Despite his studies in biochemistry and criminal justice, Anthony Katsur, President of Sonobi,
was “always spending time in the UNIX lab in Albany,” he explained. “My first
intro to tech was working at a startup with some buddies in college. We wound
up selling to a local business services company before the big ISPs got into
the game. Then I moved to the city and continued on the technology track and
got hooked on ad tech” he added.
Anthony’s career
spans stints at DoubleClick, MediaMath, Maxifier and Rubicon Project before
joining Sonobi. He is also an active angel investor and has just written an article
for Media Village on header bidding.
Tony has great enthusiasm for marketing tech and the
programmatic space in general. The following are his perspectives on ad and
marketing tech, cookies, the future of programmatic and television.
Charlene Weisler:
What is your definition of programmatic?
Anthony Katsur: It is when technology and data are applied
in unison to solve for the marketers’ dilemma. The marketers’ dilemma is to
maximize the efficacy of their media investment which is to reach the right
consumer to drive them to the appropriate business outcome. It is not just about reaching the right
people at the right time – a lot of people use that term and it is overwrought –
it is about business outcomes – to drive the consumer to some heightened
awareness or call to action.
Charlene Weisler: Has
ad tech changed since you first started? If so, how?
Anthony Katsur: Ad tech 1.0 was about automation of the old
school way that print advertising was bought and sold. We introduced that
concept into digital. Display ads were really no different than the ads you
would see in a newspaper or a magazine. Also, buying was occurring directly between
buyers and sellers. If we’re looking at this in phases, phase 1 was the
invention of the ad server. Phase 2 or ad tech 2.0, evolved into ad exchanges
and the introduction of RTB. That is where the real-time exchange, real-time
buying and the RTB protocol were born. Phase 3 is the phase we are entering
today which is where header-based technologies supersede the ad server. This
technology is on course to potentially replace the ad server in the next 5 to 8
years. The third party cookie, as we have known it, is undergoing pressure and will
probably disappear altogether. We are going to move towards better ways of
identifying and understanding consumer behavior across multiple channels and
putting relevant and useful messages in front of them.
Charlene Weisler: So
no more ad servers?
Anthony Katsur: Ad servers may radically evolve so that you
no longer see it as an ad server, almost like a dinosaur of this age. This is
not an insult. If you look at studies about the evolution of birds, for
example, they evolved from a lizard but we don’t think of them as being a
former dinosaur. As programmatic concepts and ad servers merge, they will
evolve in the same way. It won’t look anything like its original inception.
Charlene Weisler:
What about consumer targeting?
Anthony Katsur: They say consumers are fragmenting.
Consumers aren’t fragmenting! Last I checked, I haven’t cloned myself into four
people. But I am consuming content through so many different channels now. It
started out simply with the desktop and then with video online. Then, ads on
the smartphone revolutionized the ability to use phones as an advertising
platform and the efficacy of the mobile channel is still TBD. Now, with the
introduction of the Internet of things, connected television, and all of your
connected devices at home, this mobility enables the consumer to ingest content
and communicate across a myriad of platforms. The ecosystem has to go through
this massive evolution, again, to reach consumers across all of those different
platforms. And you can’t forget about the traditional platforms. Television is
here to stay. It is still the most powerful advertising medium, but how is it
introduced into this new way of thinking?
Charlene Weisler: Is
there a future for cookies and if not, what will replace them?
Anthony Katsur: How can I say this? With the future of
cookies, the meteor has not hit the earth yet but it is on its way. Cookies
build a rickety bridge in addressing a consumer. They have a high churn rate,
between 20% and 40% (this varies depending upon the study referenced) and
simply don’t live in many environments where the consumer now spends their time.
I don’t think the cookie will become 100% obsolete, but it becomes less
relevant over time, to the point at which it is more or less obsolete. It’s like
the typewriter. Is the typewriter obsolete? Don’t some people still use it? That
being said, I feel there are three steps to the 30-foot data bridge to achieve
true addressability to the consumer. The cookie is the first 10-feet. The next 10-feet
is device ID, where you don’t really have as high a churn rate. If you can
marry an ID to a single user ID then you can start to understand the media
consumption behaviors of consumers.
Lastly, the Holy Grail is PII graph data, of course
anonymized, scrubbed for email, phone number, and home address into some
non-identifiable token. This is done as a way to become less intrusive to the
consumer. With the truly addressable consumer, advertisers will know that I
have seen two TV spots and now that I am online, I may not need to see yet
another spot that day or week or for the life of the campaign. The introduction
of global reach and frequency controls enables marketers to more effectively get
their message across without being intrusive. For example – I bought new headphones
yesterday – went online and made the purchase. Since then, I have been hit by a
ton of ads for headphones on Facebook, on my desktop, and on my phone, all in
the past 24 hours. I have already made the purchase! There is nothing joining
those channels and formats together because the cookie doesn’t work across
multiple channels. That is part of the problem. I think over the next five
years there will be an evolution where cookies, device ID, and scrubbed PII
graph data will have to work in concert.
Charlene Weisler: But
isn’t there a slippery slope regarding privacy?
Anthony Katsur: I
agree. How do we solve for this? I don’t claim to be a privacy expert. Alan Chapell has great
heritage and is a leader on this topic. I would look to him and other experts
for how we can protect consumer privacy as we move to the more addressable
consumer. It is absolutely critical that we as an industry do a better job of
self-governance from a privacy perspective. And I think there will be some
regulation to protect consumer privacy because there could be one bad actor who
ruins it for everybody. However, legislation will take time.
Charlene Weisler:
Where do you see Sonobi and the industry going in the next five years?
Anthony Katsur: I think Sonobi in the next 5 years will be a
large component in the advertising industry. We are building and powering the
data bridge that we talked about before. I think in the overall industry, we
will see further consolidation in ad tech and within media. I think Google,
possibly Snapchat and others are forcing that consolidation because of scale. We
don’t need as many ad tech players in the space as there are today.
This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
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