The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is all about honoring, well, creativity. But over the past decade, the presence of machine learning, programmatic ad tech, and AI has become unavoidable there. 

Last year, one estimate put 85% of Cannes participants as being ad tech companies, up from 60% just a few years ago. This year, while the complaints about programmatic firms more or less invading the festival on yachts may have quelled a bit (in part because construction meant far fewer yacht parties than usual), the debate over their presence at Cannes has taken on a new flavor thanks to the rise of generative AI. Automation in advertising is now about much more than buying and selling – it’s now an existential crisis for creatives, many of whom see their jobs threatened by the march of automation.

So, amid this, the word “programmatic” can take on an ominous new meaning. Should it? 

On an Infillion-hosted panel in Cannes, “Why Programmatic Shouldn’t Be A Dirty Word For Creatives,” a set of leaders from across the digital advertising spectrum addressed the controversy head-on. “Is it a fear of programmatic? Is it a lack of education? Is it a lack of showing the success stories and how it can actually help them?” moderator Sinead Fox, partner at Bain, asked the panelists.

As it turns out, it’s a combination of all that. And the onus is on ad tech to create clearer communication.

• The acronyms aren’t helping. Digital ad tech, for one, isn’t doing itself any favors in the rest of the industry by making its offerings so difficult to understand.
  
  “It’s really hard to figure out the ecosystem of programmatic,” said Cynthia Clevenger, SVP of B2B marketing at ad-supported streaming service Tubi, one of the few companies that can both say it builds programmatic ad tech while also winning top awards at Cannes for its brand creative. “There are a lot of players. There are a lot of acronyms. So I get when you hear that word [“programmatic”], a lot of people who have been around in the industry, they do have that visceral reaction.”
  
  What this leads to is the perception, for example, that certain forms of automation and AI are newer and more intimidating than they actually are. “Clients are asking a lot of different questions,” said Dave Kersey, chief media officer at GSD&M, an Omnicom-owned full service agency that manages both creative and media work for clients. “One of our clients asked us what our POV is on AI and we said, ‘We’ve been using it for you for 12 years through machine learning.’”

   

• Creatives care about more than efficiency. Pirouz Nilforoush, president and co-founder of inPowered AI, pointed out that programmatic ad tech spends too much time talking about numbers. “It’s all about performance,” he said. “Creatives want to create more engaging experiences, and all this focus on the attribution for the ads and performance I think has created that perception [that the two sides are at odds].”
  
  In reality, performance can and should be driven by human creativity itself in addition to the technology that powers advertising.
  
  “You think about the first generation of programmatic and its emphasis on automation and efficiency and performance and optimization – sometimes I think of it as very left-brained,” said Marcos Escalante, chief product officer at Infillion. Then there’s “the emotion. That’s the creative. That’s really pulling that out, and it drives performance.” With generative AI entering the conversation, giving creative its credit in advertising’s impact is even more important.

• Emphasize what automation can do to enhance creativity. The message that ad tech needs to bring to creatives: We’re here to help you do your jobs better. Multiple panelists brought up AI’s ability to be “a first draft,” to test out new concepts and audience feedback so that creatives can be better equipped and more informed. “Clients can save more, and we can get to market quicker and make decisions faster,” said Dave Kersey of GSD&M. “Ultimately programmatic is just pipes to get activation out the door quickly.”
  
  There’s more, too. As an example, Cynthia Clevenger of Tubi brought up localization of ads, in which generative AI and programmatic deployment can help a message reach audiences that it wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. “There are cultural nuances that you cannot get from a machine, but there are ways in which we can do translation that’s much easier, tone much easier, and that’s what I think is really exciting,” she said.
  
  “An algorithm does not bring heart to the table,” said Chrysi Philalithes, who recently took on a leadership role at the Ryan Reynolds-founded creative agency Maximum Effort. “But it does bring efficiencies to the table.”

   

   

Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate

When it comes to team structures and communication, keeping programmatic (or media) and creative teams in close proximity can help bridge divides. “Try as much as possible to foster collaborative environments and not make programmatic this scary thing,” said Pirouz Nilforoush when asked about the advice he’d give to the industry.

At Infillion, tech and creative teams routinely meet to sync on campaigns that are running and how both teams can optimize them. “When we do a weekly review of campaigns in performance, [we] come up with actions and insights that probably couldn’t have come from other teams,” Marcos Escalante said.

In summary, the gulf between creative and tech doesn’t have to exist. “It doesn’t have to be this either-or. Why are we setting it up as an either-or?” suggested Chrysi Philalithes. “As a marketer I really believe in how the medium is the message, so let’s look at [programmatic] as the medium that can deliver the message.”

Learn more about Infillion’s award-winning work with this rundown of recent wins from our Creative Strategy team.

Few terms in the advertising industry are more polarizing than “walled garden” – which, in a traditional sense, means any closed platform or closed ecosystem where the technology provider has significant control over the hardware, applications, or content. On one hand, closed environments for data and targeting are often predictable and manageable, which is probably why 80% of digital ad spend goes to environments that could be considered “walled gardens.” On the other hand, to many marketers, “walled garden” has become synonymous with “black box.” It’s not always clear where data comes from, or if advertisers are privy to all the data they could be. 

When most people think of walled gardens, they think of huge tech companies. But really, any data owner can be a walled garden – from retail media networks, to publishers, or data aggregators. All of these entities want to scale the monetization of their owned and operated data and inventory. But historically, they haven’t had a flexible or effective way to do so. 

Enter the concept of “Walled Garden as a Service” (WGaaS), a solution that provides just that – an opportunity for data owners to activate their valuable data and inventory – at a particularly crucial time as the advertising industry undergoes a massive shift.

The Challenge (and Opportunity) for Data Owners

With the deprecation of cookies coming, first-party data is becoming increasingly valuable. In a 2022 survey of marketers, 88% said that first-party data was more important to them than it had been just two years prior. But just 35% said they strongly agreed that they were ready for the cookieless future. And sure enough, while data owners now have a huge opportunity to create new revenue streams, scaling and monetizing upon that data, especially off-site of their owned and operated inventory, can be a daunting task for a few reasons:

• In order to stay future-proofed, their data will need to be stitched together with a cookieless identity solution.
• Activating their data off-site has historically been all through managed service, making it difficult to scale.
• A crowded market makes it difficult to differentiate their technology and create successful streams of revenue.
• They face the threat of losing control over their data protection and compliance by giving third-parties access to their data.

Data owners are looking for ways to make their data seamlessly accessible and activated for advertisers in a way that is differentiated… and also within an environment that they can comfortably control.

MediaMath Is Changing the Game

Nearly 70% of advertisers think that their walled garden spending will increase in order to contend with new regulations and norms around data privacy. If you’re a data owner, why not capitalize on this? MediaMath’s Walled Garden as a Service is an off-the-shelf, white-labeled platform with a future-proofed solution to differentiate a data owner’s technology and scale data and inventory monetization.  

By taking the heavy lifting off the shoulders of data owners, and doing so within a completely controlled environment, MediaMath is creating an easy and seamless path to new revenue streams.

• On-Site: Scale your on-site inventory within MediaMath’s Curated Marketplaces – turnkey private marketplaces of inventory with proven performance in a specific vertical or towards a specific KPI.
• Off-Site: Scale your first-party audiences offsite within MediaMath’s Curated Marketplaces and also within MediaMath’s Audience Taxonomy, so that advertisers can target your audiences across the large-scale publisher network.

Fully prepared for the cookieless future, MediaMath has also taken the lead with a truly agnostic approach, making this a future-proofed solution that ensures scale in all regions, with or without cookies.

As an extra bonus, by white-labeling MediaMath and making the technology their own, data owners can differentiate themselves in the market – especially now that MediaMath has access to enhanced combined capabilities of Infillion’s other products following its recent acquisition. Data owners can offer unique capabilities to advertisers now, including: 

• Award-winning high-impact, cross-device creative 
• First-party proprietary location data for hyper-local targeting and personalization
• Zero-party 100% opted-in survey data  
• MediaMath proprietary performance-based audiences
• Customizable algorithmic decisioning for improved optimization

“Walled garden” no longer has to refer exclusively to the opaque environments put forward by a few large tech companies. Indeed, the ability to create one and scale it is an incredibly promising opportunity for data owners. With three-quarters of advertisers who spend on walled gardens saying they have fluidity in their budgets to explore new opportunities and platforms, the time is ripe – and MediaMath’s offering can get data owners ready to capitalize on it. 

We’re here to help! Reach out to us for any questions you may have about “Walled Garden as a Service.”