People of Programmatic

Every digital media company is struggling to recruit and retain great talent. In episode 6 of our “People of Programmatic” podcast, part of our 10x10 series to herald Xaxis’ tenth anniversary, our guests explore the new landscape of work and workers, and reveal how recruiters, managers, and executives can evolve their practices to find great people and keep them on board.

Episode Host:

• Arshan Saha, CEO, Xaxis APAC

Episode Guests:

• Michael Wright, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, GroupM
• Juli Santiago, Recruiter, SearchMax Inc

In This Episode, We Discuss:

• The talent shortage and how to manage it
• How skilled workers’ expectations have changed
• Whether companies are to blame
• Solutions including culture, mindset, and rewards structures

Read full episode overview here: https://www.xaxis.com/episode-6-the-talent-squeeze/

Some Links:

Xaxis Careers Website

SearchMax, Inc Website

“1 million more job openings than people looking for work” (CNBC)

“U.S. job openings hit record high as employers struggle to find workers” (Reuters)

“What’s next for America’s workforce post-COVID-19?” (PwC)

“Hot ad tech job market creating new hiring practices” (AdAge)

Consumers’ shopping behaviors and habits have rapidly evolved, and the change has accelerated in recent years. The retail paradigm is evolving too, and with it ecommerce and relevant media platforms and strategies. In episode 9, Brittny Schoeneman, Director of U.S. Programmatic Commerce Solutions at Xaxis, interviews Michael Schuh, VP for Media Strategy at Kroger Precision Marketing, about how a large retail company is responding to and leading the trends.

In This Episode, We Discuss

• What’s changed in consumer behavior, including results of a new research report on changes in shopping behaviors and habits, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• How retail and advertising platforms are merging into a holistic retail media approach.
• How first-party data from retail media companies is affecting media strategies and leading to more effective outcomes.
• How search is changing, from search engines to retail sites.
• The future for retail media.

LEARN MORE, REACH OUT & FOLLOW UP:

• “The Retail Paradigm: The Evolution of Consumer Shopping” (research report Part 1)
• "The Retail Paradigm:How brands are investing in the new era of shopping" (research report Part 2)
• Kroger Precision Marketing
• Xaxis on Twitter

About the Host

Brittny Schoeneman is the Director of Programmatic Commerce Solutions in the U.S. for Xaxis and has been a part of the GroupM family for the past 6+ years, servicing a number of clients’ programmatic strategies and investments. Brittny is the dedicated subject matter expert for commerce within the organization, working collaboratively with GroupM agencies, clients and leadership teams to identify growth opportunities and further develop Xaxis’ retail media product solutions.
About the Guest

As Vice President of Media Strategy, Michael Schuh and his team develop retail media products across Kroger’s onsite and off-site channels to drive measurable business impact for advertisers. His responsibilities include leading the overall media product strategy including technical, content, commercial and partnership considerations.

Kroger digital properties and offsite partnerships are evolving rapidly, set the pace for retail media, and present a tremendous opportunity for brands to engage with digitally active customers at the point of purchase. Michael is accountable for ensuring Kroger, consumer packaged goods companies and media agencies have a robust, high-impact product mix to execute advertising plans.

Prior to his current role, Michael spent three years working closely with global retailers at dunnhumby as a product manager across a suite of pricing and promotions software. Prior to 84.51°/dunnhumby, Michael spent two years at Booz Allen Hamilton as a senior consultant, working with public sector agencies to streamline their data and reporting assets.

Michael has a BS in systems engineering from the University of Virginia.

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In every episode, our “People of Programmatic” podcast introduces you to the achievers who bring programmatic advertising to life. Find us on Twitter (@xaxistweets) and LinkedIn, or feel free to contact us through our website.

As we rapidly approach the end of cookie-based targeting, marketers are seeking new strategies, technologies, and solutions that will enable them to reliably maximize the return on their media investments. In the programmatic world, this means putting more emphasis on contextual strategies that combine first- and third-party data with AI and dynamic creatives.
In this episode, we explore our final 10x10 series topic, "the cookieless world," with Solutions & Innovation Strategy Head Divya Acharya hosting Oracle Advertising's Sales GVP Marc Grabowski. This conversation will walk marketers through the biggest ramifications of the impending cookieless world as well as the recommended ways to adapt to it -- including both long-established and cutting-edge strategies.

In this episode we discuss:

• Whether the industry is prepared for the world of cookieless media.
• How the cookieless world will impact the programmatic landscape, audiences, strategies, measurement, attribution, targeting and ROAS.
• What marketers should be doing to prepare.
• The effectiveness of contextual advertising.
• Which piece(s) of data will become the most important in the new paradigm.
• Is third-party data dead?
• How can brands and marketers prepare to identify, gather, and utilize data properly?
• What types of technology marketers should be investing in.
• What kinds of skills are vital in the new environment?

Episode host:

• Divya Acharya | Head of Solutions & Innovation Strategy, Xaxis APAC

Episode guest:

• Marc Grabowski | Sales GVP, Oracle Advertising

Some links:

• 10x10 content series. 10x10 was Xaxis' year-long series covering the Top Ten Trends in digital media: Xaxis 10x10 hub
• Oracle Advertising blog: Contextual targeting in the new era of ad tech
• Xaxis Twitter
• Xaxis LinkedIn

With the digital media industry facing more complexity and uncertainty than ever, brands are showing rising interest in outcome-based strategies that guarantee business results from their marketing investments. But some brands don’t have a full understanding of what “outcome media” really is, how it really works, what it accomplishes, why it matters, or where it’s going next. In episode 7 of our “People of Programmatic” podcast, part of our 10x10 series to herald Xaxis’ tenth anniversary, our guests help grapple with the challenges of having to show value for every dollar spent, when to rely on outcome media — as well as its pitfalls.
Episode Host:

• Henry Stokes, MD of Global Accounts, Xaxis

Episode Guests:

• Emily Knight, Business Development Director, The Trade Desk
• Michael Siewert, Global Programmatic Marketing Director, Colgate-Palmolive

In this episode, we discuss:

• The ways outcome media is defined.
• How brand marketers and their agencies can determine desired outcomes.
• The challenges that outcome media can help solve.
• The benefits of technology in using outcome media.
• How brands can embrace outcome media.

What is Outcome Media?
Outcome media is fundamentally about data, and about using that data across the spectrum of brand marketing and performance marketing, which have traditionally been seen as representing two sides of a divide.

• Outcome media brings a new level of sophisticated thinking to marketing.
• It allows marketers to get a clear sense of what they can expect from their media campaigns.
• It also allows marketers to measure efficacy in real time, to be accountable to a defined outcome.
• It fulfills the needs brands have to quantify results and justify their ad spend.
• It can connect media across channels, for example connected TV, shoppable media and performance marketing.

Outcome Media help marketers focus

• Marketers need to think longer term, come up with a mix of metrics that prove with data and testing over time to have the best effects.
• They should focus on the goals, not the minutiae they measure to help reach those goals.
• It’s imperative to incorporate as much first-party data as possible.
• Marketers must test, test and test toward the goal. That can range from something like performance oriented metrics to more custom solutions such as interactions with a purpose-built API.

Outcome-based media will, our guests concur, be even more important as cookies start to diminish and first-party data become more important. Marketers can use the data that is available along with the metrics they’ve established to set hypotheses, test, analyze and continually improve to achieve their brands’ objectives.

Some Links:

• Xaxis website
• Colgate-Palmolive website
• The Trade Desk website
• Transforming media into outcomes (Xaxis)
• Is outcome-based media the future of media planning? (AdAge)
• Why outcome-based marketing is so successful (MarketingProfs)

In a special audio and video episode of The People of Programmatic Podcast, we hear from five Copilot crew members about the academic research, review, and writing that goes on behind the scenes as part of their ongoing efforts to stay on the leading edge of AI technology in digital media.

The discussion also covers the team’s experiences in data science, data visualization, and organizing journal clubs, as well as which modern examples of AI in action have inspired them.

To date, the Copilot team has published three journals:

1. Dynamic Bidding Strategies with Multivariate Feedback Control for Multiple Goals in Display Advertising by Michael Tashman, Jiayi Xie, John Hoffman, Lee Winikor, Rouzbeh Gerami
   1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00426
2. Online and Scalable Model Selection with Multi-Armed Bandit by Jiayi Xie, Michael Tashman, John Hoffman, Lee Winikor, Rouzbeh Gerami
   1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10587
3. Techniques Toward Optimizing Viewability in RTB Ad Campaigns Using Reinforcement Learning by Michael Tashman, Jiayi Xie, John Hoffman, Lee Winikor, Rouzbeh Gerami, Atefeh Morsali, and Fengdan Ye
   1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10587

And they hold one patent titled “Double Blind Learning Insight Interface Apparatus, Methods and Systems” which describes the unique new way that the Copilot Insights platform delivers real-time updates and insights through a user-friendly interface guided by machine learning.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180307653A1/en

Watch the video version here.

Featured in this episode:

• Jiayi Xie, Senior Data Scientist
• Rouzbeh Gerami, Head of Data Science
• Sambhav Jain, Senior Designer, Data Visualization
• Katherine Mello, Software Engineer, Visualizations
• Kelly Mergenthaler, Senior Product Marketing Manager