MediaMath, acclaimed independent advertising technology company for leading brands and agencies, today announced global availability of the SOURCE digital media ecosystem, delivering upon the promise it made one year ago to develop a 100 percent accountable, addressable and aligned digital media supply chain by the end of 2020. Working with industry-leading partners to align the interests of brands, agencies, publishers and technology providers, MediaMath has created a transparent digital media ecosystem built to navigate the advertising industry’s most demanding challenges.
“When we set out on our SOURCE journey, modern marketers, consumers and publishers faced the threat of rapidly increasing fraud and misinformation, the impending demise of third-party cookies, with a market structure that makes industry-wide solutions hard to engineer,” said Joe Zawadzki, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of MediaMath. “We found the middle way between fragmented-open and consolidated-closed environments by redesigning the connection between brands and consumers across media and technology. An accountable, addressable, aligned supply chain; digital advertising, redesigned by market leaders, the way it should have been built.”
MediaMath has achieved significant results in the last year as it works toward its SOURCE vision to provide future-proofed omni-channel addressability, while enabling brands to keep pace with a rapidly evolving ecosystem. MediaMath was named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech for the third year in a row. MediaMath has built its SOURCE Identity Marketplace, which lets brands transact on the Common ID of their choice, currently offering LiveRamp’s people-based, pseudonymous ID, and the Merkle Merkury ID, with several new identity partnerships to be announced in the weeks ahead. These partnerships will allow brands to bridge the gap from martech to ad tech, providing IDs that bolster the provider’s other data services and offer the greatest scale in the ecosystem. Brands have already seen MediaMath’s “signal agnostic” approach drive bottom-line results. In fact, a recent case study showed that a company leveraging SOURCE’s integration with LiveRamp’s Authenticated Identity Infrastructure saw their campaigns perform 15 percent better in aggregate and achieve an 11 percent increase in ROI.
In October, MediaMath set an industry standard for transparency as it announced the global launch of the SOURCE Ecosystem Scorecard to provide unique clarity into the ecosystem supply partners that deliver the most value to advertisers, ultimately empowering advertisers to make better-informed decisions about their supply paths. In addition, as consumers increasingly consume news and content via CTV, advertisers have completely reshaped budgets and strategies to reach their audiences in new ways. MediaMath’s redesigned SOURCE infrastructure is leading the industry toward complete transparency of the CTV supply chain, providing advertisers confidence in their ad performance and full visibility into their spend. The SOURCE ecosystem brings together partners such as White Ops and TVSquared that share MediaMath’s values, providing unsurpassed measurement, analytics and transparency.
“SOURCE was imagined and architected to right the wrongs of a digital advertising industry that had organically evolved over the last decade. Now, global events and increased regulations have reshaped how brands interact with consumers who demand increased transparency and privacy for all their ad experiences, regardless of screen. Simultaneously, the pandemic and the resulting economic uncertainty has led advertisers to seek greater ROI on their ad spend,” said Anudit Vikram, Chief Product Officer, MediaMath. “Ultimately, there’s an increased need for alignment between advertisers, publishers, tech vendors and brands. MediaMath has addressed these challenges head on and created an environment in which all pieces of the ecosystem can thrive.”
“This achievement would not have been possible without our clients, partners and the team on the ground here at MediaMath who remained steadfast in their commitment to our goal, despite a global pandemic. There is more work to be done, but we now have the foundation to stand on as we enter this next phase of innovation in the digital economy,” Zawadzki added.
Partnering with Industry Leaders
MediaMath clients have achieved significant results via the SOURCE ecosystem. IBM was among the first brands to pilot SOURCE, achieving increased transparency and reduced overhead with a 27 percent reduction in CPEV and a 40 percent improvement in ad viewability, achieving economic control over their supply chain and the ability to allocate advertising money into working media. Notably, 62 percent of ad revenue share went to publishers.
“As a long-time partner of MediaMath, we share a mutual desire to harness the power of technology to revolutionize the advertising and marketing industry, and to ultimately empower improved customer experiences,” said Rich Brandolino, Head of Marketing Innovation and Programmatic Media, IBM. “SOURCE provides a tangible steppingstone on this journey toward creating a brighter future for the entire industry, by creating an accountable, addressable and aligned ecosystem.”
“MediaMath’s SOURCE aligned CTV attribution measurement has enabled our brand to break our ROI goals surpassing our expectation by nearly double in season. It has also allowed us to maximize ad spend efficiency during a critical time period for us,” said Mandy Herrmann, VP of Marketing at Balsam Brands. “We truly value our partnership with MediaMath and their expertise in driving CTV performance.”
“As the leading European-level industry association for online advertising, one of our core focuses is to increase transparency and trust in the digital marketing ecosystem,” said Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe. “2020 has been a challenging year for everyone, and now more than ever, we need to increase trust in our industry. It’s never been more important to continue innovating in technology to achieve this.”
“Assessing the reach, frequency and brand-specific outcomes of CTV advertising campaigns is critical for marketers to seamlessly and successfully adjust their strategies in line with ever-changing shifts in consumer behaviors,” said Jo Kinsella, President at TVSquared. “As MediaMath’s preferred partner for CTV measurement and attribution, TVSquared’s scalable, always-on platform is delivered to MediaMath’s global clients through SOURCE, empowering brands to confidently advertise and prove ROI in the rapidly growing CTV space.”
“As consumer demand for connected TV content continues to grow at a rapid pace, advertisers increasingly need transparent solutions to reach consumers on these channels,” said Rachel Gantz, General Manager, Activation Solutions, Comscore. “Marketers today need privacy-focused, brand-safe data solutions to reach consumers across channels. To that end, we are proud to have recently announced a partnership with MediaMath to launch a CTV and video contextual targeting solution for the open exchange programmatic landscape, and we look forward to continued innovation together.”
“MediaMath’s mission to build a transparent digital supply chain for the betterment of the entire ecosystem is directly aligned with our core vision to make advertising work better for people,” said Esra Bacher, Managing Partner, Programmatic Investment at GroupM. “Together, we’ve driven incredible results for the brands we work with and are driving toward a better future for the advertising industry. We look forward to utilizing SOURCE on a global scale.”
“SOURCE was born from the advertising industry’s desperate need for a re-designed digital supply chain, the commitment to its clients and partners to align their needs and goals, and the courage to take an action that will push the industry forward,” said Nathan Pedwell, National Head of Digital & Technology at Ikon. “Increasing the visibility of actors within the supply chain will ultimately transform the relationship between advertisers and publishers —creating more mutually beneficial relationships based on meaningful value rather than transactions. As an agency, we see this as a critical step forward and are excited to be a part of this transformation.”
“Perhaps no industry has been more greatly disrupted in recent years than news media. To survive and drive growth in this new landscape, publishers need to adopt innovative solutions to monetize content and reach the right audiences,” said Steve Mummey, VP, Programmatic Sales and Operations at AccuWeather. “The SOURCE ecosystem not only empowers effective contextual targeting for brands, but helps reputable publishers maximize the value of their audiences.”
“The digital advertising ecosystem has been long overdue for change. Not only did the ecosystem lose consumer trust, but the cookie-based infrastructure has always been fraught with inefficiencies: data loss due to cookie syncs; incomplete customer views; inability to measure campaigns accurately; and weakened inventory monetization,” said Travis Clinger, SVP, Head of Addressability and Ecosystem at LiveRamp. “That’s why we announced a global partnership with MediaMath earlier this year, integrating our people-based, privacy-focused identifier into MediaMath’s bidding infrastructure through SOURCE. Today’s milestone achievement reinforces our approach as we move one step closer to providing brands with the tools and technology they need to achieve greater addressability overall through improved scale, accuracy, control and measurement, while simultaneously upholding the promise of consumer trust.”
“The SOURCE vision of a supply chain that would align the interest of all parties – both DSPs and SSPs – immediately resonated with us, and we were the first sell-side platform to join the ecosystem,” said Adam Soroca, Head of Global Buyer Team at Magnite. “Since then, SOURCE has truly reimagined the digital supply chain. While the initial mission of SOURCE has been achieved, MediaMath continues to innovate and we look forward to the evolution of SOURCE to meet the needs of the modern advertising industry.”
“We share in MediaMath’s vision of aligning programmatic advertising to achieve the levels of visibility and performance that both buyers and publishers are seeking,” said Alex Shephard, Regional VP, Demand Side Platforms at PubMatic. “Through our partnership and the SOURCE initiative, we are leveraging the power of our platform and innovative technology with the intent of creating additional value for the industry rooted in transparency and trust.”
“The threats of invalid traffic, malicious activity and fraud continue to become more sophisticated, evolve and represent a real challenge for brands and publishers,” said Dan Lowden, CMO at White Ops. “Working with MediaMath, we are cleaning up the digital media supply chain to make it fraud free, providing comprehensive real-time protection visibility at the bid-level even for emerging channels, and providing clients and partners globally with complete confidence, trust and transparency that they are fully protected.”
“Oracle Data Cloud and MediaMath share a commitment to bringing clients the best tools in brand safety and measurement to drive optimal performance,” said Mark Kopera, Head of Product, Moat by Oracle Data Cloud. “We look forward to our continued collaboration as we strive to provide brands and agencies the most transparent view of their campaign performance.”
MediaMath continues to expand SOURCE’s supply chain ecosystem with new, industry-leading solutions and advertising opportunities. For example, MediaMath was the first to market with supply path optimization, and plans to launch new enhancements to its robust supply path management in the coming year. The company also plans to add new partners aligned to its CTV vision.
