Home AdExchanger Talks Podcast: Goodway Seeks A Better Way To Do Programmatic

Podcast: Goodway Seeks A Better Way To Do Programmatic

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Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here.

Jay Friedman, our podcast guest this week, came up with the concept for a recent AdExchanger comic depicting a marketer running on a “brand safety” treadmill while scarfing down “cheap CPM” cupcakes.

The point: You can’t have it both ways.

In this week’s episode, Friedman throws some more good-natured shade about marketers’ self-inflicted wounds. For instance, he says of marketers who avoid the confusion of multi-touch attribution vendors by not doing MTA at all, “That’s like saying, I didn’t know which life vest to buy so I just went on the boat without one.”

Friedman also tells the story of Goodway Group, the third-generation family business that employs him as chief operating officer. Classically a print and direct marketing agency, Goodway has built out a biddable media practice that serves three sets of clients: regional agencies, franchisees of national brands and marketer-direct business.

“Strategy is underrated in programmatic,” he says. “Everyone thinks about the trading and the bidding and the platform. That’s complicated, but there is a significant amount of strategy before and after the buying is done.”

Goodway takes special pride in the pre-work involved in programmatic. The company has developed tools to value impressions on a pre-bid basis by forecasting media attributes, floor prices and probability of the user to convert.

Also in this episode: The hard work of measuring sales lift, how the industry got obsessed with “working media dollars” and the persistent faith in walled garden measurement.

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