Mediabrands' Cadreon Verifying Ads And Audience; Audience-Level Attribution Is Coming Says VP Brunick

IPG Mediabrands’ agency trading desk, Cadreon, recently announced plans to track and verify audience in addition to integrating ad verification vendor technology. Read more on MediaPost.

Cadreon’s VP of Media Technology Michael Brunick discussed the latest developments in the holding company’s trading desk strategies.

AdExchanger.com: Regarding new audience verification strategy, Cadreon will use “various Research methods to validate the data being acquired is reaching the desired Audience member.” Can you provide any more insight on what these methods will be? For example, will you be comparing URLs to Comscore or Nielsen panel data for those sites?

I unfortunately can’t really go deep into the methodology on this publicly just yet, but the focus won’t be on URLs or domains, but on verifying the actual audience profiles we are buying, acquiring or appending for our clients’ campaigns. The purpose of this is twofold: first, we want to ensure that are messaging to the right people, delivering on the promise of zero-waste targeting; second, we want to be certain that our clients are getting what they pay for – as larger portions of budget get spent on data, we need to be extremely diligent in protecting that spend in the same manner we do with inventory today.

Cadreon says it is using nearly all the ad verification vendors. Why? Are you waiting to find one that works best?

We have tested and/or integrated with almost all of the verification vendors in the marketplace today – we first wanted to make sure we had the ability to implement this functionality for any client or campaign that needed it. The partners we are now focusing on and ultimately feel are best are the services that have gone beyond simply reporting violations, and are enabling real-time blocking capabilities. To take that a step further, it is critical that those partners also integrate with our back-end transactional platforms to ensure that the ads that get blocked do not incur any cost to the campaign – to essentially make the blocking decision before the bid gets made. That is the key piece of functionality in the verification ecosystem.

What is Cadreon doing about attribution?

We are continuing to push attribution models forward, while working within the constraints of some of the inherent methodologies that exist in the industry today. De-duplication currently favors the largest inventory providers for attribution credit, and last-click models still dominate. We have evaluated a few partners that are enabling advanced models and capabilities, providing enhanced flexibility and customization in attribution assignment, and will continue evaluating new technologies and capabilities as they become available. We have also taken steps to bring attribution to the audience level – assigning credit to individual data providers and audience profiles used on campaigns. There will be more to come on this shortly, so stay tuned!

By John Ebbert

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