„All media will be programmatic, including television“ – Richard Frankel, Rocket Fuel

Als Medienpartner der d3con im März 2015 in Hamburg stellen wir euch in den kommenden Wochen die Speaker der größten RTA-Veranstaltung Deutschlands vor. Auf dem Weg entlocken wir ihnen vorab schon viele interessante Aussagen über aktuelle Trends und Entwicklungen rund um das Thema Real-Time-Advertising.

Richard Frankel ist Gründer von Rocket Fuel und seit 2008 auch Präsident des Unternehmens. Er hält einen Bachelor of Engineering der Princeton University und einen Master in Englisch and Classics der San Francisco State University. Der Online-Veteran war schon zu den Anfängen des Internet aktiv und gestaltet seit 15 Jahren die Online-Werbebranche mit. Bei NetGravity war Frankel an der Entwicklung des ersten Internetservers für Werbeanzeigen beteiligt und führte später als General Manager bei Googles DoubleClick die Geschäfte. Die letzte Station vor Rocket Fuel des d3con Keynote-Speakers war Yahoo!, für die Frankel als Senior Director of Product Marketing die Behavioral Targeting Technologie weiter vorantrieb.

Interview mit Richard Frankel, Gründer und Präsident von Rocket Fuel

OnlineMarketing.de: What can d3con attendees expect to learn from your keynote speech?

Richard Frankel: The way the average person consumes media is radically different than it was ten, or even five years ago. New services, driven by burgeoning technology, make it easier than ever for consumers to control exactly where, when, and how they access their content. People now expect television, music, and radio programming to deliver an exclusive, personalized digital experience tailored specifically to their lifestyle.

Leveraging addressable audiences looms larger and larger over marketers’ advertising strategies—and with more digital challengers emerging, programmatic buying of advertising will be a reality sooner rather than later for media of all kinds.

This is part of a larger trend we call the “age of consumer choice.” In this new era, finding audiences will be both a challenge and an opportunity. While it’s harder to find consumers as they fragment throughout different channels, the highly targeted nature of the new audiences into which they will organize means media can become more relevant than it ever was before.

In my keynote speech I will talk about what this transformation of the consumer means for advertisers and agencies and what they need to set up and be aware of to be ready for the market of the future.

What do you think the year 2015 will bring for the RTA industry? What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities?

All media will be programmatic, including television. Digital advertising includes display ads, search, mobile, video, and social advertising. There are also emerging categories that Rocket Fuel does not yet participate in, such as digital out-of-home, billboards, and addressable TV. These are interesting channels for the future. Our belief is that as these new channels emerge, they will rapidly adopt the best practices that come from the display advertising ecosystem, which has already spread to mobile and social, mainly real-time bidding and programmatic decision making. In that world, companies like Rocket Fuel that are positioned to apply AI technology to these problems are going to be the winners.

Direct-response advertising and brand marketing will become more tightly linked and converge. In 2015, “Brand Marketing“ as a cost centre and „Direct-Response Advertising“ as cost of goods sold closely tied to revenue will increase in similarity. Brand dollars will be more measurable for actual sales outcomes, and DR dollars will be valued more highly for the „reach,” or „planting the seed“ value they add toward traditional brand objectives.

2015 will be the year programmatic marketers begin to tie together paid and owned touch points, both online and offline. In 2015 DMPs will increasingly bring offline and owned-channel data together with online media data for a singular view of the customer, and we will see a few innovative marketers make „touch-point management“ the centrepiece of their strategies.

Technologies will converge into powerful and intelligent marketing hubs. Marketers will be able to control the content, timing, and frequency of all addressable messaging to their customers, which means getting the right message to the right consumer, in the right place, at the right time, in the right frequency, in the right channel – across the most effective inventory.

Cross-device targeting will help marketers reach people, not just their devices. Ad buyers will begin to demand a unified view of their customer, regardless of media channel or connected gadget. Once delivered, this will lead to a massive upswing in mobile marketing budgets as the true influential value of such spend early in the consumer purchase cycle becomes clear.

Agencies will reinvent their role for advertisers as strategic and creative partners by learning to use data and insights from programmatic campaigns and DMPs. Agencies will continue to provide great value for brands focusing on automating media buying across multiple channels and objectives, generating actionable insights that inform future marketing decisions. This shift will empower creative designers to get back to the „Mad Men“ world of fun, creative, and effective advertising.

There’s no denying that the topic of ad fraud reached new heights in 2014. However, in 2015, fewer people will be pointing fingers, and companies will focus on actually tackling the issue. We should see unprecedented measures taken by individuals to ensure advertising spend isn’t being wasted, and a collective effort by the industry as a whole to resolve this problem.

How did and does Rocket Fuel manage to succeed in a highly competitive market with huge players like Google and Facebook?

We think Google and Facebook are great ecosystem partners – we source inventory from each of them. But both companies have distractions that compete for the attention of their teams with regard to mastering digital marketing effectiveness. We have a singular focus – activating the science of marketing to enable our clients to reach their customers with greater relevance at a pace and scale beyond anything humanly possible. Rocket Fuel’s deep predictive science uses artificial intelligence and big data to learn, act, adapt and scale — so innovative marketers can drive brand loyalty, increase sales and gain insights that improve every subsequent marketing action. Over the years we’ve worked with thousands of marketers and served billions of impressions with the common goal of improving business outcomes – and we can apply that corpus of knowledge to every bid decision.

The speed and scale of the worldwide data-processing infrastructure enables us to score thousands of different prediction models (i.e. likelihood for a person to take an action after exposure to advertising) against each and every RTB request, again, all with the goal of making digital marketing more effective and profitable for our clients.

Thank you very much for the Interview!

OnlineMarketing.de ist offizieller Medienpartner der d3con 2015. Dieser Artikel ist in Zusammenarbeit mit den Event-Organisatoren entstanden. Interessierte können sich hier für die d3con anmelden. Außerdem organisiert OnlineMarketing.de die Aftershow-Veranstaltung des Events.