I was keen to stand in for my boss when she asked me to do this presentation, until she told me that it was about transparency and walled gardens, I was like woah – tricky! I literally said to her that’s like the holy grail isn’t it? The pipe dream? She said yeah course! I’ve been in the business of trying to run media campaigns since 2007, and I think it’s getting worse not better. But my mantra is – stay positive! As an agency, Merkle are always looking of ways to beat the system.
As for walled gardens, well thanks to the way these companies make money and the likes of GDPR I would argue the gardens are becoming impenetrable. Also new measurement restrictions from IOS and Chrome and Safari to follow suit with restriction of effective measures are presenting further challenges.
We have been talking about transparency for years. I feel like currently it’s the most overused term in the industry. But why? Because let’s be honest, it’s like we need something to talk about. Programmatic, real time buying was able to be non-transparent. Arbitrage models and dodgy sites dogged those of us who tried to make prog transparent, let alone sharing advertiser pixels for retargeting. But I ask you were Direct buys transparent? Cough not really. So why has the bad rap come to Prog? Because for one it’s far more accountable and therefore we should be able to measure it’s transparency. It’s also a hugely competitive landscape. So when there’s a drama about bid caching from index, or measurement issues in FB, not that I am condoning this, but there are plenty of naysayers on hand to twist the knife if it means an opportunity to divert advertising spend
Before we attempt to figure out how we can break down the walls we need to address the fact that data issues will arise. It would be naïve to think that any of the walled gardens are going to compromise on their positions around data because it suits us
People based marketing solutions like M1 will no doubt be the future of how we transact; and can assist in breaking down the barriers of the walled gardens with a altered lense approach. Is facebook just a marketing drug that everyone is used to? What is the core value and moving back a level and how can you still target those people? Similar to Amazon – appreciate this is pretty pie in the sky reach for the moon philosophy it is a way out of the black hole, and if we we’re nothing else we’re optimistic
Been a bad year for attribution and Google have been wishy washy about what the solutions are, our vision is to go back to an AB type testing of cause and effect, and that’s when you need media mix modelling. Don’t allow others to mark their own homework