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A: It’s interesting. I think that over the time, we’ve made this huge jump forward and then this huge jump back. As soon as everyone was home, it wasn’t only finding a new way of working together, but a new way to reach out and find consumers.

I do think the beauty in how the industry reacted to change – the moment brand thought “ now I need to be digitally led” – was really unique because we saw brands like McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts and all these different brands start to get very smart and more strategic around how they actually deliver an experience for their customers.

Consumer habits change; we adapt and react to where our circumstances lead us to. Currently, we’re not all grabbing our coffees on the way to work anymore. I order it on my app, I walk to my kitchen. But, as things open up again, we will no doubt adapt to whatever the new normal has in store.

Brands have learned the importance of being authentic. And not just showing up publicly, but internally. It’ll be interesting to see who continues the conversation, how those conversations are led, the use of data and what we do with it. Clearly things like creative optimizations is kind of an issue because maybe we’re determining things based off the sites we’ve gone to, but again, there’s so many other different patterns that play into it that unfortunately can’t really be used right now. It’s a big learning curve.

Q:  When we think about the adtech industry specifically, and the power that consumer data can bring to creative teams, what innovations are you seeing from some forward thinking marketers?

A: You want me to be honest? It’s not a heck of a lot! I’m just being totally transparent. We have seen different ways in which people are getting products to people – that kind of experience of walking up and not having to go into a store anymore is creating new ways to communicate with consumers in their own homes – but I don’t know that I’ve seen a significant jump in usage of different technology. I most certainly have seen more augmented reality and I think that’s cool, but in a lot of cases, AR has a long way to go. Because the extent of which a lot of people are using AR is along the lines of “let me just take my phone and put it at my foot and now I have a sneaker on it”. Cool, right? But not game changing.

Technology such as Chatbot is cool because you’re able to have this one to one conversation. But the majority of people that use chatbots don’t like it because it feels very disconnected and inhuman. I type in a sentence, as soon as I press return, I get a sentence or a paragraph back, right? It doesn’t feel human at all. You might be giving me insights of information that I need, but it’s totally disconnected. So how do we humanize those opportunities and utilise technologies such AR and even smarter AI, to truly understand who you are, what you do, and then deliver the right message – in a more relevant way, that actually matters to me.

Q: You were one of the first creative minds to really bring to life biometric research as a way to fuel the creative outcome. Have you seen businesses invest in this to bring this storytelling to life?

A: Not many in truth, because it’s pretty expensive. For individuals that are listening and don’t understand what biometric research is, let me dive in a little deeper. Essentially we created a lab where people could come in and test advertising solutions on a mobile device or laptop, and we then explored how the body reacted. Imagine these respondents were in the ICU and they’re connected up to their hands and their heart – it was a true scientific experiment.

From this, we were able to identify heart rate, pupil dilation, arousal, which is the sweat on your palms, whether you’re leaning forward or backwards, all of this amazing insight to capture the human experience. And we were able to understand what worked best, based off colour pallets, call to action, speed of animation, position on the page the whole nine yards. We were able to really test innovation first, before we bring it to market to guarantee success.

Every brand wants to innovate. And every RFP will inevitably have the word ‘innovation’ throughout. But we don’t have to go to the extreme of biometric research; the number one aspect of innovation is doing something new, doing something that will challenge the status quo. But these things can take time, and a lot of brands want to get to market with their product campaign fast, which can hamper the utilization of true innovation.

The brands that are going to succeed are the brands that are actually willing to take that leap of faith and do things that are different and more unique. But it’s this difference and unique way of thinking that gets people’s attention. I can have a thousand people in the audience when on stage, the first question I ask is, “show of hands, how many people remember the last time you saw an ad?”

Of course, everyone raises their hand because everyone knows they saw an ad today, probably in the last 30 minutes. And then I say, okay, great. Keep your hands up if you remember the name of the brand. 98% of the hands will go down. My next question will be “keep your hands up if that brand was not your company or not your client”. And then you might have two hands left out of say a thousand people. This is the point we need to focus on, because this is what we all do for a living – we want to help marketers deliver meaningful ads in the right moment. So relevancy and innovation is everything; the innovation that will make that person say, oh yes, I do remember that because it was different, because it was unique, because I’ve never seen something like that before.

Q: Outside of the walled gardens, how can brands be creative themselves to build stronger relationships with their customers?

A: One thing I will say, which many will be surprised at, but I hate programmatic. And the reason why I hate programmatic is because it’s the lowest hanging fruit. It’s a 300 by 250, the ads that no one really looks at. Yes, we’re reaching the right audience demographic, but do we really as consumers care? That’s why there’s something called banner blindness. But, as we try to move forward beyond this cookieless space, it’s going to be more about building relationships with the publishers again, the way I did in the past, and I’m going to have to innovate with these people to create solutions that actually matter.

But this also puts a significant amount of that pressure on the publishers and on these different platforms to actually build, test, and bring these new solutions to life. But the beauty of taking this approach in today’s climate, is we have a much smarter breadth of tools and technology that can automate much of this stuff for us.

Some say it was easy to innovate in 2001, and 2002, and 2003, because businesses were simply grabbing at anything. It was like, Hey, this cool, let me do this and see if it works. But now, when you look at the (m)adtech landscape – I mean how many businesses are there all innovating and taking a slice of the pie? It’s a much harder landscape to navigate.

Q: The pandemic has had a huge impact on the creative industry specifically on shoots and productions. What innovative ways of working have you seen take place over the last year?

A: That’s a really good question. I mean the world of video conferencing might be feeling a tad frustrating after nearly two years of doing it, but it certainly has brought so many of us closer together. But in terms of how we work, we’ve learned to work in a very disconnected, disjointed space, which is super interesting. We’re doing shoots now and you might have a couple people on set, and then the rest of us dial in via Zoom, or Teams, or another platform of the like. We’ve learned to be a little bit more flexible, and we will most certainly take away some positives from the past year or so.

Q: We are a huge advocate for diversity in the creative industries. Diverse creatives are fighting an uphill battle against negative stereotypes on many fronts. How have you seen the conversations move on in terms of celebrating black creatives, female creatives,  especially at a senior level?

A: I think that this year has presented us with an opportunity to speak more where we are listening to each other like we’ve never listened before. This of course, is a good thing because we can’t move on with anything without having these hard-hitting discussions. What I will say, is I don’t know that we have seen significant change over this year other than the conversation become somewhat more public. We’ve most certainly seen a few people step into senior roles which has been incredible, but still and I say this all the time, it’s not enough.

When the ‘Me Too’ movement happened, we saw a significant amount of change happen very quickly rapidly for women, specifically white women. And that happened because there was a fear. Men were like, “Oh sh*t, I’m going to lose my f***ing job.” Yet, with diversity and inclusion, it’s not just people of colour, but as people with disabilities too, the conversation is a lot more hidden if you like, a lot more complex. It isn’t a case of having a D&I budget and ticking the boxes.

So, it is a real challenge, but it is fantastic that we are starting to have these conversations. I most certainly have been using my platform to speak more about these circumstances, be it comfortable or uncomfortable, because people are listening now. The hope and intent is that there are people who are inspired by some of the things that I say. And people that learn from that and maybe become inspired.

This is about everyone working together to create a better space. White people, black people yellow people, all colour people, black, blue, purple, orange, whatever. We all need to be figuring out how we create opportunity. Here’s just one example; It’s people of colour that are pushing fashion; it’s people of colour that actually push the boundaries of music; It’s people of colour that are actually buying and moving forward with technology the fastest. But, is this reflected in the teams behind the product? In all likelihood, the answer is no.

So, it is only right that you ensure that you have these people who are also in the room to create these campaigns and to build these opportunities. It’s about ensuring that we have inclusiveness all around the technology space through to advertising and the whole nine yards.

Q:  So on this similar topic, the notion of our diverse workforce creating better and more disruptive storytelling is slowly being recognised. Are you truly seeing brands grab this opportunity? And do you think they are really putting the right measures in place?

A: Let’s be honest, it’s a real mixture of some brands doing really well and others not so much. Even Nike had that problem. Someone created an Instagram account for Nike, it was for all Nike’s black employees. Post after post after post of all the micro-aggressions and all of the negative suddenly became public. And then of course, the domino affect comes in, and before you know it, its being picked up in the news. All of a sudden the account vanished. Before we start the conversation externally, we HAVE to make sure our ducks are in a row internally. So many businesses have, are and will be caught out.

A lot of people don’t like when I say this, but I could care less about the numbers of diverse people in your organisation. I say that because any person, doesn’t matter what colour you are, when you get on a zoom with your team, your company, so on and so forth, you know immediately whether your place of work is diverse or not.

When you walk into an office and you sit down in a conference room, it’s the first thing you see. It’s the first thing you feel. So, all I care about is, are we creating a culture and environment where people can walk in and feel that every place they go? Once you do that, you then create a diverse workplace for all.

Q: What are some of the interesting things that have come up in these conversations when they talk about diversity?

A:  I get a lot of hate mail, and negative stuff. But from the majority, I get messaging from people saying “I wanted to comment on your post, but I was afraid to, because the ramifications of what could happen to me in my job, in my company, what people might think about me.” There are several who feel, “I can’t say that because if I say that, then I’m going to get in trouble”.

So, I feel lucky that I can be disruptive in some manner, to challenge these difficult subject matters. Last week I called out an issue on a white CEO and today I made a call out to black people about the fact that when there are opportunities in jobs that require us to move, we don’t want to move. So I call it how I see it. I’m honest and candid in my approach. And if someone doesn’t like that, then I couldn’t give two f……..

Q: As a senior black creative in a fast-moving industry, how do you see your role moving forward?

A: I really don’t know! Whatever happens next, happens. I’m not the dude that’s like, in two years I want to be a chief creative officer. Then three years later, I want to be a CEO. For me, I’m just about being in a place where I enjoy the people I work with and being in a place where I can do work that’s incredible and fun and blow some things up. Not literally, of course, but I just thrive off being creative, innovative, and working with great people. It is so important to surround yourselves with people that truly inspire you.

The biggest thing I always tell creators, regardless of what colour you are, is that as you come up, the one thing you’ll learn is that the more senior you go, the less work you actually do, right? The less work you actually do, the more pitching and selling you actually do. In theory, almost every C-suite, I don’t care what job you have, whether you’re a CMO, a CSO or CCO, you’re selling. So, the biggest thing I always try to leave people with is that from as early on as you can, get comfortable with speaking in front of people and as a creative, get comfortable with telling a story. Your job is to be able to inspire your teams, other departments, and then your clients, right? And of course, new business opportunities.

A: It’s funny, every time I hear the demise of the third-party cookie, I feel like there needs to be a dun, dun, dun, after it because it’s such a seismic shift that we’re seeing across the industry. There are a couple of things that I hear and see all the time. So first and foremost, when we’re working with different clients across the board, especially as we look at brands and marketers, are those that are really leaning in, learning, and testing. They’re saying “I have all of these cookie-based workflows. I’ve got it figured it out.” Oftentimes they are starting on the paid media side of the house.

On the other hand, there are those that are saying, “I am going to wait and see what actually happens.” “I’m going to wait and see if the deprecation of the third-party cookie really does happen.”

The fact is, we’re moving away from a third-party cookie into a person-based identifier, and so therefore we are hearing a lot of questions on scale. Concerns surrounding the level of depth around those cookie workflows and which ones have to be replaced and which ones are just gone forever, are just a few to mention.

Q: A big focus for LiveRamp this year is the idea of data collaboration. Can you tell us a little bit more about the notion of data collaboration?

A: Yeah, absolutely. The idea of data collaboration is nothing new. However, the ability to do data collaboration in a privacy compliant way via a platform that is scalable, is where it gets exciting. When I talk about data collaboration, what I mean is, the ability for two companies – or two brands or partners -to be able to share their own first-party data. An example, we just had an announcement with Carrefour and their CPG partners. They have set up a means where they can share data in a controlled environment based on use cases, based on approved access and a set of privacy controls that they can now access data to be able to drive better paid media with greater insights. You can imagine on the Carrefour CPG side, CPGs are looking at it and saying, I actually need transaction level data so that I can now, in turn, build better audiences and create a better customer.

Where it gets really complex is when you need to be able to scale that but keep it controlled. It’s all about figuring out how to maintain data in an environment and protect that data from being leaked or used in multiple different facets. So, it’s really about how do you create that scalable platform with keeping privacy at the heart.

Q: Data collaboration sounds very interesting. And pretty simple, right?

A: The idea is straightforward and simple. The complexity and the nuances around the data, the privacy and those controls is where all of the complexity comes in. Because if you’re a brand, your most valuable asset is your first-party data – your customer data. It is also the most insightful information that you have. And so you don’t want that data to be used across any sort of use case. The challenges lie within how to manage and control your data, and still provide the insights that are needed across the board with your partnerships.

Q: Are there any other concerns or perhaps pushbacks from your clients regarding the privacy and safety of customer data across these collaborative partnerships?

A: Clients want to understand how their data is being protected. Once they understand the depth of the privacy, controls and the capabilities that are available, they know that their most trusted asset is going to be protected and will ultimately in control how that data gets accessed across their trusted partners. I think once they understand that a lot of the concern starts to go away.

It allows you to do more than just thinking about paid media or marketing use cases. It allows you to get much deeper into the customer experience and enhancing that as well.

Q: GDPR was arguably the catalyst for regulations across the globe, and we’re continuing to see more regions join this trend. Being located in the states, what’s the overall viewpoint on these new laws? And are you seeing a shift in business etiquette in terms of adapting to these changes?

A: In short, yes. We are already seeing it with the implementation of the CCPA regulation in California. I was reading an article the other day and it stated there were seven to ten states that had some sort of additional privacy regulation on the table for 2021. And so yes, the reality is it’s coming! And it is a good thing after all.

It will fundamentally change how we work within the industry. It weeds out bad behaviours and bad players, putting a force behind the need for what we call privacy by design. These regulations help us focus on how we insert privacy into product development at the earliest stages so that as we start to look at what the business challenges are – and what we are solving for – the solutions that we bring to market, privacy starts at step one instead of towards the end of the life cycle process.

Q: Today, we exist in a very nuanced world, a polarised world where marketers are quite rightly honing in on brand safety and suitability. What role will data play for businesses who want to push for quality advertising experiences?

A: There will continue to be a push on overall data quality. There is a constant pendulum when it comes to data; Do I want scale? Do want quality? The answer is both, surely? But when we think about how data gets used across advertising, it’s highly dependent on the marketer, the campaign, the targeting, or the strategy in terms of how accurate that data has to be. Going back to the conversation around privacy by design, it’s not just about the quality of the data, but how you acquire that data, the rights, and the use of that data. All of these things are very much tied together.

We must start looking at how we use quality data to enhance the overall customer experience. That is so important. And I think for so long, that’s been often been pushed aside. We are reaching a critical point now where we actually have to start delivering on that promise. And this in turn, very much feeds into the brand safety and sustainability focus.

Q: I want to take a slight change in direction, and talk about your podcast! Can you tell us how this came about and what inspired you to create this forum?

A: Thank you for asking that question. So my friend. Chad Hickey and I, (he’s the CEO of a company called Givsly, which is a social impact company in the US), were having lunch one day and we bonded over a couple of things. Both of us are very gregarious personalities, and very outgoing. We talked about the fact that when we go to networking events and walk in alone, how difficult it is for us. People just don’t expect that right? And it got us thinking, “Why aren’t people honest about these things?” And so, the more that we talked about these things, we said, “You know what? We really need to have authentic conversations.”

It’s so interesting. And I think because of the fact we’ve been so disconnected for the past year, it has become even more important for people to understand the struggles their peers may be feeling, and that everyone will cope very differently. The idea of personal versus work is gone. But, at some point, it just became clear to me that everybody needed either a virtual hug or just to know that, guess what? I’m your leader and I’m struggling with the same things. Or, I’m your leader, and I’m struggling, and here are the things that I’m doing. Our ego needs to drop, and empathy needs to rise.

Q: From a gender standpoint and through your podcast discussions, what progress is being made when it comes to the empowerment of women.

A: When I think about my career and I think about being in sales in the ’90s in the south of the US, I look at what I was faced with then and the opportunities that were presented to me versus what I see for women today. And I see a tremendous amount of growth across the board. I don’t think women en masse, at least in our industry, have to deal with the onslaught of what I dealt with or what a lot of women dealt with in previous generations or in other parts of the world.

Saying that, I still think that women get marginalised, and we are not in enough strategic conversations. When I’m on a Zoom, the first thing that I do is look to see how many other women are on the call. And it will come as no surprise, it’s not many. And that signals that we still have an issue.

I am not a sensitive person in general, but I’m sensitive to making sure that we are represented and that our voices are heard. One of the biggest things that the ‘DIB movement ‘has done (Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Movement) is to focus on the fact that it’s actually not about having a certain number of people of colour, nor a certain number of women, it’s about ensuring that our voices that are different, our points of views are different, and these differences have a seat at the table.

I applaud our industry, in general, for putting a stake in the ground and saying the diversity conversation is important. But it’s one thing to recognise it, and another to do something, to take action. What I am terribly fearful of is that if we come back in 18 months, we head back to a world where diversity and inclusion is not a key driver for organizations and instead becomes a tick-box exercise, verses something that businesses want to do. And that’s a concern that I have.

Q:  COVID has significantly changed the way we do business and by default has created a huge shift for leaders. Many find themselves struggling to adjust to this new normal. From the discussions you’ve had with your network, what opportunities and learnings can we take from the past year?

A: It’s such a good question. Covid, for me, has been a real big driver for the need to have authentic conversations. Where leaders have found success, has been through being more transparent and authentic, more open and having discussions around feelings. Covid was – and still is – traumatic. And so we are all dealing with trauma at some level. When we think about that and we think about the fear that we had, it leaves a level of uncertainty which can be unsettling.

From my perspective, a good leader will see the opportunity to find ways to connect with people and to put their guard down and to lead from a human standpoint, not just from a performance standpoint. Creating spaces for people to be able to talk about those emotions, and having professionals come in and talk about mental health, is where we need to head towards, especially as we start to re-enter the office world.

If you asked me the positive things that come out of Covid, one is I think I am a better leader because of Covid. I forced myself to prioritise and to create boundaries because I saw how bad it was. I’m also working with my team to create those boundaries. People want to work for people that not just empower them, but help them grow across multiple different facets.

Q: Your podcast is all about finding purpose, purpose in what is a very complex industry and uncertain world. What tips and tricks would you give to our listeners in terms of finding purpose and how do we change your mindsets to look for opportunities instead of feeling trapped?

A: Such a good, powerful question. It all came about, simply because, I went through a journey in finding my purpose. Today, I am able to succinctly talk about it more so than in the past. It can seem a bit daunting in terms of thinking about your individual purpose, but it doesn’t have to be. Firstly, think about what it is that you enjoy doing. Think about the things that you are passionate about. And think about how you can apply those to either your job, to your teammates, to whoever.

Purpose goes out the window when you are literally working two jobs to sustain a family. Purpose goes out the window when you are terrified because of your name or what you look like, that you cannot find another job, that you don’t have other opportunities open to you.

If you work for a company that does not support your purpose, start small, start organic. And find other avenues because that purpose and that exercise of doing that, might lead you to someplace else.

A: IRIS TV’s clients are publishers, broadcasters and CTV type platforms. The change they all had was an increase in consumption of their content. It is a big tick for them being seen by more eyeballs. What we are seeing again in studies on this, is there was no real result in a proportional move of ad dollars to those eyeballs, and that’s still shifting sand in terms of how that moves over. Therefore, the change in buyers and advertisers habits didn’t result in improved revenues to the publishers.

It was quite well covered in terms of push due to a lot of the news being considered negative. Not only do we have COVID, but we also had Trump and all the stories around him. There was buyer-side nervousness on top of supply-side frustration, from an IRIS perspective. This helps highlight the importance of context in general, and not everything is negative.

There were brand safety concerns around negative sentiments, and negative context within the videos. What we need to consider is not all news is bad news. A lot of technologies, IRIS.TV being one, have to rise to get solutions in place to make sure the dollars follow the eyeballs as the consumer shifts to these types of new platforms and new consumption habits.

Q: Many execs believe that Connected TV has the potential to revolutionise the TV ad market – driving convergence between TV and digital, opening up the market to streaming services, and creating new opportunities for addressable advertising. What opportunities are you seeing resonate the most with your clients, and where do you see the future going?

A: Our clients on the supply side are hoping money will come their way, and are looking for solutions to put in place to execute sending more ad dollars to them. A lot of these CTV platforms are keen for the continued evolution, consumption of effects, TV quality, production, and programming by these streaming services, which will encourage marketers and brands to move their money.

At the executive level, there’s the potential there to revolutionise the TV ad market. The opportunity is always there and if you track the evolution over time, in terms of advertising spend, it always follows the eyeballs, or for podcasts follow ears. Podcasting has grown, there is more advertising coming to those. It’s a different way of engaging with users using the technologies out there.

I’d say the future is playing out at different speeds in different regions. Again, we are a US company, now we’ve opened up our EMEA business, and EMEA has different regions, different regulations and competition rules. Then you got the walled gardens as well and different types of infrastructure dynamics. These have impacts along the top of how the agencies and their buyers for their clients can shift that spend over to where those eyeballs are on that engaged audience. CTV will drive that and revolutionise TV ad markets.

It’ll take longer than anyone would ever wish it to, because a lot of content creators in the space are spending a lot of money to create content, and not necessarily seeing, particularly in the AVOD space, the ad dollars following. It will come and technologies such as 4D and who we partner with, Silverbullet and IRIS can help in terms of that evolution.

Q: Contextual video has seen a resurgence in the wake of the third-party cookie demise. Yet, contextual targeting back in the day was deemed a simple keyword-based targeting and blocking tool. What advancements are you seeing in contextual video and what can brands expect for the future?

A: From where IRIS.TV sits, we’d say that context is key, and the demise of the third party cookie is accelerating the need and interest in contextual solutions. With the demise of third-party cookies, there are lots of different solutions people are looking at. This causes some confusion in the short term regarding what metrics people are going to target against. But contextual targeting is not new.

With CTV, there are no cookies, it’s a cookie-less environment, but in the OLV, online video, there are still cookies. The way you’d buy digital, you’ve seen video be the same and it is we’re using the cookie. With CTV there are no cookies, there are no URLs. People have to adapt their buying habits around that. Again, that’s where we think contextually to be able to offer contextual targeting is key. Traditional contextual solutions are not new and they are looking at page-level details.

They’re scraping a page, they’re looking at the page, they’re pulling out keywords, and identifying through those keywords several identifiers help devise a type of target against it. A video doesn’t have words. Our marketing people say the text is worth 100 words, a picture’s worth 1000 words and a video is worth a million words. You’ve got a million words to basically in effect contextualise, therefore you can get a more granular and targeted buy on behalf of your clients.

Technologies improved, what IRIS.TV does is give video level data analysis, we get verified by third-party sources. The partnership we have with Silverbullet is utilising the latest and greatest in terms of AI, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. All these other technologies sit alongside what is traditional contextual targeting. This has evolved a lot in terms of the video space and gets you to a far more granular level, which then hopefully gives the buyers and their clients a far more brand-safe and targeted buying opportunity. The opportunity in CTV is huge, it’s still new, contextual will help. Technology continues to evolve at massive rates.

IRIS sits in a pretty unique position in the ecosystem and promotes IRIS around all of this. Its key people understand most solutions out there in the marketplace around contextual are looking at the page level, they don’t look at the video level. Most of the providers out there don’t have access to the actual content asset. IRIS clients are the publishers, the broadcasters, we have a direct feed from those publishers, so we can get the full knowledge and understanding of those videos.

When we work with the likes of 4D, we can then pass information to them, allowing them to further contextualise and offer sub-segments the buyers recognise and understand at a video level detail, rather than an assumed page level detail. This is the more traditional side of it. It’s different in terms of where we sit which is on the supply side, offering solutions to the buy-side to target a far more granular level.

Q: Today we exist in a very nuanced world; a polarized world where brands have to be on top of their game when it comes to brand safety and suitability. When we think about the pandemic and political unrest, brands need to be confident their brand is placed in a respectful environment to reflect their brand ethics. How can video advertisers make sure they combat these issues?

A: It starts with transparency, this is where context can play a key part in helping brands gain confidence in the video and see environments are not only brand-safe but far more granular in their targeting and execution. The ad is directly linked to the contents and the granularity of the information then helps with the brand safety concerns that the buyers have. I mentioned earlier in terms of stories around Trump and COVID. There are positive stories, not around Trump, but positive stories around COVID in terms of vaccines coming out, solutions coming out. Certain advertisers and brands would probably want to be around that content, it is going to draw a lot of eyeballs and it’s a good news story.

There are blockers and other technologies that suppliers use. I say, suppliers, I mean the publishers and the broadcasters still have to make sure they’re blocking ads or potential money, because of the fear around unsafe content. Therefore, video advertisers, in particular, using contextual solutions at a granular level, can also help get over some of those concerns around brand ethics and concerns the buyers and clients have.

The agency is making sure that they’re doing well for their clients. They’re also conversations around the audience ID solutions. This is something that’s come out pre demise of the cookie, audience ID is looking in terms of how you can leverage data that’s out there to address the fact cookies are disappearing.

They’re about 80 solutions out there in the market at the moment. That’s going to take time to settle down, you can’t have 80 solutions that offer a buyer and a seller, a type of mutual metric they can trade off. It’s an improvement in terms of looking at solutions post cookie which allows brands a more targeted and safe way of buying. We think IRIS.TV, and where 4D sits as well, assists in the contextual side, most definitely, it can sit alongside that or separate. But offers a far more brand-safe and targeted way of buying at a micro-level.

Q: I imagine many brands are struggling right now as they decide whether they should or shouldn’t abandon advertising ties with the walled gardens, and how to combat some of the backlash against social giants. In your opinion, how can brands overcome the lack of transparency when trying to navigate this side of the spectrum?

A: Walled gardens are somewhat of a black box. It’s a closed ecosystem where the rules of engagement are determined by the owners, and therefore transparency is an inherent problem, it’s a big unknown. They do offer huge scale, in many instances, they can offer that transparency. By offering a huge scale, it means from a buyer’s perspective, you can get campaigns away to perceived relevant audiences. As you mentioned, there are inherent concerns around what happens within walled gardens, and the content in there. Looking at YouTube, it had concerns with cookies going away, the control of the content, where the ad is going to appear – big concerns around that.

To operate outside of these walled gardens, brands need to be provided with credible reach to market and tangible paths to transparency and metrics transparency. In terms of being transparent, the programmatic landscape hasn’t necessarily helped itself over the last 13 years. Ultimately, the rise of programmatic trading is pipework that should provide full transparency. There’s been too many players and bad players in the space that should’ve stopped that happening.

This allowed the walled gardens to offer a credible and scaled solution. As more focus is on the programmatic landscape, we’re seeing that market consolidate somewhat and grow massively. For them to continue to grow, there needs to be increasingly more transparency in terms of where they operate.

Brands need to embrace context, which we think is a primary data filter to their targeting and buying needs. These context signals enable buyers via programmatic pipes to target with greater precision and get better ROI in terms of their spending. We know from speaking to senior leaders they need to have proof points, because they are spending their brand’s money wisely, this has always been the case.

As they’re looking at CTV environments, the growing space there, and making sure they’re moving and looking to shift money out of the walled gardens, how can they do it in a brand-safe world at scale? Programmatic pipes allow that to happen. Using other solutions, ours and others out there can help them return to their clients and prove they’ve got ROI outside of the walled gardens. This will help publishers outside of that space to succeed and do well. Then they have to produce good content to advertise on their good content. We as a company highlight that content and context to enable this type of value add purchase to happen.

Q: With the rise of video, and the various channels that sit within this space – Broadcaster VOD, CTV, online video, linear TV, the list goes on – how are you seeing your client measure attribution? What are businesses such as IRIS.TV doing to support this fragmented ecosystem?

A: It is fragmented; part of what the IRIS.TV solution is to build video level data, aka contextual solution, to address the fragmentation of the ecosystem which exists due to the lack of attribution available. These are growing audiences and growing consumption platforms. Our clients are all those businesses you have mentioned above Broadcast VOD, online video and they continue to grow as the route to the market barrier to entry is relatively low.

Our clients are looking for ways to make their ad dollars attractive to the buy-side, as this further fragments, it makes it difficult to then identify where the relevance is for them as a buyer. For this to be accountable, we see the need to work with partners such as 4D who have addressable targetable contextual segments. The buy-side can readily identify and buy with confidence the supply they’re targeting via what IRIS.TV does in the background. It all needs to be trackable or needs to be measurable and addressable. The buyers can prove that back to their clients.

The technologies out there now and have evolved, are allowing these fragmented ecosystems to be targeted at a far more granular level. Therefore, you don’t have to buy on one particular site or one particular platform, you can address, whatever the campaign parameters are across a bunch of different sites, platforms, broadcasters, to address the needs of that particular campaign.

To use an example, if Nike is looking to target sports lovers aged X to Y, who are buying in a brand-safe environment around particular contents. In basic terms, it doesn’t have to be just on one TV channel or show. What IRIS.TV does is go here’s all the sports content and football content and whatever the buyer may particularly need, you can categorise it all into a PNP. They can then execute it across the relevant contextual segments across the audiences identified by the likes of 4D, because that’s what the buyers are used to targeting and buying. The ecosystem might be fragmented. But it’s a very targeted buyer in terms of the relevance of the content where that’s going to sit around.

Q: In conjunction with the rise in contextual targeting and new brand safety measures, brands are looking at ways to enhance the power of their first-party data. How do you see both first-party data and context working in tandem to support video advertisers with cookies going away?

A: First-party data is important, and media should be providing more data to marketers. The challenge is going to be doing it in a privacy-first secure way, looking at all the regulations that are out there and continuing to evolve and be secure on the terms that maximise the value of that media. Marketers utilising the currencies they value,such as trusted third parties like Silverbullet is key in recognising the partners are out there and parties out there that can then help them target around relevant data sources they’re happy with.

Our job at IRIS.TV is to be the bridge that enables the value of first-party data to truly be unleashed by securely onboarding it, enabling trusted third parties access, analysing, segmenting in a way that provides marketers transparency with what the publishers trust. First-party data and context working in tandem is key because people want to understand the audiences, they also want to understand the context. There’ll be instances where it might just be an audience buy or context buy, but the more you work with both of those and the more target it’s going to be and then hopefully more brand-safe it is on behalf of the buyers, the clients at the agencies.

Q: IRIS.TV recently announced that it is supporting the industry-wide initiative to develop and deploy Unified ID 2.0, an initial development led by The Trade Desk, which offers a new open-source industry-wide approach to internet identity that preserves the value of relevant advertising while putting user control and privacy at the forefront. What encouraged you and the IRIS.TV team to decide to support this initiative?

A: Firstly we are keen to support industry initiatives which push for cleaner and more transparent routes to market for buyers and sellers. We know the market is evolving, it is a great initiative. Trade Desk has passed over to pre-bid and they kicked that off. They’ve got good clout, great kudos in markets, it has helped get that going. IRIS.TV has always had a close relationship with Trade Desk. We’re more than happy to be involved and feel our unique expertise and video level data tied into Unified ID probably further down the line. It can help in terms of using that as an identifier, which will help target around the contextual side of things as well within the unified ID. As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of ID solutions out there, it doesn’t mean there’s going to be one definite winner.

We felt this one had many people backing it, many people are already involved in it. We will get involved in other ID solutions. Because we want to make sure the market continues to evolve and the different ID solutions will be used by different buyers and sellers. We felt this is a great initiative and one IRIS.TV is happy to get behind and ID Solutions are going to be part of the future for buyers and sellers as the cookie crumbles. This is important, context is also an essential component of identity and with more people watching on shared devices, as well as a prioritisation on privacy, it’s going to be hard to respond to people based only on signals. Therefore, context is going to be a key part.

To summarise, Unified ID plus video level contextual targeting, which IRIS.TV provides will help benefit buyers. We also have our ID, which is an IRIS ID, which allows buyers to target by pre-bid, we see that as something that will help the ecosystem, it isn’t an audience ID. But it is a type of a unique ID allowing buyers to target on a contextual level that can sit along with the Unified ID 2.0 or any other solution. There’s no one clear play at the moment, as I say, the buy-side is still trying to work out how best to work in particular CTV environments. With a cookie crumbling as well, it is changing buyers habits and workflows internally within the agencies.

Q: As we look ahead to the next 12-24 months, what would you say the biggest trends are for the video landscape?

A: Even though we’ve gone through all the problems in terms of internally within agencies and changing consumer habits, they continue to put money into video and CTV will happen. The need for the premium inventory to be discoverable, and addressable is going to be key to us and others trying to make sure that solution that’s in place, as that money shifts the buyers can buy the confidence. The buyers continue to look outside the walled gardens for brand-safe, premium inventory. It is not going to be a sudden shift of money moving from the walled gardens, but there’s more awareness in terms of not necessarily wanting to have all their money being spent in the walled garden space. Context is becoming a key part of the overall buying strategy from brands and their agencies. The shift will pick up the pace, particularly as people want to get back into the offices post-COVID. This helps us generally in conversations and moving solutions forward. The world consumption of content and movement from linear to other platforms has been accelerated and the ad dollars are trying to find a quick route to find the way they can buy it in a more addressable and targeted way. This will gain more speed.

Q: Final thoughts, having a senior leadership role in arguably one of the fastest growing sectors of our industry, what do you think is key for success in your role? 

A: Transparency generally because we touch all sides of the market. As I mentioned in the beginning, our clients are publishers, and broadcasters. We also have good relationships and partnerships with the likes of Silverbullet 4D and others. We also have to educate massively in terms of what’s happening in the marketplace.

Education, openness and importantly, awareness from an IRIS.TV perspective of why do we exist? Why are we here, we’re here to fix a problem where we think within a fast-evolving ecosystem, there is a huge gap in terms of confidence in terms of how people can buy on target CTV and, in particular, also the changing video landscape. My role is more about building out a team and building out the business in EMEA. But it’s communicating the problems we think are out there as to why IRIS.TV exists, and what the solution is to those problems. We are one part of that solution. This huge ecosystem we’re speaking to, but it’s an education thing.

At PubMatic we launched the PubMatic Academy with the main reason to educate the market in terms of why PubMatic existed at a particular point in time. It was really to say we are a programmatic solution to help you as a publisher, monetise your inventory. Programmatic was relatively new then, publishers are trying to work out why they had to work with programmatic partners and SSPs. What are all these new acronyms that come into the marketplace? This helped in terms of education.

IRIS.TV educates the market in terms of why we’re here, why we exist, what the problem is that we’re trying to solve and trying to bring the market up to speed as quickly as we can. Not only does it help us as a business, but also helps to solve a lot of the problems we see further down the line in terms of addressability. Also in terms of measurability of buying and executing CTV campaigns in a growing ecosystem of supply. This is fast-growing, highly relevant and engaging from the consumer perspective, but isn’t necessarily getting the ad dollars coming to them yet.

Q1: In the EU, there is still a considerable lack of awareness regarding the management of personal information. From your lens at Sourcepoint and during your time spent building RedBud, how have you seen the attitude of publishers and brands change to tackle the regulations set by the GDPR?

A: I’ve seen a lot of change. Rhys and I set up RedBud because we both lost our jobs to GDPR. The company we were working for decided it was too risky for them to continue operating in Europe. We were children of GDPR. When we started RedBud it was at the same time the ID TCF framework launched in the market. At the time, no one knew what this framework was all about. No one knew how to interpret the regulations. It felt like all of the publishers implemented consent management platforms (CMP) quickly as a vanity project.

Then they had to catch up and ensure they had the proper resources internally to manage the CMPs and manage the requirements of the new law. We’ve seen big changes in terms of focus from implementing something and checking a box to making sure the implemented CMP works hand in hand with the technology they have on their website.

For example, two and a half years ago, you would have CMPs which would say, “Hey, we’re dropping cookies and this is the purpose why we drop cookies”. Accepting or rejecting cookies didn’t have a big impact on what’s happening on the website. Cookies, storage and access to information were still happening before the consent of the user.

Fast forward two and a half years to now. Most sites have implemented a CMP which works hand in hand with all the technology they have on their website. They withhold everything from loading, every script from the page, until the user has given consent.

Publishers have invested time and resources internally to get teams focused on privacy. We’ve seen publishers like The Guardian put privacy first, and use it almost as a USP to attract agencies that are buying across websites who don’t put privacy first.

Q: Placing an ad in a safe environment is a challenge for all companies. How do you see brand safety – and ensuring the suitability of ad placement – evolving over the next 12 months? How can brands gain the confidence to run ads on websites with verified consent?

A: There are several angles to this question. The first angle, brand safety is going to be broader and it’s going to encompass privacy and data ethics. For brands, it’s about advertising on websites that use data which respects the choice of the consumer. These websites give the user transparency on how the data is going to be used and respects the choice of the user.

Secondly, brand safety tools in the past have been coarse. For example, the New York Times homepage recently had a brand safety holding ad. It wasn’t a branded ad. The brand safety tool thought it was COVID related content, therefore not brand-safe. Instead of the ad, it showed a brand safety image. This was crazy. It’s the New York Times homepage.

In the next 12 months, those brand safety tools have to continue to be smarter by looking at the context of the website. Some of them are already doing this, but the trend will continue.

Thirdly, you have publishers like Reach who have created their own content verification and brand safety tools. There’s going to be more AI used in brand safety and those tools are going to have to be smarter to not penalise the publisher, or result in agencies losing precious advertising opportunities like the New York Times homepage.

Q: There are different types of inventory in the advertising spectrum that range from very safe models to more high-risk open auction approaches. What steps do brands need to take in order to combat this complex space?

A: Most of the steps brands will need to take will be in open auctions. In the open auction area, there’s a large number of longtail publishers, who are small and part of networks. They have lots of different activities, and they do sponsorships and advertising as a side project. These longtail publishers, don’t have a relationship with agencies. They’re not in the weeds in the ad tech ecosystem as some of the larger publishers, agencies and ad tech vendors.

It will be important for agencies to scrutinise the longtail, have the appropriate brand safety tools and verification tools to make sure they know where their ads are going. It is going to be important to know where your money is going and make sure that you have the checks in place to promote brand-safe advertising.

Q: The demise of the third-party cookie has left many in our industry somewhat lost in how to get ready for this brand-new world. As solutions such as contextual targeting come back to centre stage, how do you see the relationship between brands and publishers changing over the next 12-24 months?

A: Advertisers and publishers have to continue working closely together. Agencies and publishers have been talking about the depreciation of cookies for a long time. Multiple publishers that would have never worked together in the past, are working together to brainstorm. They’re testing different approaches to solve the deprecation of the third party cookie challenge. They’re even embracing standardisation of audience ID category. Agencies will have to continue leaning in a little bit more.

On the publisher side, it will be paramount they think about creating something simple for agencies to buy. Agencies are used to buying on Facebook and Google, where it’s easy to target a particular audience with scale. What’s going to be important for publishers is to enable the same thing and continue embracing standardised categories of content or standardised audiences.

When agencies need to buy across a number of premium publishers, they will be able to target mums, new mums, and have the confidence they can use targeting criteria across a number of different publishers. We don’t want to have the definition on one website, and a slightly different category on a different website. Agencies want something simple to buy.

Q: AI has become a buzzword in digital advertising lately, especially with advancements in contextual to help marketers trace the environment and context of their ad placements. From your point of view, do you believe the advancements in AI and machine learning are good enough to help brands feel safe in our current climate?

A: One of the key things we’ll need to do is solve for the bias that we may have in AI. We have to ensure whatever training data we’re using, we don’t introduce any bias.

I have a great example. In Hungarian, there is no notion of gender. When you take a sentence in Hungarian and translate it in Google Translate, you will have a sentence like, “neutral gender is doing the dishes”, “neutral gender is running the company”. However, when you look at the translation in Google Translate, the translation has added “she” for words related to kids, family and cleaning, and”he” for words related to running your business and exercising.

This is all due to the training set in the model being used. There’s a bias, it’s stereotypical. For brand safety, it’s going to be key to look at the data being used to ensure we avoid those instances.

In a brand safety context, how would this appear? What I’ve heard multiple publishers mention with football is that you’re going to use the words “attacker”, “secure”, and “attacking”. When you combine football and attack it’s fine, it makes sense. You’re not going to block the content, it’s not violent content.

But AI has to have models elaborate enough to know the attacker in the context of a football article is not something to block, and you can continue advertising it. AI is going to have to remove any bias. It is going to have to be more clever to avoid those silly blockages of content.

Q: We’re going through such a seismic shift right now, and it’s fair to say there’s not a “one size fits all” solution out there. What advice would you give to businesses when trying to protect their brand whilst adhering to data protection regulations? 

A: There are several things agencies and brands need to be doing. Much of it is vetting. They’re going to have to vet the vendors they work with. What I mean by vetting is not vetting with a spreadsheet filled in good faith. Sometimes the people who fill in those sheets, those RFIs, might not have the information and they want to win that contract. They’re going to say what they want the company to be doing, and future sell.

It’s going to be important for agencies and brands to engage in the proper vetting of vendors. This includes looking at how vendors are behaving on websites, looking at whether they’re potentially doing things that are not compliant with privacy regulations. Agencies have to vet the longtail of publishers they advertise on. We build a privacy lens with exactly those two objectives in mind to help brands and agencies vet the website they’re advertising on, the apps they’re advertising on, and the vendors they work with.

I’m going to use a particular example; I remember one of our clients was having problems with their data being made available in the buying platforms without their knowledge. It turns out a small audience monetisation company was piggybacking on another vendor to drop cookies and link that cookie to behavioural information about the user. At no point was that vendor ever mentioned on the site of our client as an approved vendor. Yet that company was selling the data of our clients on the biggest platforms in Google, specifically in all of the big DSPs branded with the name of our client. The data was completely non-compliance because the vendor had never been mentioned in the consent management platform.

They were building those audience profiles they had gotten from piggybacking off of technology across many websites, and agencies were buying those segments. They were available on the buying platforms. It’s going to be important agencies pay attention to where they’re buying media, what data they’re using, and ensuring they vet the data they’re using. They may think “It’s easy, it’s in my campaign tool. I tick a box and there you go, I’m targeting an audience.” They’re going to have to be doing a bit more than that in their own vetting of the data that they’re leveraging.

Q: Let’s pivot to the world of the publisher for a bit. When you started RedBud in 2018, your business model predominantly focused on supporting the publisher in the wake of the GDPR launch. Since starting RedBud, have you seen a change in mindset from publishers? How has progress been made to combat data privacy from a publisher lens?

A: Publishers made huge progress. They have teams looking after privacy, and they have a dedicated person in charge of the consent management platform and ensuring it is always up to date with the vendors they’re working with.

We have particular publishers we’ve been on a journey with for a number of years. We track their progression, month after month on a number of criteria like how many unnecessary cookies are you dropping before consent, with the aim to have only strictly necessary cookies. They’ve made huge progress. They have invested so much time and resource in having privacy-first experiences.

Q: Finally, I’d love to find out a little about you and your role. Without undervaluing others in the industry, your role as SVP Product for a data privacy software company sounds very intense, with everything going on. What do you think is key for success in a role such as yours?

A: There are several things that are critical. I like to see the role of someone in a product role as being a mini CEO. I do think to be successful in a product role, you need to be able to do a variety of things. Such as build a roadmap, prioritise items in a roadmap, understand finances, understand the legal aspect of products and have privacy by design mindset when building products. It requires being comfortable with a variety of things. When you’re in a product role, you have to work with multiple stakeholders who may be very technical, like the engineer or not technical at all like sales.

It’s important to be able to explain concepts at different technical levels, be good at building rapport and be a great team player. I’ve said several things: being able to switch and do a variety of tasks, work well as a team and adapt your narrative to whichever stakeholders you’re speaking with. At school, I loved every subject; Math, English, French and Science. There was not one subject I didn’t like. That’s why I’m so comfortable. I enjoy the product role. I like my job because I get to do a variety of things like I did at school.

A: There does seem to still be a little bit of confusion, which of course makes me very sad because I’ve spent the last four years of my life trying to get rid of that confusion. Our definition of a CDP is: packaged software that builds a unified persistent customer database which is  accessible to other systems.

In somewhat plainer English, it means you pull together all of your customer data and create these unified customer profiles. Then you share them with whatever other system needs them. The core idea is that you have all this data, and you want to get it in one place so you can have a complete view of each customer. That’s really what a CDP does.

Q: Is the marketing group the key buyer of the CDP in an organisation?

A: Sometimes it is, but traditionally and in most cases I would say marketing is still the main buyer of the CDP, it was the case in the past. Now we’re seeing other departments in the company sometimes take the lead; it could be a customer service department that needs a complete view. But more likely, it’s central, like a data group or analytics group or even the IT group, which have been tasked with building this unified picture of their customers.

Of course, it’s useful throughout the company. Once the company realises a CDP has got uses outside of marketing, then the actual project management tends to migrate out of marketing as well, so the people who build it can share it with everyone else.

Q: Are all CDP offerings the same, what are some key differences? 

A: If I said they were the same, this would be a very short interview, they’re not all the same. There are about 130 CDPs in the world we know about, and certainly no two are alike; they tend to fall into clusters. There are some CDPs which meet the definition of building a unified database, then they stop there, and they make it available to whatever system wants to use them.

There are CDPs which do this, plus provide analytical capabilities, predictive modelling, typically or sometimes marketing, measurement, or attribution features. They build the database, plus they do the analytics.

For the bulk of the market, we estimate about 70% of the industry are CDPs that both build databases and do some flavour of campaign management, customer engagement or personalisation. But they give the marketers a tool to do something with the data, not simply create the profiles other systems can use.

There’s some you can go further with, some would follow an email engine or web content management to deliver messages, not select them as those campaign CDPs do. Some are CDPs baked into an ecommerce system, an entirely separate platform that happens to have the CDP inside. It’s quite a variety, which is a good thing because it means you can find one to fit your needs.

Q: Most major marketing cloud vendors now have a CDP (Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle). Has this impacted the market?

A: Oddly enough, it hasn’t had much impact yet. We certainly expect it will, but those products are all relatively new, Oracle’s is about two years old, Adobe is about a year old. Salesforce is still something of a work in progress, although Salesforce had bought a couple of other companies with CDPs, depending on how you look at it, you can say they’ve been around as well. So far, these are still relatively immature and they are of interest primarily to the companies already using the suites of those vendors.

The independent CDP vendors still have a pretty good chance of selling in environments where the company doesn’t use Oracle, Salesforce or Adobe, which is the vast majority of companies. There are very few companies that will only use one of those vendors. As long as they’re using a couple of the vendors, there’s at least a little bit of room for a non-suite CDP, or an independent CDP to sneak in there and be neutral across all the other vendors. We expect eventually the big vendors will take a larger role, but so far, it’s been somewhat limited.

Q: Do you think the infrastructure the CDP vendor chooses is important?

A: The technical infrastructure makes a great deal of difference. It drives what the CDP can do now because our definition of CDP says you have to be able to serve all different kinds of data and you have to keep all the details. That is a fairly stiff set of technical requirements. There are only a few kinds of technologies that can meet those requirements, almost every CDP will use some sort of a NoSQL database, for example.

You really can’t strictly do what a CDP needs to do if you’re going to use an Oracle, SQL server or one of the relational databases. That being said, some companies call themselves CDPs that don’t meet our definition and have these more limited capabilities because they’re built typically to service the tools developed by a particular vendor, not really to share with everyone else.

Those systems might use a more limited technique, or they might use a relational database, for example. But if you’re going to use a relational database, it’s really hard to keep web browser logs, for instance, or to keep social media post history, the actual text itself, it doesn’t work that well in those kinds of databases. You’re almost always forced to use something else.

There’s a lot of databases now which do that, Snowflake is a popular one, Elasticsearch or even Redshift, which is a SQL database but it’s highly scalable. MongoDB is a document database, there are some different data stores we’ll see being used by the CDP vendors, but it’s almost always something else, it’s not simply a relational database.

Q: With the changes web browsers are making to cookie access and Apple is making to the device advertising ID, what effect does this have on the CDP?

A: By large, it’s a good thing for the CDP vendors because it makes it harder to accumulate third-party data, both with the cookies and with the Apple ID situation. Therefore, it makes companies pay more attention to their first-party data. CDPs are mostly about first-party data, they’re mostly about data on your actual customers. It’s been a selling point for CDP vendors to say: “hey, you want to do more through first-party data? Well, you need a CDP to do that”. Interestingly, I did see one analysis the other day where somebody said, ‘a lot of CDPs collect their web data through a third party cookie’, which is a true statement.

Collecting data is one aspect of what a CDP does, it’s only 5% of the value if you had to pick a number. The CDP will have to find some other way to get their hands on the web data. But there’s still plenty of other things a CDP does, it’s still going to add value. All this is  not going to harm CDP use directly, and it will help them indirectly, quite a bit.

Q: How do CDP platforms enhance the customer experience? 

A: The CDP’s primary mission is to pull together unified customer profiles. When the customer comes to the website, the call centre, the retail store, the mobile app, wherever, they’re interacting with you. Whatever that system is, it can call back to the CDP and know everything about the customer across all channels they’ve interacted with. It’s not that they get into the call centre, and the call centre agent can only look up the history of that customer in the call centre. They don’t know what the customer did on the web, because the call centre system won’t know that.

The CDP can share information with the call centre system, they get a complete view of the customer, which means the agent now can react to the customer with full knowledge and give them a better experience. We have seen a lot of research demonstrating people want companies to recognise them, understand them, and treat them consistently across channels.

They don’t necessarily want to get personalised advertising, because no one in history has raised their hand and said, “hey, send me more advertising”. But they do want you to give them better treatment in terms of appropriate discounts, or offers relating to the products they’ve purchased. Other kinds of important treatment include making it simple to do returns, customers want you to know about them. That’s what the CDP makes it possible for the company to give them.

Q: What are some untapped opportunities marketers have when implementing CDPs that they might not otherwise have thought of?

A: Marketers are very creative people. They think of many things, some of which you can talk about in public, some of which you can’t. In terms of CDPs, what marketers might not necessarily think about are some of the cross channel things. CDPs traditionally work in cross channels. But to be more advanced in predictive modelling, for example, and doing more advanced segmentation based on the predictive modelling, this is something often marketers don’t even realise could be done with those kinds of models, because they’re focused on getting the job done and doing relatively simple things.

There is a very interesting advanced technology out there that the CDP makes possible, because it assembles all this data, lets you do things and see relationships that you couldn’t see before, and therefore maybe offer some new services, for example. To take advantage of this cross channel view with customers, there’s quite a bit which can be done, but most marketers have a long list of things they’d like to do. Again, they’re creative folks, their problem is rarely they can’t think of what they might like to do next.

Q: There has been a massive growth of CDPs in the past few years, why do you think this is? Will this growth last?

A: The growth has been driven by the proliferation of channels and independent disconnected channels. As customers demand a connected experience, the company is forced to buy a CDP to connect those channels, because that’s what CDPs do, it is very difficult to do without a CDP. It’s been very much demand-driven, very much customer-driven, which is not always the way in marketing technology. What happens is some technologist comes up with a clever idea, “hey, we can do virtual reality tours that are on some crazy new social media channels you never thought of before”. They can have colour pictures that read your mind and do whatever cool thing they think of. Then somebody builds it in some market and they buy it, but the customers scratch their heads and say: “I wanted you to process merchants more efficiently”.

The customer is generally less excited about the technology than the marketers are. CDP is the other way around, CDP is the customer saying: “get all my data in one place, give me better treatment, understand what I’m doing, do what I want you to do”. That’s what companies have been forced to do, that’s part of the reason the big vendors like Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle were relatively late to market on this,  because they didn’t see the need. Their customers saw the need and their customers’ customers saw the need, but it wasn’t so clear to them. They didn’t rush out and do it. It took them a long time to understand this was something serious their clients needed to serve their clients’ customers. Then they eventually came around and gave their clients what they wanted.

Q: What data trends have you seen over the past year that have shocked you, in either a good way or a bad way?

A: When it comes to data, in particular something that has very pleasantly surprised me, has been the increasing interest in privacy. For years, we’ve heard about privacy. There were this little coterie of privacy fanatics who were concerned about it and nobody else cared. The people who cared about it would make a lot of noise and they would get some people in the government excited. Nothing would ever happen because the industry would, I wouldn’t say paid anybody off, but they had influence.

In the last few years, privacy advocates have been much more effective. I’m not sure it’s because the privacy advocate got any smarter, however, consumers got a lot more worried about privacy.

Frankly, they saw a lot of data presented to them, about them, which they hadn’t intended to share, and it scared them. They worried about what data was being collected about themselves, and about their children. They realised this data was being used in many ways; some good, some not so good. There’s a substantial growth in actual mass consumer interest in privacy, no longer the relatively small number of advocates.

This led to considerable regulation, obviously GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, there’re some in Australia as well. All of a sudden, there is some fairly serious concern about privacy and, of course, more recently, with Facebook and Google. Australia passed a very good law regarding this for the news channels. It’s all part of people pushing back against the companies that do suck up a lot of their data. I tend to think this is a good thing, but it may not be the easiest thing for marketers to deal with. But it’s a good thing overall, it’s been a pleasant surprise,

Q: As we step into a post-cookieless era, what are some of the myths about data you want to see disappear? 

A: I want to see the mystique disappear around the thought you can’t do anything without third party cookies. Even though I’ve been saying it for quite some time now, the rest of the world has no choice but to deal with this reality. It’s weird, everybody’s been saying “oh, cookies are going away, the world is gonna end”. I thought, well human beings have been on this planet for a long time and they were doing marketing for most of that long time, they didn’t have cookies until maybe 20 years ago. Somehow, the world of marketing survived before there were cookies, and no doubt the world of marketing will survive after cookies.

If there’s a myth, it’s related to the notion that with cookies, and with other kinds of data collection techniques, we can predict with great accuracy what customers will do. It’s absolute nonsense. At one point in my checkered career, I ran a predictive modelling team, and the models are 80-90% more accurate than throwing a dart at a dartboard, but they’re not 100% accurate. The more complicated the behaviour, the less accurate they get. It’s not like we had all this absolute precision we are suddenly losing, we were never that good at actual predictions.

People need to understand there’s plenty of data out there, still. There’s plenty of tools to be used for modelling. Some of it is more effective data for modelling than cookies ever were, as cookies had a lot of issues anyhow. But we have to realise you only go so far, you have to listen to your customers and not try to figure out what they’re going to do as much as seeing what they’re doing and react to it. You really can’t force them to do things too much.

There are some exceptions around this, and some of them are pretty scary, like some of the kinds of things social media can do shape people’s behaviour. But even then, they’re taking people’s tendencies and exaggerating them, you’re not going to make me do something I have absolutely no interest in doing because I’m on social media. Social media exaggerates and moves people in more extreme directions than they move in otherwise, but even social media is not the root of all ill.