This year may be “the year of transparency” in media buying, says Joe Zawadski, CEO of MediaMath, but buyers increasingly hold the keys for unlocking what it is they want to know, leaving publishers to wonder how best to participate in a world where agencies and brands increasingly buy “audience” instead of “sites.”
What occasioned our DM2PRO.com interview with Zawadski was MediaMath’s nod as AlwaysOn’s OnMedia media advertising networks and exchanges category winner for top private companies of 2009. (As reported last week, Millennial Media was the overall winner of this award – a sort of “most likely to succeed and pay significant returns on investment” honor from a conference player that caters to VCs.)
While it’s a bit of a “beauty contest” – who can predict five years or even one year into the future of “exit opportunities” for innovators like MediaMath? -- we couldn’t be happier we used the award as an excuse to see the market from Zawadski’s “buy-side” perspective. His company, which may have invented the “demand side platform” designation a couple of years ago, sits like a junction box in the middle of the most rapidly moving innovation in online media buying: the real-time bidding on digital ad inventory based on identifying and targeting the different kinds of audience of value to brand clients at any given time.
Sound complicated? It is. Using MediaMath’s dashboard (a kind of Bloomberg Box for media buying), six of the top seven agency holding companies and another 30 brand-focused agencies can tap more than a dozen sources of inventory supply, and reams of audience and consumer purchase data and make instantaneous buying decisions that can be tracked and modified in near real time. As Zawadski puts it, it’s like giving each of the 13 billion impressions running through MediaMath’s system at any given time its own individual insertion order. Gone is the “bulk buy” and the black boxes that formerly shrouded the connectivity between audience and media.
Does this “threaten” premium publishers who fear that their most valuable audiences will be poached through other less expensive channels? Not surprisingly Zawadski says no, but his reasons are among the most cogent we’ve heard.
Watch our interview with Zawadski today in digiday’s video viewer in the upper right, and turn to DM2PRO.com as we build out more extensive video coverage from our top picks of the other interesting innovators unveiled at OnMedia. At $20/month DM2PRO.com is the deal of the century, and joining gives you access to our “conference in a box” coverage of all our upcoming digiday events. (What are you waiting for? C’mon. Be a pro!)
