In this issue of our Q&A Spotlight, we sit down with GroundTruth’s new VP of Programmatic, George Tarnopolsky, to discuss some of these key trends and how marketers can identify the right programmatic partners to help them reach their marketing goals.
PM360 Magazine selected George Tarnopolsky as one of Pharma Marketing’s 100 most influential people for 2021. As media consumption habits of people, including healthcare professionals, expand to more screens and devices, it’s critical to reach them on emerging channels. Today, as VP, Programmatic for CMI Media Group, George Tarnopolsky finds increasingly effective ways to reach people.
George’s programmatic team boasts multiple industry firsts. For example, George’s team created a unique Connected TV campaign for a type 2 diabetes brand that specifically targeted endocrinologists on a 1:1 basis. For another client, George’s team successfully launched a pulmonology brand targeting patients through a targeted Crossix and Adstra campaign within the streaming audio channel.
Lasso, the omni-channel platform for healthcare marketing and analytics, and Xandr today announced a strategic partnership to simplify the way marketers plan, activate, and measure their Healthcare Provider (HCP) and Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) campaigns.
“Lasso has been a great partner for driving results in our healthcare marketing campaigns. Utilizing the Lasso platform has allowed us to activate HCP campaigns with scale and efficiency,” said George Tarnopolsky, VP Programmatic, CMI Media Group. “Lasso’s partnership with Xandr is the best of both worlds: leading omnichannel reach of Xandr, coupled with Lasso’s turnkey capabilities and 1:1 reporting created for the healthcare space.”
Digital advertising is changing. Third party cookies and mobile device IDs, trackers used to build a $100B ecosystem, are about to be discontinued without a universal alternative to replace them. Let’s dive deeper into how we arrived here, what likely short- and long-term outcomes look like, and what smart marketers can do to prepare for the changes.
PM360 asked analytics experts about the impact of Google, Safari, and Firefox all phasing out third-party cookies and the biggest missed opportunities for marketers regarding data. Specifically, we asked them:
With third-party cookies crumbling, how will a marketer’s ability to target their campaign, measure attribution, and/or use programmatic buying be impacted? What other areas of marketing may be affected?
What are the biggest opportunities in terms of data and/or analytics that not enough companies or marketers either know about or are leveraging to their full potential?
Feedback from George Tarnopolsky, VP Programmatic at CMI/Compas:
Over the next two years, programmatic marketers will need to evolve beyond using targeting methods that depend on cookies. Changes will impact HCP and patient campaigns differently, with key challenges and opportunities in each.
HCP target list buys on endemic websites will flourish as these tactics often depend on NPIs instead of cookies. On the opposite side, HCP non-endemic buys are primarily cookie-based and will need to pivot to alternative approaches, such as using CRM data activation with large publishers who have login data.
Patient marketing will experience growth in keyword contextual and private marketplace tactics, as these approaches don’t depend on cookies. Also, similar to HCP programs, it’s likely CRM data activation will become another replacement. The growth of CRM targeting will signal a rising importance of large publishers, who are able to protect their content behind a login. An unintended consequence of this change may be a decline in independent content, if smaller publishers aren’t able to monetize as effectively as before.
To prepare for these changes, marketers should audit current media plans. This exercise will be helpful in demonstrating that pharma marketers already employ many non-cookie-based strategies, such as NPI targeting, CRM data targeting, and contextual approaches.
A new report says there’s a rise in fraud on connected TV platforms. Here’s what pharma marketers should know, from two CMI/Compas experts, Joe Warren, EVP, Media Investment and George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic:
While the headline is scary, it should not be a complete surprise. Clearly television streaming has had significant gains during Covid lock down, and as ad-funded broadcasters increasingly turn to programmatic buying options. Prevention of ad fraud requires adopting programmatic tactics similar to those that marketers have used in the display marketplace, albeit it is currently more challenging to prevent fraud in the video space.
Pre-bid brand safety and fraud prevention solutions are still evolving for emerging channels like Connected TV and Audio. In the interim, marketers can mitigate their risk by partnering with DSPs that screen every impression for bot traffic, via integrations with solutions like White Ops. In addition, marketers may rely heavily on Private Marketplace deals with premium content owners like A&E, CBS, the Golf Channel, and others—which ensures a premium, controlled environment for cTV ads. Lastly, marketers can utilize post-bid reporting from providers like DoubleVerify, closely monitoring their activity for brand safety and fraud, and making changes to campaigns based on observations.
Ad network update from George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic: This week, CVS has announced the launch of its own ad network--CVS Media Exchange, or cMx. buyers will be able to reach customers across Display, Video, Search, and Social channels, utilizing intent and purchase audience data from CVS's 74M customers. CVS's ad network closely follows similar approaches from Target and Walmart, who've also launched ad buying powered by their proprietary audience data. This model also emulates the success of the Amazon DSP. More than any other retailer, Amazon has made a concerted effort to compete against market leaders like Google DV360 and The Trade Desk, with its own purchase and intent data as the differentiator. These offerings, including Target Media Network, Walmart Media Group, and the Amazon DSP, have historically been geared toward retail and CPG brands. Healthcare marketers are hopeful that CVS, given its history, creates opportunities for pharma brands as well. We will watch the CVS Media Exchange closely.
Walmart is leveraging its scale and advertising ambitions to launch a new platform competitive with Amazon, Google, and Facebook. In a new development, Walmart Media Group is adding a new set of metrics to its Walmart Ad Center. The new Walmart reporting suite ties online advertising with customer behavior, and shows how online ads drive online and ecommerce sales. While the applications of Walmart Ad Center are limited to OTC brands, this announcement is exciting for several reasons:
The emergence of new options for marketers
Increased emphasis on measurement that goes past front-end metrics like reach and clickthrough rate. In healthcare, measurement like script lift is essential in order to better illustrate ROAS of ad campaigns
The synthesis of front-end ad campaign metrics (impressions, clicks, reach) with consumer behavior metrics (online and in-store purchases)--all in a single dashboard.
We will watch Walmart's developments closely. Healthcare marketers will benefit from similar developments in healthcare programmatic platforms and offerings. This type of union of online and offline metrics in a single platform will create for better ad campaigns and drive better return on advertising spend.
Apple’s WWDC was a few days ago and there’s one topic people seem to be still talking about: privacy. The company will now require third-party apps to ask permission before tracking users, and are using a nutrition-label-like format to streamline the process.
George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic provides this insight: Users will now get a popup about device id (IDFA) use when they first download an app; the popup will ask whether users allow for their IDFA to be used for ad targeting purposes. This change allows users to opt out of tracking very easily, when apps are first downloaded. App developers will be able to customize this initial popup, for example to illustrate the value exchange from opting into ad targeting. It’s unknown what percentage of users will opt out of IDFA sharing in apps at this time.
At a high level, it is clear that this change will affect the ability of app developers to monetize through ads—and for buyers to buy that app inventory. In the short-term, mobile ad budgets will flow increasingly towards Android apps, which are unaffected by Apple’s change. Long-term, app developers will likely shift more apps to subscription models or require logins. Programmatic buyers will be able to continue leveraging keyword contextual, sitelist, and PMP strategies. In addition, we will likely see an emergence of first party data as the top method for reaching audiences, replacing both browser cookies and mobile device ids.
Publisher update from George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic: News publishers are finding the COVID-19 crisis challenging to navigate. While news consumption has grown dramatically, the impact to news publishers has been a negative one from a revenue perspective; most ad buyers have been blocking Coronavirus content. News publishers have had to balance increasing viewership and infrastructure costs with a declining ability to monetize content. In response, Google has announced that it would waive Google Ad Manager (publisher ad server) costs to news publishers, for a period of five months. In a recent blog post, Google said that they hope to “help news organizations reduce some of the cost of managing their businesses and funding important journalism during this time.”
Programmatic is not going anywhere. Despite the recent questions swirling due to data privacy changes (GDPR, CCPA, and the impending “cookie-less” reality), industry experts agree programmatic for pharma will not be hurt by increased privacy legislation or trends. The bull market position taken by thought leaders is that scaling back now on programmatic “will risk major missed opportunities for greater ROI and better attribution.” Across all sectors, U.S. programmatic media spend totally roughly $60 billion dollars in 2019, and is conservatively estimated by eMarketer to increase to over $80 billion by 2021.
Today, we will leave the reader with this insightful summary of the immediate future from George Tarnopolsky:
“A shift to non-cookie based tactics will make programmatic more interesting, as buyers will need to get more creative in their tactic and strategy mix. For example, instead of using a cookie-based data segment that represents a patient population, a programmatic media buyer may now combine Private Marketplace, keyword contextual, geography, and time of day targeting—while also leveraging high engagement Video or Native creative ad units.”
The advertising industry is shifting as consumers demand more privacy and ownership of their data, regulators struggle to keep up, and technology continues to evolve to offer more ways to engage with consumers and collect their data. The media landscape is fluid and evolves quickly. In an age where data is a commodity, consumers are becoming more aware of how advertisers are using it. In a common quest to educate and regulate, digital governing bodies, state and federal officials, publishers, and technology giants are all weighing in.
At CMI/Compas, we have been planning for this industry shift for some time and have been using both cookie-based and non-cookie-based approaches in our digital ad campaigns. We believe that relevant advertising won’t go away, but we will see a pivot to strategies and tactics that don’t depend on cookies. With the implementation timeline from Google still two years away, there are some unknowns—but there are also ways that we can begin to prepare now.
Google says it will phase out third-party cookie support within two years, and some marketers are lamenting the data loss.
The pharma industry, which has to work within strict privacy and regulatory boundaries, may be better positioned than others. Pharma marketers already use plenty of non-cookie tactics. But change is still on its way. “In general, relevant advertising isn’t going to go away. It’s just that we’re going to see pivots and shifts to tactics and strategies that don’t rely on cookies,” said George Tarnopolsky, VP of programmatic at CMI/Compas.
Recently, there has been a lot of news around Google’s algorithm updates, CCPA and privacy, user data, acquisition of Fitbit, and their overall intention or motivation driving these updates. While changes of any kind coming from a company like Google are sure to make waves, it’s important to know what can be filtered out and what we need to focus on as marketers and advertisers. This POV addresses the most relevant and high-profile news to provide clarity and guidance on how it may impact your business.
Big news coming from Google yesterday; here’s the scoop from George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic: In the first Scoop of 2020, we speculated that Google will eventually block all third party cookies. Google has now made this change official, announcing that the they will phase out third party cookie support from Google Chrome within two years. There are several implications of this change; some are known today while more will become clearer over the next two years.
It’s certain that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other “walled gardens” are well positioned to continue operating in a post-cookie world, as they have large pools of logged in audiences and can utilize people-based IDs such as user logins to reach persons.
Contextual advertising will see growth in this new era—with increase of Private Marketplace buys as well as keyword contextual data solutions like Oracle Grapeshot, Peer39, and others.
Large ad tech companies, such as LiveRamp and the Trade Desk will vie for adoption of their universal id as a replacement for cookies.
It’s likely that new walled gardens will emerge; for example, if large DSPs will acquire SSPs in order to get closer to logged in first party publisher audiences
CMI/Compas’s AdMission is already designed with deep first party endemic publisher relationships (Medscape, Haymarket, Frontline, HMP, Bulletin Health etc.)--which allows us to target HCPs on 1:1 basis on endemic sites, without the use of cookies.
CMI/Compas, media strategy, planning, innovation and buying for the nation’s top healthcare companies and part of WPP (NYSE:WPP), has bolstered its client service offerings with the hire of several executives as part of its continued growth, including senior leadership in the company’s West Coast and Midwest office locations. George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic, is helping to create a world-class programmatic media buying practice at CMI/Compas.
CMI's Programmatic Team used TTD Planner’s machine learning to analyze audience insights and develop pre-optimized campaigns before spending a single dollar.
Amazon advertising update from George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic: In an anticipated move, Amazon on Friday announced that it is acquiring the Sizmek ad server as it ramps up its advertising efforts. In the recent years, Amazon made big inroads with the Amazon DSP, powered with Amazon’s shopping intent and purchase data. While the Amazon DSP has restricted buying for pharma campaigns, it has been popular with Direct Response and especially Retail brands. The acquisition of an ad server further builds out the Amazon ad stack, and mirrors Google’s DV360 DSP and Campaign Manager ad server value proposition. An in-house ad server will help direct some buyers to go “all-in” on the Amazon ad platform, with both ad server and DSP components. It will be interesting to watch whether Amazon succeeds at integrating Sizmek into its stack—and whether it continues to add to the platform, for example building or buying an SEM offering.
A recent programmatic OOH – you read that right, programmatic is hitting billboards – campaign featuring Kylie Jenner’s makeup line is showing how programmatic changes the game. A campaign that would have typically taken weeks or months to set up was able to hit in days, which as AdWeek points out, really works well for our on-demand world. OOH works for pharma too (if you’re hoping to keep up with the Kardashians) as George Tarnopolsky, our VP of Programmatic notes: “Digital out-of-home presents interesting branding opportunities for pharmaceutical brands, as well. DOOH ads can be purchased via programmatic buying, and placed in front of users in different contexts, for example: roadside billboards, transit shelters, airports, elevator and lobby screens, shopping centers, health clubs, and doctors’ office waiting rooms. Both banner and video opportunities are available, with time of day and geofencing (latitude & longitude) targeting options. For example, a consumer campaign for a dental product can be targeted to digital billboards specifically in dentist waiting rooms during business hours—driving patient awareness directly in the practitioner’s office.”
In this week’s episode, we discuss:
Current market dynamics, and what a potential recession means. We touch on the Visto (Collective) bankruptcy.
The Rocket Fuel data targeting controversy and other industry examples; we touch on the Theranos book "Bad Blood" and how it's reminiscent of ad tech
The acquisitions of 2018: Nexstar buying Tribune, S4 acquiring Mighty Hive, iHeartMedia buying Jelli, and chatter about Accenture bidding for MDC Partners.
In this episode, we discuss:
- State of the ad tech ecosystem: CDPs, Management Consultants, Amazon & TTD
- The in-housing trend and how specialist agencies can reverse this trend and benefit brands
- Programmatic Frontiers: DOOH, CTV, Audio, and what role eBay and Samsung may play in our ecosystem in the future.
Inspired by great mentors and role models through his career in tech, George synthesizes seventeen of the most important lessons learned on leadership, work, and life.
George was interviewed by Alexandra Popescu at theSuper.host about Tokeet's industry leading vacation rental management offering, growing 10x in 2017, and Tokeet's plans for 2018 and beyond.
In this week's episode, we discuss:
- The week in ad tech: LinkedIn launches its DSP (we take a deep look) and YuMe gets acquired
- Gravity4 launching its Blockchain-based Lydian Coin token
- Deeper look at who’s who of ad tech companies doing Blockchain today, including MetaX, Rebel.ai, MadHive, NYIAX.
In this week's episode of Ad Talk, we discuss:
- DoubleVerify going private equity, and what private equity means in the marketplace
- Ad tech company public valuations, market consolidation, and M&A activity. What ad tech public companies have attractive balance sheets?
Launched: the 2017 Mobile Programmatic Buying Playbook!
Download playbook here.
The playbook is intended as a tool for new and seasoned programmatic buyers alike, and provides an overview and valuable tips on mobile's most important nuances: creative, location, viewability and brand safety, device, and data activation capabilities.
In this episode, we discuss:
- What is Blockchain?
- Is it applicable to ad tech?
- How soon will we see Blockchain and Smart Contract technology adopted?
Excerpt: "A key tenet of Blockchain is decentralization, which runs contrary to the “universal buying platform” vision of everyone from Google to the Trade Desk, MediaMath, etc. Adopting Blockchain isn’t about enhancing RTB protocol and evolving SSPs and DSPs-- Blockchain would mean a potential elimination of intermediaries--and a mechanism for sellers (publishers) and buyers (agencies and brands) to transact together.
This is a good thing, and this is the original vision of the ad exchange as it was intended. Implementation of blockchain should result in the majority of the media dollar actually being spent on media."
In this episode of Ad Talk, we discuss:
1. Is it possible for companies to operate both Buy and Sell side businesses?
2. Why have so many tried, and failed, at the Buy Side?
3. Can The Trade Desk dethrone DBM? We dive into TTD annual report and quarterly earnings.
In the ad tech space, “CRM” and “CRM data” are being increasingly misused in the context of targeting customer lists via addressable platforms. Here are three unexpected places where SaaS companies can mine data on customer interaction with their product
