How Cadreon’s Erica Schmidt joins the dots between walled gardens: Programmatic Punch NY
For brands to be truly successful in the programmatic space, they must commit to growing their understanding of the tech, building fluency and partnering with the right players, says Erica Schmidt, Cadreon’s new global chief executive officer.
How Cadreon’s Erica Schmidt joins the dots between walled gardens: Programmatic Punch NY
Schmidt shared with The Drum how brands can navigate the walled-gardens and thrive, before her fireside chat at Programmatic Punch New York on March 28.
What advice do you have for brands feeling overwhelmed in this space where walled gardens are everywhere?
The first piece of advice I would give to brands is that they need to become as educated as they possibly can. The second tip is don't believe everything you hear. A lot of our partners will come to us and say that we should adopt a new beta tech, we should leverage a new AI algorithm – and we put them through the ringer on that. It’s important for brands not to take the best sales pitch as the one that is grounded in any sense of reality. Partner up with experts and find an advisor who you can truly engage with and trust.
The core thing for brands, for them to be truly successful, is recognizing there’s always going to be the commitment of understanding, building the fluency and partnering with the right players.
How can advertisers best work with the duopoly?
The duopoly is partially in terms of the share spend that they receive and partially in the sense that a lot of the tension goes into that. However, if you specifically pivot that in the sense of the advertising technology ecosystem, we believe that competition amongst multiple platforms is ultimately better for the ecosystem, better for advertisers and consequently, our consumers.
Our goal is to ensure that when we work and engage, we have a diversity of platforms to reach the right audiences at the right time.
What is the alternative to dealing with the walled gardens?
No one partner can do it all. We work above and around the walled gardens with a number of different partners and believe in the promise of what both want to deliver as they stitch together all the assets from the former entities into the new entities. Cadreon sees innovation coming from the independent players within the ecosystem and value the fact that they are continuing to drive innovation forward.
How would you clean up the industry if it were in your power?
It’s rather unfortunate that a few bad actors have made a bad name for the rest of the digital ecosystem. There are viewability standards, but we have research that we did a few years ago which shows that there is a standard for viewability measure. We believe in absolute brand safety, but it is a very big term just like transparency. Every client has a very slightly different lens and it is a cost benefit analysis that you need to undertake to determine what the best approach is.
We are dealing with new and emerging technology, advanced algorithms, and an ever-changing ecosystem. However, there is a tradecraft and specialization in our work, and it is our goal to keep the space as clean and safe as humanly possible.
Schmidt will be appearing at Programmatic Punch New York on March 28. Her fireside chat, ‘owning your data and knowledge’, will look at how IPG Mediabrands navigate walled gardens.
Tickets are available to purchase online, with the event taking place at Ogilvy & Mather, New York.
Sponsor for this event are: Parsec, Smart, Grapeshot, Sharethrough and MoPub