Dominic Powers is the CEO of CtrlShift a global SaaS company that is transforming audience engagement with technology, aggregation, data and insights. He talks about their Hub platform which is reducing complexity and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of programmatic media, delivering improved transparency in the process for advertisers, their agencies and publishers.
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Transcription:
Darren:
Welcome to Managing Marketing. Today I’m in Singapore, the rain has stopped and hopefully the skies are clearing and I’m sitting down with Dominic Powers who is the CEO of CtrlShift. Welcome, Dominic.
Dominic:
Thank you. Welcome to Singapore.
Darren:
Thank you very much. What brings you to Singapore each day?
Dominic:
Each day it’s a journey to change an industry that I think needs disruption, and Singapore is probably a great place to do it for South East Asia. We are at the forefront I think of a media industry that is struggling to find its new direction and struggling to come to terms with the new demands of the brands that they work for.
Darren:
So this is specifically around programmatic media buying, isn’t it?
Dominic:
It’s about media buying that could be done in an automated way. I think programmatic has a definition which it is clinging to which goes back to its earlier days 2005, 2006 which was about biddable media.
Darren:
Real time media.
Dominic:
Real time media but still biddable. I think as we move forward, as we start looking at other channels like OTT, like digital out of home, you are still going to have a means by which you want to buy these directly, and automated but they are not necessarily going to be biddable.
So for us it’s about looking at the landscape of audiences, consumers that you want to reach, seeing how they can be reached effectively and gluing all the pieces together that will allow you to do that frictionlessly.
Darren:
I remember early on hearing about programmatic media and they made it seem like it was going to be like the stock exchange for media. That it would allow people to trade in real time and buy and sell. So you would have the publishers being able to sell inventory, the advertisers, demand and supply side.
The stock exchange is seen as incredibly efficient and transparent, where did the media version of that go wrong do you think? Because all we hear about is lack of transparency and fragmentation and confusion and distrust.
Dominic:
It is a question that comes up quite often. And even over a year ago I was on a panel at Mumbrella 360, we were hosting a panel actually, around transparency of the media industry and I think if you compare the financial services industry and you compare the media industry, there is one thing that’s missing and I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but it’s regulation.
If you look at the media industry and you look at programmatic specifically, we haven’t been particularly good at self-regulating and that has allowed the industry to become murky. To have middle people between the demand and the supply that are shaving bits of the dollar as it goes through.
Darren:
Bits! They may be taking a small bit each but collectively it can be significant.
Dominic:
Our own research and research you see out there, a brand can put $1 in and as little as 30 cents can end up at the publisher. Now some of that is valid, it’s legitimate, it’s money that is providing real service but where the brands have had issues is, some of that has been murky, it’s been black boxed.
I won’t directly say who’s to blame for that, but they know who they are. They know that the industry has got to change because that murkiness has got to disappear. Now is regulation the right thing? Probably not. But is self-management, self-regulation? Yes it’s got to be.
So it’s about everyone saying, we may have done some dirty things in the past, but now we are clean. You’ll see a bunch of the media agencies, a bunch of the technology providers who are starting to get into these relationships that are open, transparent all the way through, so that a brand knows exactly how much they are paying.
Whether that’s a brands negotiations with their media agency around how they are serviced and what they pay for that servicing or whether it’s at the tech level where the brands are actually contracting directly with the tech or data providers themselves so they get that transparent cost, they negotiate it themselves, rather than being provided in that black box.
Darren:
One of the other things that’s missing is that stock exchanges actually tell you in real time, the value and volume, of transactions that are happening. They are absolutely transparent in that they tell you at the moment; these shares will sell for this amount and buy at this amount and this is the volume that is being transacted.
Dominic:
Yes.
Darren:
So it is completely transparent.
Dominic:
It is but if you think about it, there are still broker’s fees in there and brokers charge different fees if you are a retail investor. So, if you are not in the retail part of it, yes, it is far more transparent and you know what you are getting. But if you are in retail then that is what you have. I suppose if you are looking at the brands, they are very much like the retailers going in because they are not buying on mass.
Whereas you get some of the agencies for example, they do pre-buy, they buy in advance and arbitrage just like it’s done in the financial services industry.
So, there are similarities, there are differences, would our industry go that far? I just don’t think at the moment there’s the dollars in it and the willingness to make it that transparent at the moment, so we’ve got to start small.
Darren:
Do you mean Singapore, or globally?
Dominic:
If you look at the financial services industry and you look at the media industry as a whole, you look at programmatic, there are multiple zeros of difference in scale here in US dollars, so there is that you have to take into consideration.
Darren:
That’s an interesting point because I was talking with SMI who I know are not in Singapore, they’re in Australia, North America and the UK, and they say programmatic, as a percentage of all media trading is relatively small.
Yet you read trade media where people are talking it up and saying it’s heading towards 50 % of all trades, but you have to read the fine detail because they are talking about a particular sect, aren’t they?
Dominic:
You’ve got various numbers that are put out there and the ranges we see are anywhere between it being 60 -70 billion dollars globally in 2020, so next year, with 50 % of that being in North America.
If you look at the rate at which digital media is growing and you look at the rate which programmatic in its broader term, being stuff that can be bought in an automated way, is growing, it is going to become a larger and larger part of digital media.
There is really no reason why the inefficiencies that currently exist in the programmatic space, or in digital media buying as a whole should continue.
Digital media, a large chunk of it when it is direct from agency to publisher, or brand to publisher is still bought with physical IO’s, Insertion Orders, that are printed and signed and scanned or faxed. That is how a large majority of this, what is it, 400 billion dollar industry exists.
Darren:
It’s so quaint, isn’t it?
Dominic:
It’s quaint. These are some of the problems that we are trying to fix. 6-7 years ago we saw the Lunar-scape. The lunar-scape if you don’t know it is obviously a view that is put out by Lunar in North America which just shows all of the companies in some shape or form, involved in the advertising technology space.
Whether they are dsp’s dpm’s, ad tech, ma tech, all of that, and we had a vision that the industry would be this complicated. Very early on we saw how things were becoming siloed very quickly with the different dsp’s the different dmp’s.
We just knew that it would lead to a point where you’ve got these ‘traders’ who are buying the media, who ultimately are the real knowledge workers of the industry, who know what is happening at the coal face, who are going to spend more time learning platforms, logging into platforms, logging out of platforms, than actually physically working with the brands, working within their agencies to actually drive strategic thinking and insights that make them more efficient.
We produced a regional survey, that actually touched the UK and North America, that we put out, that focused purely on the traders because these are the guys that are really ignored in the industry.
Darren:
I remember seeing that report.
Dominic:
What we saw was that 40% or more of traders are touching 5 or more platforms a day to do their job.
Darren:
Crazy.
Dominic:
20 % or more are touching 8 or more platforms. So that is Google, Facebook, and then it’s the ad serve, the dmp, its various different dsp’s, we’ll be using. They may be plugging into reports from certain platforms that don’t allow them to buy themselves, and they just download the report.
So if you look at people that are working in that industry, it’s no wonder they only last 18 months. We were talking to one of the very large global media companies and they were just sharing with us this amazing insight, how the burn out rate for their trade is 18 months.
They said the thing that is shocking and saddening for them is, they invest this time and energy training these guys and they do 18 months and they don’t just leave the agency, they leave the industry completely.
Darren:
They’ve had enough.
Dominic:
They’ve had enough after 18 months, so again that should tell the agencies that something is fundamentally wrong with the way this is managed. This is where we are coming in and we being CtrlShift, we being this journey to defragment this industry for a while, but we had to wait until the time was right.
Darren:
I know the Lunar Scape you mentioned isn’t just programmatic media, it’s all Ma tech, Ad tech and they made a big thing, they’d hit 5000+ potential suppliers in that space.
I know it became impossible to read, it just looked like someone had sprayed colour onto it, but even then in the space that you are focusing on, there’s still a significant amount of fragmentation. There are multiple platforms and as you say, they are increasingly starting to align themselves into silos aren’t they, so that it doesn’t allow for cross platform trading?
Dominic:
Cross platform trading in inverted comers there, it doesn’t, and so we pre-evaluate platforms. We have built a platform in the hub that is open architecture, EPI driven. So we have gone out over the last 8 years and really pre-evaluated the platforms that we see as being market leaders being able to provide something different, not just the me too’s.
So we have integrated now 11 platforms that we bring into our UI that allow you to manage your work flows, to build campaigns, to report and see it all in one UI. And not all these platforms are created the same. They’ll have different audiences, they’ll have different performance levels in different markets depending on audiences, and so we are giving our clients the ability to see that in a holistic way.
Then if they want to move money out of, let’s say out of Google and to App Nexus, Media Math or Adobe, they can do that without logging into the underlying platform. So, we have a way that they can just simply put the section media they want and we do the push.
They can actually start to have a view of how they are working across the platforms. Now not many brands are going to be bidding on the same audiences in two separate demand sight platforms because they would be bidding against themselves, ultimately.
What they are going to be doing is perhaps looking at different audiences, looking at them in different platforms and moving money where it makes sense to drive overall performance.
Darren:
Especially for a particular marketer brief or brand brief, you would want to explore as many options as possible.
Dominic:
Absolutely
Darren:
In defining what’s the best way of investing your money.
Dominic:
I think that’s important when you also look at how stilted our industry is in terms of developing the way media is bought. As I mentioned we have the insertion orders but we also have this concept of a media plan.
And we are of the very strong opinion that, a media plan is only as good as the second it is signed off on, because the moment you put it out into the wild of the programmatic space, you are actually then trading based on the insights and what is happening.
So you may have decided your media plan looks like X % in Facebook, X % in Google, X % in Media Math, X % in Tube Mobile, but by the end of the run of that media plan, it is going to be completely different.
Darren:
And that’s if the client, the advertiser, is paying and investing in their agency constantly demising. And I say if because so many times when we’ve been bought in, to look at a client media agency relationship, it’s been squeezed down.
The fee’s been squeezed down by procurement or whoever, to the point that the agency doesn’t have the resources to be optimised and so a spend is happening in a traditional way.
Like you would plan a media plan for TV, you would then go out and buy it and it would run. At the end of that campaign you would then go back and see how well it performed. And I think a lot of marketers don’t realise that they are missing out on the opportunity with their digital investment, that it can be constantly optimised.
If something in the original plan is not working then change it and look for what does work better.
Dominic:
I think if we just take one giant leap up a level, we’ve got an industry that’s had a lot of pressure where brands and procurement organisations are putting huge amounts of pressure on digital and programmatic.
What we have seen is you are in a place where a brand, whether they are a commerce brand, whether they are a retail brand, they come to you and say we want the cheapest cost per X; the cheapest cost per lead, the cheapest cost per download, impression, whatever they are looking for.
But there is no concept in their mind or very few have that concept in their mind of what the life time value is and so what this has done is completely devalue programmatic in its place in a broader ecosystem.
Again this is one of the areas that we talk about a lot. Digital transformation, a trillion dollar industry globally and you hardly ever in the same breath hear programmatic spoken about in digital transformation.
Yet it is one of the only pieces that, if you are thinking about the money that’s invested in websites and in transforming businesses, can actually touch a consumer at every single point of that consumer journey, if you are trying to ultimately sell product to them.
Very few brands, very few consulting companies actually see this or get it. There’s a massive bridge between activities that happen in acquisition, the data that’s created in acquisition and then the data and the insights that are created through CRM and the building of customer journeys through existing customers.
Darren:
I think Adobe is a good example of that. You’ve got modules you can buy. You can buy the insights module and the customer experience and management module and then there is the Ad module.
Dominic:
They’ve bought some great products.
Darren:
Even the way they package it, you buy modules, except that a total digital transformation would usually involve all of those modules. So I guess that is what they are trying to get to except so many times we end up with clients that have got, well, ’we’ve got sales force for this, Adobe for this’, and they’ve ended up, again, in the 21st century, with all these legacy systems all based on API’s that will help them talk to each other but almost never do.
Dominic:
Again it’s a product of just how broad the digital industry has grown. Focus was placed on point solutions that solved a particular problem and these have proliferated across the various problem areas. Whether it is website traffic tracking, whether it’s providing an ecommerce platform that enables you to do stuff. Whether it is a programmatic platform, whether it’s an email CRM platform, and they have grown and great businesses have been built.
The vision has been there to create an end to end solution, but because these platforms have been built with different end goals in mind, while they may have API’s it’s very difficult for these to talk together in the way you may envisage it to happen.
If you really break apart everything that is in the industry, you’ve almost got to start at the beginning and architect something completely end to end.
Darren:
Well that is a way to develop a solution, is to actually define the whole problem and then work out the stages. That suddenly makes me think about the name, CtrlShift, do you know where that came from.
Dominic:
Absolutely I know where that came from.
Darren:
I like the fact, take control and shift the way you are doing something, is sort of the literal interpretation.
Dominic:
Very close. It was really about shifting the control back to the true valued constituents in the market. So shifting control back to the advertisers who are spending the money, shifting the control back to the publishers. But also in the same sense giving control back to the intermediaries, whoever they are so that they can do things in a transparent way.
Darren:
In a more effective and efficient way.
Dominic:
Exactly, and for us it’s all about efficiency. Actually I was just having a conversation.
Darren:
Sorry, before you go on, so it’s not the old Windows machine where you go control, shift, delete and restart the whole thing.
Dominic:
Control or delete. No, but we did have some jokes in the very early days from close friends in the industry saying you’d better be careful. One key and you are gone.
Darren:
Well it is just a restart. Maybe that is what the industry needs; a restart.
Dominic:
It needs a rethink for sure.
Darren:
Rather than band-aiding it all together.
Dominic:
Band aids never last. That’s the problem. Again where we sit, we are trying to do it beyond it being a band aid by working with platforms that do have API’s and finding how we can connect them in a layer itself that is completely open.
That is how we want to work with them, which is why I said earlier, we pre-evaluate. We make sure they actually do what they say on the tin and then we can bring that richness into our platform so they have a place where they can be successful too.
Darren:
It is interesting how many platforms have API’s that have no map for what that API looks like so you can actually integrate the two together. I know a few of my developer friends say, get your own map and hand it to the other person to match yours rather than ever try to match theirs because it never works.
Dominic:
When we started on this journey, 7-8 years ago, nobody really understood what we were trying to build, and so they would just give us their API’s and they would give us what they thought we needed, what we wanted.
Then we would spend months trying to say, ‘no we need this, we need that’ and as we’ve gone along this journey we have got to a point, without being arrogant, that we now have platforms coming to us saying, we’d like to be integrated.
We go, here is our basic API document, if you can’t do these ten things, come back to us when you can.
Darren:
You have to do that because I’ve seen projects that have just gone on and on and on because it’s the easiest thing to say. It’s the old 3 letter acronym API, but actually making two platforms completely align in their sharing of data and information can be a really difficult job.
Dominic:
It can.
Darren:
Because everyone labels things differently, they have different formats, so you are getting two platforms to talk to each other?
Dominic:
You’re right. The nomenclature, the way they obviously call things. As we look at the 11 platforms we’ve integrated, they’re in the same industry, they’re in the same lunar scape but they use different ways of calling things.
So one of the biggest jobs that we had to do was to create our own nomenclature that could then be used across all these platforms. That is some of the mapping that we actually do. If we bring in new platforms or if new platforms emerge in the market, traders, people working in the industry don’t have to learn a new workload nomenclature. If it’s integrated with us, we’ve standardised it to achieve the same thing, so that was a big achievement for us.
To your point about integrations, if we don’t have the right API access, and we do have some clients that tell us we do want you to integrate this platform so we’ll start that journey, it can take 3-4 months, 5 months to get an integration only half decent.
But if we have the right documentation we can do an integration in 6-8 weeks.
Darren:
I know for us the most obvious demonstration of this, is the number of times in a pitch a media agency will say, ‘yes, yes, Mr client, Ms client, we will have a complete dashboard ready for you within a month of being appointed.’ And then 6 months later the client’s going, and where is my dashboard?
Often those dashboards are pulling data from many different sources.
Dominic:
Yes.
Darren:
So while the agency may have a dashboard applicational platform, to actually integrate that and especially if they’re then pulling first party data from the client, there’s a whole lot of hell involved just in that, isn’t there?
Dominic:
Absolutely. Again this is a really interesting industry. I have a lot of respect for the media agencies, the creative agencies, they’ve done some great work, but what’s not at their core typically is a technology DNA.
Darren:
No.
Dominic:
So when they go out to try to build things they don’t necessarily come at it the right way, the outcomes aren’t what the inputs meant it to be. We’ve sat in front of pretty much all of the agency networks in the past 6-8 months and there is a phrase that has struck me over and over again that we get 15-20 minutes into the demo of the hub, and this is from senior agency executives, they stop, they go just hold it a second, is this real?
Darren:
( laughter)
Dominic:
And it is then followed by a statement that goes something like this;
We’ve been trying to build something like this for five years and we just haven’t succeeded.
Darren:
So, here’s the part that’s missing. I’ve worked with and in technology companies, and the bit that’s missing is agencies are inclined to fix an immediate problem. Like their whole reason for being is, a client comes along with a problem, they will have the solution or they will create it very quickly.
A technology company, good technology companies, don’t solve problems; they actually create a network or a platform or something to make things work more efficiently.
So they sit down and they look at, what’s the whole journey? Whereas agencies are used to companies, marketers, clients coming along and going, I’ve got a problem here, and they go, well we will solve that. There is no long term view of, if I solve that, what are the implications. What will be the unseen follow-ons that will happen from that?
Dominic:
It’s those unseen’s, to terribly paraphrase Steve Jobs, you can’t rely on the consumer or client to tell you what you should build them. You should know the problem that you are trying to solve. And that problem could be a year in the future, 2 years in the future. It could be a problem that continuously moves.
So we need to make sure that as we’re in market that we are talking to as many constituents as possible to see where their thought process is and to try and correct them or change them and just make sure that we are ahead of what we are doing.
Without sounding arrogant we are already 8 years ahead of the market, we’ve just been building this in stealth the past 8 years and there wasn’t enough pain in the market.
There was a lot of rhetoric from the brand, some from the small agencies but now in the past 6-8 months it’s started to move towards something where action is really being taken. Brands are in-housing, they know they want control, they know they want to own all of that programmatic deep data and insight that before was lost in the black box of the agencies, that was just presented in dashboards.
So it is a great time for the industry now and I think what we are going to see in the next 12-18 months is a complete shift of the way that media agencies and creative agencies actually drive value in what they do for the brands. It’s going to be a phoenix moment for them I think. We may see some changes in the financials of them, but it’s going to be a phoenix moment.
Darren:
You mentioned in-housing, and it is certainly something that we have been watching carefully. I think a lot of the in-housing that we hear and read about in the US is the content side.
Dominic:
Yes.
Darren:
Because most of the reports we get about marketers, clients taking media buying and planning in-house, it’s much more complicated, isn’t it? There are many more challenges related to that.
Dominic:
Desire and reality are two very different things and for us, we’re not out there saying to brands, you have to in-house, you should in-house because it involves a huge amount of change management, it involves a huge amount of up-skilling. It involves building teams that you have never had in-house, or had to manage before, around things that you maybe don’t know much about.
So as we go out and talk to the brands, we look at it and say, do you really want to build this in-house and manage those skill sets and have the responsibility or do you maybe want a hybrid model?
The hybrid model is, you own the technology, you take control of that, but you give the keys to an agency that you trust, that you have a relationship with. They run it for you, no longer is it a black box. It’s a complete white box, you have access yourself.
You can see how money is being spent in real time. You have your own dashboards and if that relationship breaks down, goes through review, Trinity P3 gets involved and it gets spun out, you still own it, you take the keys away, you give them to your next agency.
All of that history, all of that insight, all of those media plans, going back as many years as you have been doing it, are valuable.
Darren:
It’s a smart solution because it means you get the best of both worlds. You get your platform that is yours and the data resides in it so all of your first party data, you can make sure it is properly protected and utilised.
You’ve got the access to smart people and you don’t have the HR, human resource issues. You don’t have to deal with trying to attract those people, getting them to stay with you. I think that’s a great idea.
Dominic:
For us it’s important because we’ve come from a place where we had our own services business but we divested that and we did that for a very specific reason. As I said the agencies have a huge amount of value they can add and we don’t want to detract from that, so we are there to be friends with everybody; with the brands and the agencies.
If the agencies are in a position where they have transformed their business model to be able to support, transparently, a brand that wants to take programmatic and media buying in-house, then they’ve got a great path to the future.
If they can build a charging model that the brand respects and works well, then that future has got a long way to go.
Darren:
That’s interesting, friends to everyone, I’d say Trinity P3, we are more like the grit in the oyster. It may irritate the hell out of it but hopefully we produce some pearls.
How do you drive change, because people are resistant to change?
Dominic:
It takes time, I’ll be honest. We’ve been on this journey, 8 years building this platform; we’ve only been taking it to market for the last 6-8 months in a truly pressured way. And it is that change, even within the agencies and how they work within brands. You can imagine that’s a 10 fold way of doing things.
So what you’ve got to be able to provide is the transparency, not just around pricing and platform but around how you are going to take them on a journey to show them that you have the deep experience, the deep knowledge of managing this as a work flow and are able to then transfer knowledge.
That’s one of the biggest pieces, and I’m very firm on the team, that we are not out there just trying to sell platform. We’ve all seen that fail in the industry. We’ve seen people pay millions of dollars for platforms, whether it was the old CRM platforms, whether it was eCommerce platforms, they sold and they ultimately failed because there was no journey of transformation.
So we’ve got to be with them on that to understand how it is going to be successful.
Darren:
It is also the fact that the solution is not the platform alone, the solution is actually the people using the platform which actually makes it successful.
Dominic:
Absolutely, because you’ve got to have the knowledge of what it means to buy and sell media. Now that being said, obviously the next step, it’s not a big jump for us, we are already doing this in beta, is automated trading.
Because we have all this data, because we have all this insight, because we have this log level information we are already predicting what your campaigns will be 7 days out based on the objectives you want to achieve.
So to then take that into an auto trader which we’ve now done in alpha internally, it’s a really interesting step.
Darren:
So this is machine learning or are you going to call it artificial intelligence?
Dominic:
We don’t like to use the words artificial intelligence because it is machine learning. Artificial intelligence to us is something that has a very specific definition and that’s not where we are at, at the moment.
Darren:
Well, the world’s not at that point.
Dominic:
I would question anybody in the marketing space, the ma tech space, the ad tech space, that says they have true AI, it’s questionable.
Darren:
I think it’s one of those media terms that get attention which is why people use it.
Dominic:
It raises valuations and investments because everyone jumps on board.
Darren:
So we’ve been talking largely about the hub haven’t we, when you talk about the platform, you are talking about the hub. The lab, what’s the lab?
Dominic:
Sure, so the lab is the integral part of what do at CtrlShift. The lab is where our data scientists sit. We have data scientists and all they do every day is to focus on building models that ultimately drive some kind of performance lift or drive some value to what we are doing with clients.
Whether that is in the hub itself or sometimes there are components that they build in isolation that we then plug in. So the performance predictor was one of those. This was an off platform algorithm that we built. That then got to a level where we said, right, this is working really, really well, let’s now productise that and put it in.
Darren:
Okay, so it’s an innovation lab.
Dominic:
Yes, focusing primarily around stuff, which is driven by data, but also working on clients’ specific projects as well. So we had a couple of clients that use the platform but have businesses that are evolving in very different directions where the hub is a core part of it, but they have all these other components that they are wanting us to plug into and data science and machine learning is part of that.
So our teams work with them as well to help build particular models around anything from creative optimisation, creative production using machine learning to ways to generate reports and visualisations using machine learning. So, it really is an innovation lab of super smart guys, far smarter than myself; multiple PHD’s with whom I get lost in a 20 minute conversation, but clients love it.
Darren:
You just nod.
Dominic:
I just nod.
Darren:
Knowingly. Look that’s been great but unfortunately we have run out of time but, Dominic, thanks for making the time to sit down to chat. It’s now pouring with rain again. I must be in Singapore.
Dominic:
It’s rainy season. So yes, thanks so much.
Darren:
So that’s what happens when you come in the rainy season.
Last final question for you and that is, a lot of the media holding companies or the holding companies who have media, are making a big thing about their own propriety system, do you think we will ever get to a unified approach to trading programmatically?
Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media and commercial communications professionals, Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by Darren Woolley. Find all the episodes here
