive strategic asset. It’s only valuable if they pool it, [to] create a national footprint of data for advertisers and sellers to use and understand.”

— Adam Gerber, executive director, U.S. investment strategy at GroupM, talking about advances needed in TV measurement, at the TVB Forward conference

Speed reading

• As mentioned above, retail media is exploding as a major part of commerce media. I covered Walmart Connect’s expansion of its offerings via deals with Snap, TikTok, Roku and others, along with GroupM’s financial assessment of the broader space. 
• I also covered a major step forward in local TV measurement when Dentsu Media and Comscore partnered on testing advanced analytics in two top 10 markets with two clients. 
• Digiday’s platforms reporter Krystal Scanlon dug into the deeper problems Snapchat is facing in light of several recent senior executive departures and increased competition. 

“The early adopters to metaverse experiences are going to come out of the gaming and esports communities first,” said Infinite Reality president Rodric David. “Purchasing esports teams gave us IP to therefore own, produce and manufacture innovative programming using metaverse spaces as distribution platforms.”

The eventual plan is for Infinite Reality to create plug-and-play virtual environments that brands can customize and use for virtual commerce or events. The spaces are built using Unreal Engine and will be accessible largely via mobile or desktop browsers, though the company plans to make it available to VR and gaming console users in the future. To convince users to actually spend time inside the platform, Infinite Reality’s initial offering includes virtual “sky boxes” in which fans of both esports and traditional sports teams can congregate during games.

To turn its metaverse product into a more direct revenue stream, Infinite Reality is betting that brands will bring virtual commerce into the platform, both via NFT collectibles and virtual goods off of the blockchain. It hopes to act as a “transactional layer,” gleaning a small percentage of all ticketing and merchandise sales within the platform. “We’re like a utility company,” said Infinite Reality chief innovation officer Elliott Jobe.

The company also plans to make all of the platform’s first-party data directly available to brands building inside it, a strategy Jobe claimed sets Infinite Reality’s offerings apart from more established metaverse platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite Creative. While it’s true that these platforms are not entirely transparent with their user data, some observers were skeptical that this would be a sufficient difference to help Infinite Reality succeed. These days, new metaverse platforms seem to be cropping up every week, but the majority of brands’ marketing dollars are still being pumped into the established platforms.

“Esports is a tough play right now; we all know that esports organizations are struggling with revenue,” said Margot Rodde, a metaverse marketing expert and innovation lead at Mirada Studios, a TPG company. “So it’s almost like, well, esports is gaming, and gaming is the metaverse, same audience, so let’s do something else to try and generate revenue. To me, it feels a little bit desperate.”

Other observers pointed out that there is more than enough room in the growing metaverse sector for both the major platforms and their smaller competitors. Critics of the metaverse have bemoaned the idea that it will be defined by big tech companies, and smaller platforms like Infinite Reality present an alternative option for both users and brands.

“Companies like Infinite Reality, and the platform that they’re trying to build, I think it’s great for the medium as a whole,“ said Adam Voss, CMO of Surreal Events, another company that works with brands to create custom and independent virtual spaces. “And I think their kind of specialty, in esports, is going to show up in a way and a place that is probably underserved right now.”

Ultimately, the success of Infinite Reality’s as-yet-unnamed metaverse platform comes down to its ability to use its pre-existing esports properties, which include the esports teams Rogue and the London Royal Ravens, to convince fans to spend meaningful time inside it. If they do, brands and marketers will follow. The connection between esports and the metaverse is clear — but it is yet to be determined whether that bond is strong enough to allow gaming and esports companies to pivot to the metaverse wholesale.

“They’re going to need back-end tools, they’re going to need analytics, they’re going to need content moderation, they’re going to need ways to manage user accounts and things like that,” Jobe said. “And that’s where we come in.”

The news cycle continuously churns up tragic events, and it makes sense that brands would be hesitant about running ads against certain topics like the death of Queen Elizabeth or the war in Ukraine. But as tumultuous as the news cycle has been, The Independent’s svp of the U.S., Blair Tapper, said that brands are getting too strict with how they’re avoiding advertising against news altogether. 

During her session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Fla., last week, Tapper talked about how her team is trying to solve for advertisers’ aversion to spending against news content.

Programmatic advertising makes up approximately 75% of The Independent’s advertising revenue in the U.S., according to Tapper. But because news is such a highly avoided category by many advertisers, her team has been working to reframe the idea that buying programmatically means losing control over where and when a display ad gets placed. 

“There used to be this misnomer that programmatic was just all of these underground pipes [that spit out ads like] magic. I really believe that’s not the case. Programmatic is still a human business, it’s still a human sell — it’s just a different way of buying inventory. And so if you can humanize the programmatic relationship, I think a lot of the objections to news go away,” Tapper said. 

But even the brands that aren’t averse to news still have a lot of guidelines as to which stories they will advertise on and which ones they will avoid. A big method of sorting through these barriers are the keyword blocklists that agencies use, but Tapper said they are still very rudimentary when it comes to contextualizing the meanings of the words on their lists.

“I mean, it could be the word ‘shot’ and they’re blocking a soccer article about someone taking a shot at the goal. That’s literally how elementary some of the keyword blocking really has been,” she said. 

To remedy this, Tapper’s team works with IAS, Ipsos and NewsGuard to try and contextualize the articles affected by keyword blocking. So, rather than advertisers avoiding every single article about the death of Queen Elizabeth, for example, they can still show up on more positive articles about her legacy and accomplishments throughout her life. 

Another strategy is leaning into direct, mission-based deals with brands that attempt to add to certain news events with how they are responding to challenges in the world. 

Makeup and skincare brand Chantecaille is one advertiser that Tapper said works with The Independent for mission-based campaigns at the brand awareness level, versus advertising specific products like a lipstick or an eyeshadow. “A lot of the reason that they come to us is because we’re supporting their tentpole, which is all about climate change — as are we,” said Tapper. 

What’s more, Tapper said The Independent doesn’t shy away from advocacy or being vocal about the causes the company supports on a social level. 

“At our core, The Independent believes in climate change. We amplify voices that are often underserved. We believe in inclusion. We believe in ending the death penalty. It’s not that we’re preaching, it’s that a lot of the editorial that we’re writing is rooted in a lot of these ethical behaviors that we feel like are at the root of a lot of social conversation,” she said.

Therefore, the brands that make the most sense to work with are the ones whose values align in some way with the same missions The Independent believes in as well. 

A further frustration, publishers have yet to see adopting alternative IDs significantly impact their ad revenue. “At a certain point, it becomes the fastest way to make $300 a month: You can set up a deal, do all this tech work and then you sit and stare at the ticker and it slowly moves,” said a second publishing executive.

Publishers’ ID overload concerns echo the issues that media companies dealt with several years ago after cramming code from supply-side platforms and ad exchanges onto their sites in order to sell their ad inventory across as many programmatic marketplaces as possible (or at least practical). The problem then was that the code affected their sites’ performance. The surplus of scripts slowed the speed with which pages loaded, frustrating site visitors and lowering sites’ search engine rankings. Publishers have spent the past few years reducing the amount of programmatic code on their sites in order to improve site performance.

“It’s the same conversation [as publishers needing to remove SSP tags from their pages]. We figured out a way to move that tech debt off of the page. These identity solutions, inherent in their value is to be on page. It’s very similar,” said the second publishing executive.

Compounding matters, publishers are not yet in a position where they feel they can pick out which IDs to support and which they can afford to omit, according to multiple publishing executives. The reason? They are not currently receiving enough information back from the ad tech supply chain to discern how specific identity tech is affecting their ad revenue.

“Regardless of the exchange — you just don’t know the data coming back to a publisher on whether the bid response rates are good values or higher when they see an ID or not. At least we have not gotten that information,” said a third publishing executive.

“In the open exchange, it’s almost like you’re pumping all this information in the app requests, and there’s no one there on the other side waiting for you,” said the second publishing executive.

A fourth publishing executive said they have taken it upon themselves to try to glean the impact of IDs on ad prices. “I had to actually restrict the sending of data in certain environments to make a control. There’s about a 10% lift that’s correlated to the IDs versus the control overall across all inventory,” they said.

Additionally, publishers are being pressed to adopt specific IDs preferred by certain ad tech firms, the executives said. 

“Whether The Trade Desk or Yahoo, to actually work with them you’re going to have to adopt [Yahoo’s] Next-Gen ID or UID [which was originally developed by The Trade Desk] in order for that to happen. So it’s been leveraged a little bit,” said a fifth publishing executive.

So what are publishers to do about this ID overload issue? Will the SSP code cycle simply repeat with publishers adding scripts for all these various IDs in the short term and then down the line working to weed out the ones they no longer need? Maybe. 

Or maybe the awareness that publishers demonstrated during DPS of the potential to repeat past mistakes will help them to avoid them in the future by not only airing their frustrations in the company of their peers but also voicing their concerns with colleagues and taking a harder line with identity tech providers.

“My data colleagues, my revenue colleagues, my technology and first-party data colleagues, they’ll be like, ‘You need this ID.’ And all I hear as a product person is more crap. And there’s an exchange there. There are things that you’re doing negatively impacting your business by having more crap on your website. That will hugely affect user experience, engagement, SEO, and we need to remember what these trade-offs are,” said the first publishing executive.

As the fourth publishing executive suggested to the group during one of DPS’s town hall sessions, “Let’s all as publishers, every time someone says, ‘It’s just one line of script; it’s really lightweight,’ say ‘Fuck off.’”

That seems especially true in programmatic, where publishers appear to be having success pulling more dollars into the deals they have direct control over. In the first half of the year, private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed accounted for 35% of the total money spent globally on programmatic (including in the open exchange, according to Ebiquity. The year before that percentage was 31%. As ever, demand drives prices. The cost per thousand impressions in these curated deals was up 240% in the first half of the year compared to those prices in the open exchange. The year before that increase was 188%

“There’s a growing recognition among some marketers that it’s better to buy off premium publishers than just from the open web,” said Nick Waters, CEO of media management firm Ebiquity. Or rather, these publishers, armed with first-party data, seem more able to put their best foot forward in pursuit of ad dollars, he continued. 

 The anecdotal evidence from publishers backs this up. Commercial execs from The Athletic and Minute Media are going after ad dollars directly, not via independent ad tech vendors. They wouldn’t be making those moves if they thought marketers weren’t interested. The same goes for publisher alliances. And investments from marketers are growing. In some cases, they even seem to be taking what dollars they would’ve spent with Google et al to do it. 

“The size of budgets we’re seeing lined up for our business now compared to two years ago are materially different — they’re proper platform budgets,” said Craig Tuck, chief revenue officer at Ozone Project, a U.K.-based consortium that includes the Guardian and Stylist. “You can never really prove it but the narrative we’re being told by marketers is that some of those larger budgets we’re seeing flow into our business would have normally been spent on the platforms or with ad tech vendors.”

To be fair, these sort of gains are to be expected. Whenever markets are thrown into disarray, there’s usually a flight to quality and scale — the two things premium publishers pride themselves on. That puts a premium on the collective reach (or audiences) these alliances can offer. 

“We’ve been seeing more effort around responsible media buying with trusted publishers,” said a spokesperson for Trustx, a digital advertising alliance that sells inventory belonging to Digital Content Next members. “Trustx has had very strong growth this year and we’ve heard from DCN that direct deals with premium publishers are way up as well.” 

Whatever this shift is, don’t call it transformational. It will take more than some good fortune to reverse all that ails the publisher ads business. The truth is these publishers are the exceptions, not the norm. They’re able to continue to articulate to marketers why they’re “premium” investments at a time when many publishers can’t. But that’s only going to get harder now that the era of scale, volume traffic as the core business model for journalism, has passed. 

Until then, these publishers are focused on trying to make commercial hay out of the fact that ad dollars are being redistributed. The Athletic’s decision to sell ads through direct deals with advertisers rather than through programmatic deals done on the open web is a case in point.

“The reason why the upper tier marketers get out of their programmatic routines to work with us is because of our value and differentiation as a consumer product,” said Sebastian Tomich, chief commercial officer of The Athletic. 

Granted, these dollars are a small part of the market, he continued. But they’re also valuable, and more importantly attainable for the premium sports publisher. After all, there are few places marketers can go to reach hundreds of thousands of sports fans who are willing to pay for long-form content. Well, that’s the gamble anyway. 

“Currently, we are seeing more insertion orders sales (with guaranteed impressions, pre-rolls and products),” said Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of sales and ad tech at one of Denmark’s biggest news publishers Ekstra Bladet. “Programmatic deals are fairly stable, agency marketplaces (like Omnicom Zero and MSupply) are lagging a bit behind. “Actually, we see a bit more open market these days — some agencies pursue a strategy where they both buy via deals/agency marketplace and open market.”

Which is to say that marketers — at least the ones that can afford to buy premium inventory — don’t automatically cut advertising budgets when the economy gets tough. They also rationalize where those dollars go — i.e. wherever they can get safer, contextually relevant and better curated impressions. History proves that time and again. If anything, this crisis creates an opportunity for a handful of publishers, perhaps even an incentive, to evolve and experiment with advertising, in anticipation of more ad dollars shaking out. 

The definition of “direct deals” is unavoidably arbitrary and, invariably means different things to different publishers. There aren’t many in as gilded positions as The Athletic that can afford to cut out the ad tech middle men entirely. Lue Lytzen’s rundown on the prospects of his business made that abundantly clear.

Sometimes, a direct (ish) deal just means fewer hands in the cookie jar. Indeed, there are many premium publishers who still rely on ad tech vendors to make these deals happen — just fewer of them. These are the vendors that are having success ‘convincing’ agencies and advertisers that inventory creation is a job better handled by exchanges. That’s part of a broader effort by exchanges to move inventory curation away from the demand-side platforms, or the ad technologies that actually buy the impressions on behalf of marketers.

“We continue to see an increased interest in deals from both sides of the ecosystem, and there’s been a marked ramp up in deals particularly from media owners,” said Jessica Breslav, chief customer officer at supply-side platform Index Exchange. These “deals are valuable because they allow buyers to leverage their purchasing power to negotiate price and / or priority while providing the ability to target audiences based on the criteria most relevant to the marketer, ” she said.

“Conversely, they let media owners maximize the value of the inventory through agreements with strategic buyers, providing the inventory, content, and targeting the buyer requires.”

Back then, Said was a 28-year-old copywriter working at Droga5, one of the most highly-regarded agencies in the world. But he was burnt out, exhausted from large agency culture and unimpressed with advertising’s sameness. “I’m faking it. I’ve lost all the friends that I needed to lose to have this perception of who I am so I can work in this industry,” he said. “I’ve lost my identity and accent. I’ve done all this, become a different person to make this work and this work sucks.”

With no prior business experience or financial backing, Said took a leap of faith and left Droga5, determined to make space for people like him, people he calls “outsiders of mainstream culture” who were also reeling from burnout. In 2018, he founded his own agency, New York-based Mojo Supermarket. 

The move paid off. Said’s agency and its 60 staffers have spent the last four years giving legacy agencies a run for their money and raking in creative awards, including Cannes Lions, One Show and American Advertising Awards. The shop has snapped up work with big name clients like Match.com, Adidas and Girls Who Code. Said said he is just getting started with plans to expand Mojo Supermarket’s capabilities to include product, strategy, content and more.

“I saw the work, what it could be and I thought I’d give it a try,” Said said. “If it doesn’t work, then I go home and work in a bank in Pakistan.”

This attitude speaks to Said’s dedication to his craft. His friends describe him as a creative with no off button. “When he’s not working, he’s writing songs and playing guitar. He cannot stop,” said Camilo De Galofre, founding member and director of art and design at Mojo Supermarket. “His brain just keeps going and going. That’s what I truly admire about him.”

Said and De Galofre met early in their careers, and the two recalled memories during their time together at Droga5. 

De Galofre recalled a story in which Said was at a wedding when he met someone from the Adidas marketing team who was looking for a creative agency. At the time, Said was still working for Droga5. But instead of offering names from his current place of work, on a whim, Said offered Mojo Supermarket. There was one catch: It wasn’t an agency yet. It was a bold move, but one that worked, De Galofre said. “We totally faked that we had an agency. We made it work and then won an award with it,” he added, referring to the Adidas AR Drops campaign.

If you come to Mojo Supermarket, you’d best come prepared to break the rules of traditional advertising, according to Said. As a creative, he has even spent his weekends making work he believed in. At one point, he said he made an extension for Google’s Chrome browser called Drop United that hides United Airline flight recommendations from traveler search. It came on the heels of the airline’s fiasco in which the company dragged a passenger from the plane. 

“It was a frustration, but he wasn’t letting that frustration kill him, creatively. He was doing things on the side that was feeding that creative soul that he had within himself,” De Galofre recalled.

As an agency, Mojo Supermarket is behind moments like #GiveHerABreak Oscars hacking and Dojacode, a Girls Who Code immersive experience.

“When we think about creating work automatically, we have to partner with someone who is going to have that at the forefront,” said Ashley Gramby, senior director of marketing and communications at Girls Who Code. “Mo and Mojo got that instinctively from the beginning.”

Girls Who Code was originally introduced to Said and his agency back in September 2020. They partnered during CSEdWeek, or Computer Science Education Week, on Girls Who Code’s “Missing Code” campaign. Said and Gramby haven’t met yet in person, connecting predominantly over Zoom calls to produce work for the last two years. But Said has a reputation that precedes him. He’s known as being earnest, smart and kind, Gramby said. It’s what drew her team to work with him and his agency. Given Said is a man, Gramby said she was unsure he would get it when it came to creating something for a nonprofit organization that caters to young women. But he did, almost immediately. 

“This guy really is a champion, number one for diversity. He practices what he preaches in terms of making sure that his staff, his team and the folks that he brings to the table are really representative of his values,” Gramby said, adding that she and Said have plans to meet up in person before the end of the year. 

Girls Who Code’s work with Mojo Supermarket says a lot, considering it’s the first time that the nonprofit has consistently partnered with an agency for more than two years, Gramby said. And the organization has no plans of ending its partnership with Mojo Supermarket. “We hope that there’s a lot more innovative and creative brand work to come from our partnership,” she added. 

For Said, he said the last few years have been about finding himself. Mojo Supermarket has helped him do that. His work has landed him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, Adweek Creative 100 list and AdAge 40 Under 40 list. If you ask him about the current state of advertising, his answer is trite in his opinion, but Said said he feels it’s an exciting time to be an advertiser as more agencies are trying to mimic the level of authenticity that Mojo Supermarket has accomplished. 

“Advertising is becoming more interesting. We don’t care about it as much and we don’t have money for people to watch [ads],” he said. “The rinse and repeat of advertising is going away. Now, you have to be interesting.”

“After all, having a clean room that doesn’t lead to maximizing match rates is like investing in a gym membership when you are morally opposed to healthy living,” said Kevin Bauer, data and identity strategy lead for Prohaska Consulting in North America. “What is the point?”

It’s perhaps unexpected that there’s a fair amount of expectation around data clean room InfoSum’s latest partnership. It is working with the IPG-owned data management business Acxiom — or rather the part of the business set up to boost match rates between different data sets, called “Match Multiplier.” In layman’s terms, the tie-up works like this: Acxiom’s “Match Multiplier” data sits in an InfoSum clean room that Acxiom owns and controls.

Advertisers and media owners wishing to expand the match rates they can achieve natively on a one-to-one match can use the clean room in a three-way match where it acts as a bridge of sorts between them all. This matching takes place in the clean room without exposing or sharing the underlying data with any of the respective parties.

Better match rates should mean more interest from ad execs. And the partnership has the potential to boost those rates considerably. Through testing, customers have seen a 40% incremental lift in matching between two or more data sets, according to InfoSum. 

Those rates could be lower or higher depending on the data sets involved, but even a slight lift in match rates could (in theory) have a material impact on both advertisers and publishers. Moreover, better match rates ease the pressure on marketers having to do the heavy lifting to get data clean rooms working for them. Indeed, successful targeting via these technologies often requires large data sets to overcome the low match rates. The reality is most marketers have never actually had to define these audiences on their own, much less track performance etc. across a media lifecycle.

“We certainly anticipate and are already seeing increased interest from advertisers,’ said Brian Lesser, chairman and CEO of InfoSum. “With every major partnership we strike in the market, we have reached an inflection point where the success of data clean rooms has become inevitable. Right now there’s a bit of a waiting game with publishers to see where the major brands make their choices for data clean rooms before they commit to their plans.”

In other words, publishers are going to back the data clean rooms that have buy-in from the most advertisers. And advertisers will back the clean rooms where match rates are highest. As Lincoln Gunn, vp of programmatic revenue, operations and data partnerships, explained: “Specific clients have specific deals with specific vendors and so as a result we have to try and make sure that we service their needs. So if they’re working with one brand that uses one data clean room and then another is using an alternative then we have to make a call on where we focus our attention and resources because those platforms don’t necessarily talk to one another.”

Don’t expect partnerships like this to be a silver bullet to woes of data clean rooms. Interoperability is still a major point of confusion and not all identities are the same. Each brand, publisher and software provider defines identity and audiences slightly differently which poses a business planning and technical challenge and feels like an oxymoron for brands.