Mike Baker is the President and CEO at DataXu. Here he discusses DataXu's offering in Europe, targeting beyond the cookie, and mobile RTB.
Can you give an overview on the DataXu offering?
Our platform is a tool to help marketers make digital advertising more effective. It combines a simple user interface with a powerful back-end data processing system to make it easier for marketers to understand and engage their customers. Some of our customers call it their own “brain of digital marketing”.
The platform uses impression-level decisioning across PC display, mobile, and video media channels to improve campaign performance and reduce wasted spend. The decisions are informed in run time by massive amounts of data collected by our customers from their digital media investments (ads, web sites, mobile applications, you name it). Unlike the simple DSPs that have been in Europe for a couple of years now, our service goes far beyond targeting cookie segment on exchanges. We help marketers discover dynamic demand and profitably fulfill it.
For each campaign, the DataXu system creates custom logic (we call it a “brand genome”) that is calibrated to a brand’s specific business goals as measured by almost any consumer activity or outcome, including video completion, mobile app downloads, shopping cart values, customer profitability and even things like changes in brand sentiment.
The cookie directive is having an effect on audience buying in this market? Is the Dataxu model overly-focused on cookie targeting?
Many have observed that the first generation DSPs have a pretty limited value proposition: cookie-centric audience buying on ad exchanges. This was an innovative tactic in 2008, but it’s the shallow and crowded end of the pool today. The DataXu platform integrates a much broader set of capabilities, all focused on enabling marketers to handle big data and apply actionable analytics. Our run-time multivariate decisioning helps marketers discover dynamic pools of consumer demand and profitably fulfill them.
What variables can you use other than the cookie? And how are these likely to help European advertisers deliver on KPIs and campaign goals?
Beyond the cookie lie a number of data parameters (what I call “thin data”) that describe the consumer, the context and the creative message. The DataXu platform classifies every ad shown and every site conversion based on over a hundred variables, including things like the media type, the creative concept, the time of day and day of week, the page level content type, the site conversion value, and so on. The scale of the data is tremendous, and it allows us to detect distinct, evolving patterns among the many signals. These patterns correlate to marketing outcomes and can be used to guide investments.
Can you give some overview on how you are helping clients buy in the mobile?
DataXu launched the first Mobile DSP earlier this year – DX Mobile – offering real-time impression-level decisioning and actionable analytics across mobile inventory sources. Our thinking is: consumers don’t live in silos, so why do marketers? As the only multi-channel DSP platform, we enable you to reach these consumers as they move freely between channels in their daily lives. And with 5 billion people across the world now having cell phones, the mobile advertising opportunity is incredibly strategic.
Will RTB work in mobile display? With no cookie, what variables will you bid on?
Yes, mobile RTB already works, demonstrating superior returns. I have the good fortune to be Chairman of the Board of Nexage, the leading RTB mobile ad exchange, and they are doing very well indeed with it.
The lack of persistent user IDs in mobile makes it harder to measure and target advertising. However, the DataXu platform stills makes good decisions with whatever data is available, on any inventory source including exchange and premium buys. This may include anonymous cookies for Android users, hashed UDID’s for apps, publisher data, geo data, demographic data, and a host of other variables. The system employs machine-learning techniques to determine which data is critical to drive campaign performance and inferences around missing parameters.
Will new mobile rich media formats bring in the brand budget? How can a DSP help advertisers and agencies in that area?
Savvy brands are already devoting substantial budgets to rich media because of its proven ability to drive deeper levels of engagement. Exchange-based rich media is getting better scale through rich-media enabling tool kits being implemented by app developers and more generally by the ORMMA (Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising) API and similar initiatives. I expect the increasing momentum for HTML5 adoption will make mobile rich media simple and commonplace.
Will DataXu have to adjust its model for the European market? Does one-size fits all?
No we won’t adjust our technology or model for Europe. We will adjust our services capability to meet the local market needs as they are. While there are a few pockets of expertise, our initial experience is that the market is at the very early stage of adoption of using mining big data to create actionable analytics for digital marketing.
What is the Dataxu doing in the social channel?
We live in an inter-connected digital world that is growing increasingly social every day. DataXu’s mission is to create an integrated platform for digital marketing that spans the media channel silos, whether it’s Google, Facebook, or the new, new channel that’s hot with consumers next year. Currently our platform is running across online display, mobile video and social media channels Our customer have been getting some really great results by using data insights from one channel to power others, including using data insights from web campaigns to optimize Facebook ad spend. We’ll be sharing more information about that in weeks to come.
What can we expect to see from DataXu in the European market over the coming months?
As we’ve done in the US market, we look forward to closely partnering with European brands and their agencies to make their digital marketing more effective. We look forward to sharing more news soon.