Podcast: Goodway Seeks A Better Way To Do Programmatic

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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.

This episode of AdExchanger Talks is sponsored by Netmining.

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.