Name: OpenX CEO: In World of Clickbait, Quality Internet Ads 'Fundamental'
Uploaded: 2018-11-05
Duration: 6 min 55 s
Description: 'Otherwise you're just wasting money,' says OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan.

[ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] What is programmatic advertising and why is it so important to the future of advertising? Whenever you're navigating the web, whether you're going on a website or you're on a mobile app And you see advertising, much of that is now powered by basically a stock exchange that sits behind those websites and those apps. And it's a trading system. So if you're the owner of a website or an app, and you have ad space to sell, you ping us in real time, it all happens very quickly, in 100 or 200 milliseconds. And we'd run an auction for buyers to buy that ad space and present their message to you. In Traditional advertising. What you would do is you would buy a block of consumers attention. Let's say you buy an ad on a TV program. You buy that because you think that a certain group of people that are interested in your product will be watching. That program at that point in time, but you also know there's a lot of people who are watching who are not going to be interested, so there's a certain amount of waste. What data driven digital marketing does, and that's what programmatic is, it allows you to say, hey, I can use the data that I have. On maybe my current customers and potential customers and I can buy ads only for those people. So, I can pinpoint the people that I'm interested in, when I think they're going to be interested with a message I think they're going to find interesting. And I'm not going to spend money or invest time putting messages in front of people I don't think are going to be interested. The landscape of advertising has obviously undergone a massive shift in the last decade or so. The way people receive ads, the way ads are delivered to people is undergoing constant change. With the emergence of mobile and other types of technology, where does programmatic advertising fit into that? And how can it help to streamline that process to reach consumers? Yeah, so I mean it's been a fundamental change. We started the company about a year after the iPhone came out. So most of the activity digitally was on traditional desktops. And so that's what the comp [ any was built around then obviously mobile became The dominant way that people interact with media and communications, and so we have to shift to that format. And now we're on the cusp of a potentially even bigger transition where TV watching is going from classic forms of TV watching to digitally, the back end being digital. And that enables another wave of advertising innovation, which will, again, have the same underlying principles, you run a market, you have to do that with quality, you have to scale, you have to be fast, you have to have high standards. But also has to be attuned to the particulars of a digital TV experience. And that's kind of the new frontier For a lot of the industry. Open Access sort of stated that its intentions are to focus on quality advertising. Yep. Is that a metric, can you measure what quality advertising is? And how important is that in a world of ad blocking and click bait? It's fundamental. So the advertiser Only wants to spend their money in front of willing users who can see their ads, to have a good chance of being genuinely interested. Otherwise you're just wasting money. And so as in our industry, as in all sectors of the economy there's fraud and there's low quality, right? Ford is where people are trying to make money when they don't have what it is you're trying to buy. So putting Fake users into the system and so on. And so we've been building systems for six or seven years that help us strip out any kind of inventory that we don't think is real people. The other thing we do is a lot of curation. So it's one thing to get rid of the fraud, that's super important. Even that, when you have real inventory with real people, some of it is good, and some of it isn't. So we spend a lot of time evaluating every publisher, every cell of it comes to us and checking their site or the app making sure it's in the right category and isn't in alcohol, tobacco, or firearms or hate speech which we don't allow. So that we don't allow them into the marketplace. And we also look at how the ad experience is generated. For example if you have content or a video And dozens of ads around it. That doesn't work for us. That doesn't work for our advertisers. And so we don't allow them into the market place where we're getting feedback like if you want Coley brands to appear on your site, you need to give them a Coley experience. So those are all things that you can measure, and we do everyday, every week, and we run a lot of these systems actually in realtime to look at the quality so it's integral to have around the business. In this day and age of increased calls for Representation and diversity. Yep. Do you as CEO feel compelled, running this marketplace, to sort of speak out about these issues and make sure people know about them? So our approach has been to review the policies on what we deem acceptable and what we don't. And there are certain categories Of content that are clearly unacceptable and then there are areas where we have to make a judgment call. An example would be hate speech, which is a matter of judgment to some degree, and we draw the line, and we administer that line with what we think is acceptable and seems fair to us. And what isn't. And of course, we have to make that without a political point of view. We're just trying to make sure that there's an appropriate line there. So we have banned a number of pretty large sites that we think just cross that line with incitement to violence or race violence and so on. So we just We don't think that that's right, so that's the example of an area where we're making policy decisions that involve some judgement on those kinds of topics. Going forward, what should employees of OpenX The customers who use it, and even the general public sort of expect from business leaders who are working in the sphere of advertising when it comes to these social issues? Where is their place, as you as a CEO and your fellow colleagues in that realm? Well, the goal is to build a fair and open marketplace for reputable businesses on both sides. That's what we should Be doing and that everyone who participates in that marketplace understands how it works it's democratic, and everyone can participate, and they participate on a level playing field. After that we sort of leave it a little bit to the market. So, our job is little bit like running a stock exchange. Right? Our job Is to make sure that the fundamentals are in place, that it's fair, it's equitable, it's transparent, it's high quality, and then to let everybody participate. So that's how we tried to run the business. And that has worked well in some of the other categories and so we tried to emulate that. When I look at other marketplace businesses, you know, what works well, what doesn't.

OpenX CEO: In World of Clickbait, Quality Internet Ads 'Fundamental'

"Otherwise you're just wasting money," says OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan.