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Media iQ's marketing vice president on brand safety and audience segmentation

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By Dani Gibson, Senior Writer

August 31, 2017 | 6 min read

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Brand safety is fast becoming more of a necessity for companies and speaking to The Drum, vice president of marketing at Media iQ Digital Ltd, Rachelle Daglis explains their three step system and gives insight on key industry trends, taking audience segmentation beyond demographics and microdata and the continuing expansion of programmatic.

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Rachelle Daglis on brand safety and audience segmentation

What has been the most innovative thing you have seen from the industry in the past year?

Clearly, the fact that programmatic is moving beyond display is an exciting change, and the window programmatic data gives us into audience intent and behavior is remarkable. Programmatic offers a more complete view of a customer across channels, devices and now formats.

As a result, marketers are leveraging programmatic data to solve business challenges beyond display advertising. For example, the United States Tennis Assosiation (USTA) this year used programmatic data to evaluate the marketing effectiveness of both online and offline channels and applied that information to their overall strategy. Not only did the Open drive ticket sales, the USTA was also able to tap into new audiences to create a pipeline for the future. Programmatic isn’t just a method for buying media anymore, it’s a tool for generating insight.

What are the key industry trends right now?

Again, programmatic expansion into TV, radio and beyond is a significant trend. A lot of marketers are also starting to play with more sophisticated audience segmentation – again with the help of programmatic data. They can go way beyond demographics and microdata like zip code and target new niche audiences, like a travel company targeting audiences based on the duration of their trip. Travelers that have a trip duration exceeding seven days have a different need than a short trip traveler. This is how brands find new fans and customers – by discovering a fresh audience that has high potential and targeting them efficiently using programmatic.

What is Media iQ’s stance on brand safety?

Our commitment to brand safety is unwavering. Our three-layer safety system provides absolute peace of mind to our advertisers, which include some of the world’s most respected brands.

First, we only buy from trusted sellers on our whitelist. Second, we block thousands of domains and millions of IP ranges using a series of blacklists to exclude ad fraud and brand safety breaches. Our IP blacklists are updated daily, and our domain blacklists are updated weekly. On top of that, third-party pre-bid blocking from IAS and Grapeshot is continually updated and excludes any suspect content – new or old.

Finally, that same pre-bid blocking prevents the purchase of ads on any page containing brand-sensitive content on topics such as terrorism or violence. This system is applied to every bid we place, including on Google sites like YouTube.

The reason for our three-part approach is that blacklists alone don’t work. Domain masking, for example, packages undesirable inventory under premium domains. With our safety nets, a bad seller will activate domain masking so it gets caught by the seller whitelist, or that page will contain high-risk keywords and get blocked by our pre-bid partners.

And while we value Google as a technology partner to provide high-quality programmatic reach for our advertisers, we will of course block sites like YouTube for advertisers on request – it really depends on the brand and their goals.

What do you think the biggest challenges that programmatic has had to contend with in the past year?

Brand safety is the big one. The more brands invest in programmatic, the more costly fraud and lack of transparency become. As a result, advertisers are making their partners more accountable for things like viewability and measurement consistency – which is a good thing.

Of course, there are still the walled gardens to contend with, but the better our cross-channel data and analytics power becomes in programmatic, the less of a threat they are.

Where do you see the programmatic area of the industry going in the next 12 months?

On the advertiser side, we can expect to see more programmatic ads on TV and radio and continued investment in technology, for sure.

From the provider side, I think we’ll see more consolidation – with four or five media partners on a plan versus a dozen or more. This will give advertisers more control, but it may cramp innovation as the small and hungry players get consumed by bigger companies with more generic platforms.

As a headline sponsor for The Drum Digital Trading Awards, how important do you believe they are to the industry?

The awards allow the best of the best in the industry to get together and celebrate. Especially in programmatic trading, which used to have a certain stigma, it’s an opportunity to see the fantastic work, creativity and results it is now delivering. The awards provide motivation and inspiration to do the best work possible in digital.

How do you see being awarded an advantage for those in the industry?

Recognition, respect, recruiting power – these awards provide real advantages as well as being a badge of honor for winning teams.

Media iQ was a headline sponsor for The Drum Digital Trading Awards US in 2017.

You can now register your interest for 2018 and be the first to hear when we are open for entries.

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