For advertisers, the promise of programmatic has been to reach the right audiences in the right places at the right times. And for the most part, it has proven true.
But given the complexities of the ad tech ecosystem, and the many challenges that present themselves — IVT, ad fraud, viewability, supply chain transparency, brand safety, to name a few — marketers are often unsure if they’re obtaining fair value for their ad spend. Often achieving KPIs, but what about long-term brand value?
AI Digital hopes to help marketers do just that. That’s why they built ELEVATE, an optimization and measurement solution that promises to empower brands to make the most of their digital advertising dollars by making clear correlations between digital campaigns and brand and business outcomes. They want to help brands elevate their success.
ELEVATE includes an Accountability Score metric designed to assist brands in identifying new growth opportunities in media plans that drive unique audiences, minimize brand fraud and improve brand outcomes. Reach, impressions, and clicks typically define programmatic success, but with ELEVATE, brand equity and lower funnel actions are taken into play.
To find out how ELEVATE will allow programmatic to flourish — by enhancing optimization, brand, and business outcomes measurement — we spoke with Stephen Magli, CEO and Founder of AI Digital, about ELEVATE, the Accountability Score, and how the platform provides profound insights into audiences, channels, creatives, geographies, and publishers to drive positive results for marketers.
Yakira Young: What sets ELEVATE apart from other optimization and measurement solutions?
Stephen Magli: Most current solutions cannot provide the ability to optimize at the pace at which programmatic bids/trades and the dynamism required for today’s current trading models such as programmatic. While they’re driving business accountability, there are gaps in their ability to drive immediate optimizations and fully capture upper funnel growth. There should be a higher optimization standard and approach that’s designed for the power of a real-time optimized marketplace.
Thus, we took it upon ourselves to reimagine and establish the higher standard; built by programmatic traders for programmatic trading.
YY: How does the Accountability Score help brands identify opportunities to grow?
SM: The current definition of success focuses on media metrics and leveraging legacy attribution models built for traditional media and digital channels, not for biddable media/dynamic optimization. The Accountability Score is specifically designed to help brands identify audiences, channels, screens, and DMAs that deliver brand growth and unique audiences.
YY: From my research, I learned that ELEVATE is incredibly unique for CTV and streaming, as accountability, as it pertains to performance metrics, is lacking in that area. How can the CTV and streaming industry benefit from utilizing the Accountability Score?
SM: ELEVATE is especially unique for CTV and streaming, as CTV currently lacks accountability to performance metrics. Our proprietary metric, the Accountability Score helps brands identify growth areas within media plans that drive unique and unduplicated audiences, minimize ad fraud, and improve brand outcomes. ELEVATE also includes metrics to ensure brand safety and address invalid traffic.
Brands and agencies can understand the audiences, channels, DMAs, creatives, screens, etc., critical to driving brand growth. These insights ensure that media dollars are spent against the people and inventory driving real outcomes and can also inform future optimizations.
YY: What are the steps that ELEVATE takes in helping to reduce IVT and fraud?
SM: We have a proprietary approach to mitigate invalid traffic and fraud. Typically, it involves leveraging two specific filter implementation methods and multiple third-party partners. This allows us to fully capture discrepancies between the two third-party partners, as there are variances in the invalid traffic that each partner recognizes.
YY: Who are some of your clients, and what are their results?
SM: Involved Media’s Head of Programmatic needed to evaluate all vendors by transparency, customer service, performance, reporting & flexibility, and AI Digital checked every box. We have always been able to fulfill any needs. Whether the agency needed to optimize and pay on a viewable CPM for video, hit a certain Cost Per Action on Display, leverage ELEVATE to minimize ad fraud, optimize towards brand outcomes or create complex reporting and analysis sent over within an hour.
YY: How can publishers benefit from ELEVATE?
SM: Publishers can benefit from ELEVATE, as we can share the types of inventory and genres driving brand growth and reaching new unique audiences. Often, we leverage these learnings for optimization purposes, and our partners sometimes leverage these insights to identify high-value publishers/partners where they should be executing a larger partnership.