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Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today, we talk digital advertising fraud with a man who knows where the bodies are buried. And further down in this post, the Unmade Index wipeout continues with Seven West Media's growing debt load yesterday overtaking its shrinking market capitalisation.If you've been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:* Member-only pricing for our HumAIn and REmade (October 1) conferences;* A complimentary invitation to Unmade's Compass event (November);* Member-only content and our paywalled archives; * Your own copy of Media Unmade‘It's not easy to pick a worse time': DoubleVerify's Jack Smith on fraud in the advertising chainToday's conversation features the man who's been labelled the “godfather of digital advertising”, DoubleVerify's global chief innovation officer Jack Smith.Before joining brand safety service DoubleVerify four years ago, Smith was global chief product officer for the investment arm of WPP's GroupM. In 2007, he founded Media Innovation Group - now part of WPP's Xaxis which can claim to have been the first large scale agency trading desk.The conversation with Unmade's Tim Burrowes kicks off focusing on a new scheme - “FM Scam” discovered by the DoubleVerify Fraud Lab, in which scammers were using software to imitate smart speakers, or hijacking those out in the world. As a result, advertisers were being charged for audio ads without human listeners.As well as outlining the new audio scam, Smith discusses the other places where brands are seeing their budgets targeted by fraudsters.He points to connected TV as the scammers' current big target because it attracts high CPMs. “It's definitely CTV,” he says. “The amount you can charge on connected TV is much higher. Pound-for-pound that's the place where fraudsters are moving to.”The wide ranging conversation also covers Made For Advertising sites; the Forbes scandal; principal media - where agencies resell media to their own clients; Smith's scepticism about whether the finding from the Association of National Advertisers in the US that 64% of ad dollars are leaking out of the chain is as bad as that; and whether advertisers should simply focus their dollars on the walled gardens of social media.Is it a losing battle to stop digital advertising fraud? “The scale of programatic advertising is so much bigger today. It's not easy to pick a worse time.”Further reading:Unmade Index fall accelerates as Seven's debt load outweighs its market capitalisationThe market wipeout of Australia's ASX-listed media and marketing stocks accelerated on. Wednesday, with the Unmade Index, which was already at a record low, losing another 1.54%.The Unmade Index landed on 472.2 points, representing a loss of nearly 53% of its value since the index started at 1000 points at the beginning of 2022.The fall was worse than the wider ASX All Ordinaries which lost 0.5%.Seven West Media passed the threshold where its net debt - $257m when it last updated the market in February - is now larger than its market capitalisation which dropped by 2.9% to $254m yesterday.Meanwhile, Southern Cross Austereo stocks (down 0.7%) dropped to a new all-time low as the company's market capitalisation fell below $170m for the first time.Ooh Media (down 1.1%) hit its lowest point since November last year. IVE Group (down 1.8%) was its lowest since last October.Enero (down 2.8%) fell to its lowest point since last June.Pureprofile, which hit a low point since 2020 on Tuesday, recovered by 11.1% yesterday.How we covered the wipeout yesterday:Today's podcast was edited by the excellent people at Abe's Audio.Time to leave you to your Thursday. We'll be back with more tomorrow.Have a great day.Toodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmadetim@unmade.media This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unmade.media/subscribe
In der aktuellen Folge werfen wir einen Blick hinter die Kulissen von Uber. Nach Stationen bei Amazon, Sizmek by Amazon, Xaxis, GroupM und United Internet Media GmbH sowohl in den USA als auch in Deutschland ist Mark Grether heute der Vice President & General Manager bei Uber Advertising in New York City. Seine einzigartige Laufbahn in der digitalen Werbewelt hat Mark zu einem Pionier des Digital Advertising gemacht. In unserem Gespräch nehmen wir Uber Advertising genauestens unter die Lupe und tauchen in die Welt von Uber Mobility und Uber Eats ein. Zusammen mit Host Eric Hall diskutiert Mark spannende Themen: Mobility Media, Captive Audiences, das Konzept des "halbvollen Glases" und seine 13-jährige Erfahrung des Lebens und Arbeitens in den USA. Spannend: Was können wir eigentlich von den USA lernen? Freue Dich auf inspirierende Einblicke und Aha-Momente. Moderation: Eric Hall – Vorsitzender der BVDW-Fokusgruppe Programmatic Advertising und Gründer Halls of… Gäste: Dr. Mark Grether, Vice President & General Manager bei Uber Advertising Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung – Nicht kommerziell – Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 InternationalLizenz: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Iesha White is a programmatic media expert with over 10 years experience working for companies like Tinuiti, Sony Pictures, Xaxis, PureCars, etc. She walks us through the importance of multicultural targeting in programmatic advertising and how to implement accordingly. We cover some essential discussion points including why a person's identity isn't brand unsafe!!!!!!! (yes, we had to explain why excluding keywords such as “black” or “asian” or “queer” is unacceptable and simply wrong!!!). Another important focus was why consider adding multicultural media and how it can affect the bottom line for brands. Additional resources mentioned in the interview: ● Media Buying Briefing: Agencies expand their DEI goals and offer their expertise to clients ● It's Time to Dispel the Multicultural Media Scale Myth [Source: AdWeek] ● Black Media Is Being Hurt by Agency Blocklists [Source: AdAge] ● Diverse-owned publishers say they're still educating advertisers about their audiences [Source:Marketing Brew]● Combating Corporate ‘Pinkwashing' During Pride Month With Mutual Aid [Source:Inequality.org] About Us: Our mission is to teach historically excluded people how to get started in programmatic media buying and find a dream job. We do so by providing on-demand lessons via the Reach and Frequency™️ program, a dope community with like-minded programmatic experts, and live free and paid group coaching. Hélène Parker has over 10 years of experience in programmatic media buying, servicing agencies and brands in activation, strategy and planning, and leadership. She now dedicates her time to recruiting and training programmatic traders while consulting companies on how to grow and scale a programmatic department. Interested in training or hiring programmatic juniors? Book a Free Call At Helene Parker Consulting, we provide training and media buying. Timestamp: 00:00:25 - www.jobsinadtech.com 00:01:35 - Leave us a review on iTunes 00:02:10 - Meet Iesha White 00:05:45 - How She Landed in Programmatic (super interesting story
Nicolle Pangis is an evangelizer of balance: between linear and digital television advertising, between tech and creative, between quality data and privacy. And balance between work and life. It's the “ands” that drive her – apropos the company name of TV ad sales platform, Ampersand, where she has been CEO for the past five years. Insider Interviews podcast host E.B. Moss spoke with Pangis about a range of topics impacting the ad and marketing industry: from the latest advances in media measurement to the importance of embracing retail media networks. Additionally, this fast-moving leader who previously headed up digital shop 24/7 and GroupM's Xaxis, discussed the ah-ha moments that sparked a commitment to promoting greater work-life balance for both she and her team, and building a more equitable industry. A perfect lead in to this conversation? You'll hear first from More Labs VP of Marketing, Lydia Boychuk, who walks us through how she drives trial and word of mouth -- or "sips to lips" -- for their nutritional supplement start up company focused on well-being. Boychuk discusses how she balances retail and DTC marketing with podcast advertising. Speaking of which, "sleep better," "focus more," and prevent that post-partying head with 20% off any purchase, thanks to Lydia. Use promo code insider20 at morelabs.com! In the ever-evolving world of TV advertising, Ampersand stands out as the biggest company you've never heard of. With the ability to aggregate and activate data on a household level, their potential for creative and technical implementations is vast. But with the industry becoming more fragmented, can they navigate the challenges ahead and continue to deliver relevance without crossing the line into creepiness? Find out in this thought-provoking conversation, which is a must-listen for anyone interested in the evolving landscape of television advertising and marketing in general...and personal well-being! Relevancy of advertising is good; a creepiness factor is bad. - Nicolle Pangis Timestamped summary of this episode: Introduction and how to support Insider Interviews at buymeacoffee.com/mossappeal Insider Interviews podcast host E.B. Moss first speaks briefly with VP Marketing of More Labs, Lydia Boychuk on DTC, Retail Media, and growing awareness for nutritional supplement start-up, More Labs. Then, featured guest Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand, discusses the latest advances in media measurement to the importance of embracing retail media networks including: 00:16:51 - The Challenge of Measuring Television 00:19:20 - The Importance of Linear Television 00:22:02 - The Power of Television in Attribution 00:24:42 - Technical Creative Implementations 00:29:17 - The Future of Advertising & perceptions of AI and Social Media Additionally, Pangis discusses her Journey to C-Suite 00:41:45 - Wellness & Work-Life Balance 00:44:56 - Leadership & Empathy & Purpose 00:51:11 - Ampersand's Company Culture 00:54:21 - Changing How TV is Bought: Pangis' hopes for how to get better at buying television and embrace new ways to do so. Finally, Industry Projections and Pangis' commitment to promoting work-life balance, building a more equitable industry, and her personal growth as CEO. The resources mentioned in this episode are: Ampersand for television media solutions and data insights to make better-informed advertising decisions. Nicolle Pangis - LinkedIn Andrew Ward on "cord cutting": https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/04/19/advertiser-s-guide-the-upfronts-5-trends-changing-how-tv-planned-bought-sold E.B.'s personal recommendation for women at the top who want help finding balance? Check out Coach Marie Tanabe: https://www.marietanabecoaching.com/ Connect with Insider Interviews: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insiderinterviews Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InsiderInterviewsPodcast/
Martine was born in what is now Zaire although at the time of her birth the country's government was different. When the government changed, so did the name of the country. When Martine and her parents immigrated to America Martine did not know that she was undocumented and thus had no status. After the death of her parents by the time she was 15, she was on her own. Only years later did she discover how tenuous her status was in the U.S. She will tell us her story. Because of her life's experience she became interested in DEI, and for her especially, Equity. You will get to hear how she went from being “stateless” to being a U.S. Citizen. During our interview we get to have quite a discussion about DEI including, as you might imagine, some discussions around the topic of disabilities. Martine's viewpoint and observations are quite refreshing and worth hearing. About the Guest: DEI thought leader, TedX speaker, and author, with over 10 years of Learning & Development experience, Martine Kalaw understands the challenges that organizations face in driving DEI in the workplace. Her book, _The ABCs Of Diversity, A Manager's Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the New Workplace _makes DEI accessible to everyone in the workforce, including managers. Through her company, Martine Kalaw Enterprises, Kalaw incorporates DEI into cornerstone manager development programs. Martine works with Human Resources professionals by helping them save time, reduce burden and drive ROI, with their DEI efforts. Martine Kalaw Enterprises also offers consulting and training directly to HR professionals. She's single-handedly built and executed onboarding solutions, management and leadership programs, global mentorship programs and designed and customized training for Macy's, Xaxis, Wheels Up, and Education First. Martine's additionally conducted work on diversity, inclusion, and leadership at companies such as LinkedIn, Tiffany & Co. , Hogan Lovells USA, LLP, Howard Hughes Corporation, and Cornell University. She partners with global professionals to implement learning and workforce development strategies and solutions aligned with race and biases, manager training, and inter/intra department communication. Martine has written for Huffington Post and appeared on syndicated networks like C-span. Martine holds a Master's in Public Administration with a focus on Immigration Law. She spent her early career in the public sector working in budgeting for The New York City Mayor's Office of Management and Budget. How to connect with Martine : Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martinekalaw/?hl=en Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/martinekalaw Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MartineKalawEnterprisesLLC/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/35649968/admin/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQTb6zI5m4jehE-czyT8SvQ About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes Michael Hingson 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us. Michael Hingson 01:20 You are listening to unstoppable mindset where inclusion diversity and the unexpected meet. I'm your host Mike Hingson, and our guest today is Martine Kalaw I made sure I pronounced that right because I even asked her. She is a she Yeah, how are you? Martine Kalaw 01:39 I'm good. Thank you, Michael Michael Hingson 01:41 Martine's, an author, she has written a book entitled The ABCs of diversity. And she'll tell us more about what that's all about. She has been involved in diversity, inclusion and equity for some time, and has a lot of stories to tell. So we'll get right to it, Martine. Thanks very much again for being here. Martine Kalaw 02:04 Thank you so much for having me, Michael to pledge. Michael Hingson 02:07 Tell me a little bit about you growing up sort of how, how you got started and all that kind of stuff. That's always a fun place to start. Martine Kalaw 02:14 Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'll start by I just, you know, I was unpacking some boxes, and I found my college senior thesis. And the topic was looking at, I conducted comparative analysis between Bosnian refugees and Sudanese refugees to see if there was preferential treatment in their assimilation acculturation process in the local community. So that just goes to show where my the background of di where it first came from, where my interest lies. So when I was in college, I was undocumented, I was stateless. And, you know, so part of my interest in the immigrant refugee community was also to see if there was preferential treatment based on race, but based on ethnicity, etc. So that just kind of illustrates, you know, this is dei has always been the, like the framework of a lot of the things I did, so immigration is a subset of Di. But then even within immigration, there are other subsets of diversity, equity and inclusion and categories of diversity. And then I'll just kind of circle back around and you know, and it also highlight that my interest in dei and in the topic of diversity, equity and inclusion really stems from, like I said, Being undocumented, being stateless, and being orphaned and having to immerse myself in various in different communities. Right. So I had to learn to acclimate in different communities, whether I went to a predominantly white prep school in Charlottesville, Virginia, or I lived in the dorms with mostly other international students, or being undocumented and stateless. And being part of that subset, you know, that that community just gave me exposure to different communities, different subsets. And what that did was it allowed me to learn how to to navigate and speak their language or at least understand things and pivot my lens and understand their perspective. And my goal has always been to kind of be a bridge builder, where there's lack of understanding or misunderstanding, what I can do is sort of help to liaise that so that's really where the interest around dei really stemmed from and like I said it continued on to college And and it's resulted in the work that I've been doing for the last five plus years. So Michael Hingson 05:07 one has to ask, what did you conclude in your college paper about preferential treatment for one of the cultures or Martine Kalaw 05:15 the other? There was, so that I actually did conduct field study, which was just absolutely riveting. For anyone who may have known, both of these countries were had gone through civil wars, experienced, were impacted by genocide. So the local upstate community that I was a part of, because I went to Hamilton College, you know, had, you know, in brought in refugees from these two communities, and help them in terms of, you know, I wouldn't say rehabilitation, but settling into the communities. But there was there was bias, right, that the bias existed in, you know, their access to housing, access to ESL English as a second, second language, access for job two jobs. Right. And it had a lot to do there were some racial undertone current tied to that. So absolutely. That's what I understood. And I learned and also really understood the distinction between when we talk about inclusion, what does that mean? does it really mean multiculturalism? Or does that really mean assimilation, US expecting someone else to assimilate to our, you know, our culture, our beliefs, our standards? Michael Hingson 06:42 So when you say there was preferential treatment? And was that in a negative sense that they were not given the treatment that they really needed to have? Or they got too much or what? Martine Kalaw 06:52 Yeah, so the the Sudanese refugees did not get the same adequate treatment as the Bosnian refugees in the local community in upstate New York. Michael Hingson 07:02 And why what why was that? Martine Kalaw 07:05 Well, I mean, one would say that there were a lot of biases related to race. Because when you looked at it, a lot of the Sudanese, the Sudanese refugees, actually there, it could have been raised, but then also religion, perhaps was an undercurrent ethnicity could have been another element of it. But most likely, it was driven by race. Michael Hingson 07:30 primarily black, as opposed to, to white and so on. Martine Kalaw 07:34 Absolutely. Yeah. Michael Hingson 07:37 Now, you mentioned that you are orphaned. And stateless as it were, tell me more about all of that. Martine Kalaw 07:44 Yeah, um, you know, I was born in Zambia, my family's from the Dr. Congo, came to the US when I was very young with my mother. And, you know, she and my stepfather passed away by the time I was 15 years old. And, you know, my stepfather was American born US citizen, my mother was a green card holder. Unfortunately, as she was in the process of securing her US citizenship, she passed away. And then, you know, I fell out of status. And there I was trying to navigate, just securing having a home having place to live. And little did I know that I was without status, and did not learn that until many years later, when I was when there was very little recourse that I could take in terms of establishing or reestablishing my staff and my status. So my so and then at that point is when I learned that I was also stateless. The country that I was born in Zambia didn't recognize me as a citizen, because because I needed to claim citizenship of the country. By the time I was 18, which I would, I didn't know that the country that my birth mother and birth father were, were born in the Dr. Congo was Zaire when my mother and father left. So the the government change the country, the name, everything changed, the sovereignty change. And so there was there I couldn't establish my status there either, and the US didn't want me. So in that, in those regards. I was not a citizen of any country. And there are a myriad of people who are stateless. To this day, I mean, they're talking about over 10 million according to you, UNHCR, there are over 10 million stateless persons in the world. In the US there are over 200,000 plus stateless people. These aren't needed visuals that, you know, don't have any recourse, they generally, they're more likely to be human traffic because there are no laws written for them. And also, according to UNHCR, the statistic is that every 10 minutes, a stateless child is born, right? With climate change all of these different wars that occur, people are displaced. There are certain laws, where you can only obtain citizenship through your paternal connection, various reasons and laws and regulations that can lead someone to becoming stateless. Michael Hingson 10:44 So, have you been able to resolve that in your particular case? Martine Kalaw 10:50 Yes, absolutely. I am a US citizen. And I haven't I have been since 2013. So I'm one of the very fortunate ones. It's very rare for, for the outcome for someone from my background, being stateless, and just my, you know, my background, my history where I come from, to be in this position where I am now running a, you know, a DI business and I have you US citizenship, I have a US passport, and so forth. So that is a privilege in itself, Michael Hingson 11:26 how are you able to deal with it, since there's so many that aren't or can't? What were you able to do? That proves successful? Martine Kalaw 11:35 You know, there isn't a particular you know, one of the reasons I hesitated in the past to speak publicly and give and mentor others was because there isn't a prescription to this. The immigration system is broken in a lot of countries, particularly in the US, and it's not designed for people to succeed, it's designed for people to get stuck in this quagmire and fail, quite honestly. And so there isn't, I cannot tell someone to if they do this XYZ, if they follow the exact process that I follow, it will guarantee the same outcome, because it's, it's almost as random as the roll of the dice the outcome that can occur. So what I do say is that, you know, it's important to maintain your dignity, because this is the space this is a, this is an institution, or an ecosystem where one can lose their dignity. So it's important to maintain your dignity. And one of the ways to maintain your dignity is to remember your source of power, it's very easy to feel powerless, to not feel like you have any, any influence to not feel like you have a country to not feel like you have a home. But to remember that your voice is your source of power, that your intelligence that you can educate yourself about this policies, about the process, you can be your own advocate, even working with an attorney. So these are the things that I you know, I like to remind people, and also allowing others to understand and see and humanize individuals who are undocumented or stateless. And to see them as an asset and to see them as not charity, but as human beings who can actually be a great investment to our society, to our economy. And really, when you think about that, that translates into the work that I do within di right, it's getting, you know, the work around that I do around dei and supporting organizations and companies and especially human resources professionals, is getting them to understand and see the value, the impact that diversity, equity inclusion can have on on the company, on the bottom line on revenue. You know, it's not just the right thing to right thing to do. It's a smart thing to do. And there's an added there's a benefit for everyone, right? It's not charity work, and it shouldn't be seen as charity work where we're just giving back through this RDI efforts. Michael Hingson 14:27 So let me let me make this observation about what what you were saying before, I think that the whole issue of being stateless the whole issue that you faced and that you saw with two different countries that you compared treatments of people about really plays right into the whole area of diversity and inclusion and in reality, I know I and other persons with this disabilities tend to experience that concept a lot. And I liked what you said about keeping your dignity because it is something that we all face. Blind people, for example, when we talk about diversity, blind and other persons with disabilities generally tend to be left out, we're not included. When you talk about diversity, when most people talk about diversity, they'll talk about race and culture, and gender and so on. And you rarely hear disabilities mentioned, which is unfortunate. And it's really difficult to get people to start to talk about that in the conversation. Martine Kalaw 15:38 You know, Michael, I absolutely agree. And I think that when we talk about, you know, blindness or any other types of disabilities, physical disabilities, you know, um, you know, neurodiversity, various other categories of diversity. I think that the overarching challenge, even when it comes to race, is that people don't want to say the wrong thing, right. And so they say nothing at all, which they don't realize is more can be more harmful and hurtful, and can mute people, right? And make them feel invisible. It's like, you know, you hear, I hear when I lead conversations on race relations and leading workshops, people say, Well, I don't want to say the wrong thing. So I'm not going to say anything at all. You know, sometimes CEOs who happened to be white males will say, you know, I don't want to get involved. I don't want to offend anyone, I don't want to say the wrong thing. I'm sure. My opinion doesn't matter in this conversation. And I say quite the opposite. Your opinion does matter. We want everyone's voice in this conversation. And to me, diversity, equity. Inclusion means creating a safe space where people can engage in discussion, can share their stories, and can ask the questions without fearing saying the wrong thing. And the listener, the recipient can also when they they win, when they're asked a question, or someone makes a statement, that doesn't sit right with them, they can first consider that, perhaps the person's intentions are good, they just don't know it's coming from ignorance rather than malice. And that's really not, that hasn't really been established, you know, in this space of di and that's what I think is important for companies to do is to establish that, so that therefore no one, no one's on the sidelines, no one if you're if you have a disability, you're not on the sidelines, because the conversation is solely about race, right? Everyone should be included. It shouldn't be just focusing on you know, sexual orientation, or race or gender or ethnicity, or what have you, or nationality issue, it should include every, every category of, of diversity. Michael Hingson 18:20 And so I'm sorry, go ahead. Martine Kalaw 18:23 No, I was gonna say, I do agree with you. I do agree that when we think diversity, when the conversation around diversity, equity inclusion begins, oftentimes, the focus the central focus are gender, race, and ethnicity. And the others are kind of like, you know, become a byproduct of those three overarching diversity categories. Now, even though Michael Hingson 18:53 even though when we really look at it, the category of persons with disabilities is 25% of all Americans. It's a very large group. And the fact is, it doesn't tend to get included, which is why like, people like me, for example, I tend to define diversity as different from inclusion because if you're truly going to be inclusive than you are or you're not, there's no middle ground. Well, we include some people, you're not inclusive, then we have to change that attitude. And I think you sort of hit on part of it, which is mostly when it comes to disabilities. I think we're dealing with fear. Yeah, we are dealing with people who are different and we tend to be uncomfortable with difference. But I think we also have been so conditioned, especially with physical disabilities, because non physical disabilities are less visible. Nevertheless, they're still part of the process, but we deal with fear. Oh my gosh, I don't want to become like them. I could become like them and I we can't we can't have that, you know, those are the kinds of things that we see all the time. Martine Kalaw 20:05 Wow, I appreciate the honesty in that. Because I think that if we want to get to the root of the conversation on di, we've got to get real. And I do think that that is real. I will say, just to kind of backtrack a little bit. One of the reasons I agree with you that there's a fear, but another reason why the the, the conversation around diversity starts with race and gender, ethnicity, is because it's sometimes the most obvious, right? It's not always so obvious, because sometimes our perception of somebody's race or gender is not actually what how they self identify, however, it's, it has their more physical attributes that we can pinpoint that tie back to race, gender, ethnicity, right. And so that is the reason I believe that's one of the reasons why that's a prevalent, you know, you know, that's the prevalent prevalent conversation, but also, because there there is a gap, right? I mean, we know, and we we can acknowledge that, you know, race, race relations, is has been an issue in our country for hundreds of years, and it hasn't really changed. And it's showing up and structural racism in you know, different spaces in our society. So that's one of the reasons right. But at the same time, I also agree with you that diversity in the realm of disability or abled onus has been overlooked. And I do agree that there are two elements of fear. One is fear of saying the wrong thing. And offending someone, right. I don't want to say, am I using the right term? Right? Because di like the way that it's been presented in the last couple of years, it's like, it puts people on guard where they feel like they have to be politically correct. They have to say the right thing. They don't know what to say. So they don't want to say anything at all right. That's why my book is called the ABCs. of diversity, because we, we make it too complicated. So that's one of the reasons one fear is they people don't want to say the wrong thing. They don't want to they think back, right, we all think back, many of us can think back to when we were children, if we saw someone in a wheelchair, we pointed our parents would say don't do that, like, like, the acknowledgement of the person in the wheelchair was a bad thing. There was nothing wrong with acknowledging that someone's in a wheelchair, like, that's actually good. But our parents didn't want to, you know, would would, you know, try to, like, suppress us because they didn't want us to offend the person. So we carry that into our adult life. And you don't want to say the wrong thing. But in addition to that, what you're saying I agree with, is there is that fear of, well, if I focus on this thing, or this person, or this aspect of this person, then it makes it more real, and then it could be me, right. And I think that's very honest. And I haven't heard that before. But I think if we want to be really honest with ourselves, that is part of the that's the truth. Michael Hingson 23:32 The kind of fear that I think is also typified by a lot of what you're saying is, let's look at blindness, for example. And this started with teachers with educators and a lot of the professionals in the field of if you will work for the blind, and with the blind, you generally hear people say blind or visually impaired. And there are two problems with it visually. I don't think so we don't look different because we're blind. So visually, is a problem. Vision Impaired is a little bit more of an acceptable term, but the reality is, then you get to impaired. Why do we have to be viewed as less than other people, which is, deaf people have realized this because they would shoot you if you said deaf or hard of hearing or deaf or hearing impaired. They prefer deaf or hard of hearing. And I think that it is more appropriate to say blind or low vision, but get the impaired out because that is a buzzword that creates fear right off the bat. Martine Kalaw 24:39 And my question is, thank you for sharing my question, Michael is, is there a space for people to make those mistakes and learn because I think that's part of the fear, right? The fear is, I don't know, what's the right terminology. And it's similar to someone asking me or not knowing whether they can refer to me as Black or African American. So then they just try to avoid eye color. And it's I'm okay with them saying, I'm not really sure what the right terminology is. And I can say, You know what? I'm not either, because someone who looks like me standing next to me the same skin tone as me might say, they're, they're African American. And I say, I'm black. So it's okay to ask. And I'm okay with someone making that mistake, because I know that I expect everyone to know. And I think so that's where we got to. That's, that's the crux of the challenge that we have run on di is just that example itself. I did not know that saying visually impaired is not appropriate. Right? Well, no. Michael Hingson 25:46 And let me let me be real clear. Most people still say that, including blind people, I'm saying, think about the concepts of visually impaired visually, visually, what does that have to do with it? Because I don't look different because I'm blind. Impaired. That means that I'm generally in the fear world considered less, because I'm not impaired, but you're visually impaired. And so the issue is, I think blind people are still learning that words matter. So to answer your question, yes, there is always space. And some people might be offended, just like there are people of different races, who may be offended if you call them one thing or another. But there certainly should be space to deal with it. I was in a martine 26:36 position to educate and to learn. Sure, Michael Hingson 26:38 absolutely. And that is really what it's all about. I was in a shopping mall, or actually at a store and an IKEA store. And this young man came up to me and he said, I'm sorry. And I said, Why are you sorry? And he said, I'm sorry, you can't see. And my immediate reaction, and I said it was well, I'm really sorry that you can Why are you sorry? Well, you can't see. I love that. Yeah, yeah. And I said, Look, I say really doesn't have anything to do with it. And by that time, his mother came over and dragged him away, which goes back to what you said before, so we didn't get to continue the discussion. But the reality is, I think on all sides, we need to recognize that words matter. And we do need to change and have the conversation. So it is something that is extremely important to do, because the reality is I'm not impaired. If we want to deal with it that way, then you are blind impaired. And I'm just as correct to say that, as you are saying that I'm vision are visually or sight impaired. And and both of those are not the way we should really deal with it. Martine Kalaw 27:50 Yeah, and I, I, you know, something you said, around words matter. I was actually doing work with a client a few maybe last year, and, you know, with this company, and basically helping them to define their, what their di corporate statement was, you know, their, yeah, their philosophy. And as I was interviewing and speaking to different leaders, what I learned one of them said, you know, we should just wipe away the words that we're using, like the, all this terminology that we use, and just come up with our own. And that's really, you know, what, what I'm hearing you say, I feel like, in a space of Dei, in the history in the last couple of years, we're just collecting a bunch of lingo for hearing right? In the media, coming from the academic space, and then we we don't really know what it means. And we just use it because it sounds good, it sounds right. Whereas what we can do, what what probably would make more sense, is engage in discussion with people but asking permission, right? It's one thing to just start to, you know, start asking someone to explain, you know, someone who's blind, whether they prefer to be you know, called referred to as visually impaired or blind or what have you, rather than first asking, you know, is it okay for me to ask them ask you some more questions right about your idea? And then if the person says yes, then you can engage in that discussion. And that's where the learning happens, right? And one your your interpretation, your feelings, your how you want to self identify might look different from somebody else who also happens to be blind, right? And that's okay, too. But we can't learn. We can't we can never navigate that until we start to undo this. These terminologies that we we learned because we were so caught up in being politically correct and Using the right jargon, but in the end, we're really not right. Like, when we talk about it's interesting Latin X, you know, or Latina x is, you know, is a common terminology now that is used for individuals who are from, you know, our Latin American or Hispanic, but I'm learning that it's generational, right? Someone who is in their 60s might not respond to being to being called Latinx, who's from the Dominican Republic, they might just say, hey, refer to me as Dominican or no, I'm I'm Latina, or Latino. So I think it's just about getting in a space where we can have discussion, ask questions, and not be immediately offended, because we know that your intentions are to learn, and something else that you said around inclusion, you said something around, like what real, real inclusion doesn't necessarily what real inclusion looks like. And I actually, you know, as I mentioned earlier, in my my, my senior thesis in college, what I realized is that, you know, inclusion has different definitions. So you almost have to ask people, What do you mean by inclusion, right? Because inclusion can mean, hey, let's all come as we are, and be in this space together. And we're all equal in this space, or inclusion can look like, Come and join us and be part of us. So become like us. And that's more of like a simulation acculturation, right. And so when organizations when clients say, we really want to foster inclusion, the next best question that I ask is, what does that mean? What do you mean by inclusion? Tell me what that actually looks like. Michael Hingson 31:58 Yeah, but if we look at the definitions that existed, that exists today, there are definitions of inclusion. And so I still submit that in reality in the long run, if we don't force people to adhere to a definition of inclusion, that doesn't leave anyone out, then we're doing a disservice that we've already done that with diversity. And diversity doesn't really necessarily allow for inclusion, it recognizes difference. But we don't recognize all differences as equal anyway. But when you get to the concept of inclusion, you are either going to recognize that in some way. All of us are part of the same world, or you're not truly inclusive. And that's part of what we, we do need to deal with. And so, for example, when you talk about companies that are making statements and creating diversity and inclusion statements, I think one of the things that the industry has to start doing more of is making sure that disabilities are included in the statements because if we don't start pushing the conversation, we're not going to ever really be able to have the conversation because we will continue to be left out. attitude about blindness, for example, people constantly say to me, or I read when people write about me, leaving the World Trade Center, Michael Hinkson, was led down the stairs by his guide, dog Roselle, which is absolutely the worst and most atrocious thing people can say, because it implies I don't really have anything to do with the process. And Guide Dogs don't guide or lead they guide. It's my job to give the dog directions command by command and the dog's job to make sure that we walk safely, but people don't get that. And we need to start creating conversations in general, that hopefully will lead people to an idea that maybe our view is not really what it ought to be. Martine Kalaw 34:18 Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And I think it does, partly, it needs to also I mean, inclusion is one element, but diversity is another. And diversity is about representation. And if you think about, you know, a lot of organizations and companies, they they have not established a space where they're inviting more individuals who have disabilities, sometimes the challenge right they there there needs to be an opportunity to, to, to to Have a broader reach, right? And find candidates who can work. First of all, they've got to create positions and jobs where someone with a particular disability can actually, you know, be able to fully, you know, do the job and has the equipment and, you know, all of that do the job. But then, in addition to that, we've got to have a broader reach, right? Organizations have not really in general, done a lot of that enough of that yet. So therefore, right? That voice is it reinforced in the conversation around inclusion in need. Michael Hingson 35:42 And hence, we have the unemployment rate among persons with disabilities in this country today, being between 65 and 70%. And it's not because people who happen to have a disability can't do the job. It's the others. Martine Kalaw 35:58 Yeah, others think you can't, and they're not looking, they're not searching. Their pools are so limited, right? Their pools are limited, the pools are out there. But companies aren't reaching far, far enough, far out enough or far enough out to identify those candidates. And the thing about it that I always emphasize is that, you know, it's not, you know, when you're searching and you're broadening your reach, it's not what you're reducing, or watering down the quality, the qualifications of the applicant, because the applicant is going to apply in the same pool, as, you know, other applicants, the ones that you the pool that you typically look at. So for example, if you start to broaden your reach, and you happen to have a candidate, you know, who is blind and can do the job, and they apply for the position and they're qualified, and they're competing with other candidates that are not blind, they get the position of what difference does it make, right? Because Michael Hingson 37:05 that's not usually what happens. Of course, what happens is in a job interview, the first question to the SAS is, how are you even going to get to work, it doesn't matter that we got there to for the interview. And it doesn't matter what the resume says. And most all of us can tell you horror stories about how recruiters and others if teach have have treated us when we get to an interview. And for the most part, people tend to not even say in advance that they're blind, of course, it's a double edged sword. Because if you don't say you're blind, and you get the interview, then the defenses go up when you get there. But if you do, say you're blind before the interview, it's a it's a difficult way to it's difficult process to deal with. But there's a way to deal with to address that. But if you do say you're blind, you won't generally even get a letter back acknowledging that you send in a resume. And so that's why I'm saying I think that the DEI industry, the professionals in the industry, need to start to really help push the conversation, because it's not that we're not trying. But it's it's that we're, we're being ignored. You know, we've got where this is National Disability Awareness Month, and national blindness Employment Awareness Month, October 15, is National white cane day, none of that gets mentioned in the media. None of that gets mentioned in the general conversation, and that's what we really need to change. So, you know, those are those are things that that do have to be addressed. But I know your time is short. Tell me about your books. You said, You we talked about one, but tell me about your books. Yeah, absolutely. Martine Kalaw 38:53 I mean, I, you know, Michael, we should absolutely circle back because this is something that, you know, I I definitely agree that dei practitioners in house out, out, you know, those who have their own businesses and work alongside companies, we can do more we can are, that's, that's one of the things we can do. And I'd love to learn about more organizations that, you know, that, you know, I can connect with, so that, you know, I can, you know, if I'm working with a company and they're looking to recruit more applicants, they're looking for interns, they're looking, right, I can redirect them to an organization where they can find applicants who are from an underrepresented group, you know, one disability, a particular disability. So, I do think that there's more effort that we can all do. And so I appreciate you sharing that. And then I so back to, you know, to your question, my book, my first book is my it's called a legal On us a stateless woman's quest for citizenship. And that was my memoir, which just gives you it's kind of a guide on how I went from where I was as an undocumented stateless person to where I am today and how I navigated through broken immigration system. And the second book, which is also available on Amazon, and is also a an audio book is The ABCs of diversity of managers guide to diversity, equity and inclusion in the new workplace. So it's really meant to read to to be like a primer on diversity, breaking it down, and how managers specifically can incorporate this into their everyday practices. So when we think about foundational Manager Development, diversity falls and reinforces that because managers are involved in hiring and recruiting in promotions and compensation, all of those elements of foundational Manager Development have an element of diversity, equity and inclusion within them. And so this book becomes a primer. Each chapter has an application that way you can, you know, self reflect and then a piece where you can apply it to your, to your, to your everyday job, and to your direct reports. And so, I encourage everyone to, you know, tune in, get a copy on Amazon and also, I have a masterclass every month, you can go on my website, Martinekalaw.com, and sign up. It's a complimentary masterclass on Dei, its main mainly focused on it's targeted to human resources professionals who are trying to implement DEI effectively in your organization's so they can join in for an hour, I will give them the top seven things that they can do in the next 90 days to really move dei forward. The next section session is October 18. And then there's another one November and then so forth. Michael Hingson 42:10 Spell your your name and the website. Again, you're not spell it all out if you would. Martine Kalaw 42:17 Yes, absolutely. It's Martine M A R T I N E K A L A W.com. So www dot Martinekalaw.com. And when you go there, you'll be able to find a link to both of my books, as well as the masterclass. Michael Hingson 42:39 Well, I hope people will reach out. I think this is a fascinating discussion, and I think we should continue it. I think what I believe it will be great to do that. And I think we between us have a lot to offer people. I'd love to hear how you who are listening to this feel about this, please shoot us an email, you can reach me Michaelhi at accessibe A C C E S S I B E.com. And you can go to our podcast page if you're getting this elsewhere, Michaelhingson.com/podcast. But either way, we hope you'll give this a five star rating when you review it. And I hope that you will email Martine and me with your thoughts. We'd love to hear what you think. And maybe you'd like to come on the podcast and talk about it. So Martine again. Thanks very much. I really appreciate your time and the chance to be here. Martine Kalaw 43:29 Thank you, Michael. It's been a pleasure. Michael Hingson 43:36 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com. accessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.
In the Sensei's Corner this week, we welcome Nish Desai, director of technology and partnership with Xaxis. Founded in 2011, Xaxis is a programmatic media company that empowers its clients to reach out to their customers through different touchpoints. Today's episode was recorded just short of a year ago, and we discussed when Google first announced third-party cookies deprecation and the effects they can have on ad spending. Although Browser IDs will not be a tangible solution based on Google's latest announcement (in 2021), the conversation with Nish really brought up some historical explanation on Cookie targeting and additional resource to consider (in 2021) Nish and I recorded an updated episode that will be published next with newer information based on the 1Q 2021. Timestamp: 00:00:28 - Who is Nish Desai 00:03:06 - The challenges to face with Google's announcement 00:07:51 - Browser-based ID solutions 00:10:33 - How realistic is the browser-based ID solution 00:15:06 - The effect of this change on Nish's team's strategy 00:19:08 - Changes with traders 00:21:10 - An experience wherein he saw DEI being done wrong 00:23:00 - Fun facts about Nish Desai 00:25:41 - The latest book he read 00:26:37 - Advice for new people in the industry Guest Information: Seraj Bharwani LinkedIn Meet Our Team: Hélène Parker - Chief Programmatic Coach Programmatic Meet Up | Website | LinkedIn | Twitter Programmatic Digest - Youtube | LinkedIn | Instagram The Reach & Frequency Course - Listeners get a 10% discount with code podcast10 Alexa Gabrielle Ramos - Podcast Editor Instagram | Website | LinkedIn S and S Creative Media - Podcast and Media Manager Instagram | Website | LinkedIn
The Godmother of the Metaverse, Cathy Hackl (Founder and Chief Metaverse Officer at Journey) is our esteemed guest for our season finale hosted by Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) and Dale Imerman (Group Director Metaverse and Innovation at WPP). Cathy encourages us to move on from trying to define the metaverse and instead adopt a builder mentality and set out to build it. We now have a great opportunity for all of us to lead and put on our builder mindset to create the future. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse #metaverse #worldbuilding Journey Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) is joined by Krystal Olivieri (Global Chief Innovation Officer at GroupM and Choreograph) to look at the future of media in Web3. Through the lens of advertising and data, Krystal shares her thoughts about where the opportunities are in the future, what might be different, and what challenges may remain working towards the "Metaverse for Good". Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
Innovation and enthusiasm around the metaverse and web 3 is moving at an incredible pace. Are teams paying attention to matters of ethics, risk and governance which may become obstacles to success? Vicky Brown (General Counsel Commercial & Chief Privacy Officer at WPP) is Sara Robertson's (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) guest on this episode where Vicky shares her thoughts on how to approach an engagement the right way with careful thought around balancing the desire for innovation with legal guardrails. The law is not black and white, there is a lot of grey. Vicky wants you to know that lawyers are your friends and by leveraging first principles and common sense they can help educate teams and clients with the practical steps towards ensuring a successful engagement. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
There is a lot of discussion lately about the metaverse, but does it really exist? Dale Imerman (Group Director Metaverse and Innovation at WPP) is Sara Robertson's (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) guest on this episode where he shares the origin of the term, the excitement around the potential, and what needs to be in place to make the metaverse a reality. This discussion puts the listener into the metaverse, explores the possibilities, the social implications, and how it can change people's lives, including an interesting overview of the virtuality continuum. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball The Virtuality Continuum - Interaction Design Foundation Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse #wpp Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
Virtual Worlds have a rich gaming heritage. In this episode Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) and Andy Hood (VP Emerging Technologies at WPP) discuss the collision taking place between the gaming heritage of virtual worlds and the advent of new web 3 capabilities. Also, Sara muses about the dystopian thought of living our lives in a virtual world at some point in the future. It may not be too far fetched to think this and Andy ponders everything that needs to happen to make this dream a reality. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
In this episode Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) chats with Virtual Reality (VR) expert Austin Mace (Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Subvrsive) about the hardware and design challenges facing VR along the road to becoming an everyday device. They talk about what use cases are appropriate for using VR and to think of it as an enhancement, not as a replacement for real world experiences. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse Getting started with Meta Quest 2 (Oculus) Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
Augmented Reality industry expert Luke Hurd (Director of Experience Design at VMLY&R) is Sara Robertson's (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) guest in this episode where he provides a definition and overview of augmented reality including the delineation between AR and VR (virtual reality). Many of us might have already been exposed to augmented reality and may not have known it! AR is more a part of our lives than we know and marketers are beginning to explore ways to take advantage of this technology. Luke shares his thoughts on how brands can embrace AR as well as where the pitfalls are and what it takes to deliver an awesome AR designed experience. ** There's good stuff in this podcast for developers too! Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse Getting Started with Spark AR Snap AR Learning Resources for AR Creators and Developers Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
In this episode we turn things on it's head! Di Mayze (Global Head of Data and AI at WPP) takes on the role of "super guest" and poses a series of tough questions about blockchains to our host, Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis). This discussion provides the listener a good foundational understanding of blockchains covering topics ranging from what is blockchain technology, where did it come from and where it is going, why you should care, what it enables, and the disruptive potential it presents in it's role enabling Web 3 experiences and more. It even includes a good joke to bring to your next cocktail party as a bonus! Di makes learning fun and together with Sara manages to turn a potentially complex and daunting subject into something that is interesting and understandable. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #stayclassymetaverse Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin Whitepaper - a worthwhile read Sara mentions this book: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephensen Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
Consumers' shopping behaviors and habits have rapidly evolved, and the change has accelerated in recent years. The retail paradigm is evolving too, and with it ecommerce and relevant media platforms and strategies. In episode 9, Brittny Schoeneman, Director of U.S. Programmatic Commerce Solutions at Xaxis, interviews Michael Schuh, VP for Media Strategy at Kroger Precision Marketing, about how a large retail company is responding to and leading the trends.In This Episode, We DiscussWhat's changed in consumer behavior, including results of a new research report on changes in shopping behaviors and habits, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. How retail and advertising platforms are merging into a holistic retail media approach.How first-party data from retail media companies is affecting media strategies and leading to more effective outcomes.How search is changing, from search engines to retail sites.The future for retail media.LEARN MORE, REACH OUT & FOLLOW UP:“The Retail Paradigm: The Evolution of Consumer Shopping” (research report Part 1)"The Retail Paradigm:How brands are investing in the new era of shopping" (research report Part 2)Kroger Precision MarketingXaxis on TwitterAbout the HostBrittny Schoeneman is the Director of Programmatic Commerce Solutions in the U.S. for Xaxis and has been a part of the GroupM family for the past 6+ years, servicing a number of clients' programmatic strategies and investments. Brittny is the dedicated subject matter expert for commerce within the organization, working collaboratively with GroupM agencies, clients and leadership teams to identify growth opportunities and further develop Xaxis' retail media product solutions. About the GuestAs Vice President of Media Strategy, Michael Schuh and his team develop retail media products across Kroger's onsite and off-site channels to drive measurable business impact for advertisers. His responsibilities include leading the overall media product strategy including technical, content, commercial and partnership considerations.Kroger digital properties and offsite partnerships are evolving rapidly, set the pace for retail media, and present a tremendous opportunity for brands to engage with digitally active customers at the point of purchase. Michael is accountable for ensuring Kroger, consumer packaged goods companies and media agencies have a robust, high-impact product mix to execute advertising plans. Prior to his current role, Michael spent three years working closely with global retailers at dunnhumby as a product manager across a suite of pricing and promotions software. Prior to 84.51°/dunnhumby, Michael spent two years at Booz Allen Hamilton as a senior consultant, working with public sector agencies to streamline their data and reporting assets. Michael has a BS in systems engineering from the University of Virginia. = = = = In every episode, our “People of Programmatic” podcast introduces you to the achievers who bring programmatic advertising to life. Find us on Twitter (@xaxistweets) and LinkedIn, or feel free to contact us through our website.
Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) is joined by Matthew Jacobson (EVP, Marketing and Growth at WPP) for a discussion about the cultural revolution surrounding NFT's, suggestions for how to get engaged in the NFT experience, and where to go to stay current about the NFT space. *** This podcast is for educational purposes. The discussion in this podcast and the links provided below are not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, financial advice, and should not be considered as a substitute for financial advice from a professional. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #StayClassyMetaverse Keith Grossman's twitter: https://twitter.com/keithgrossman You can sign up here for the JUMP DAO: https://jumpcommunity.xyz/ Season 1, Episode 2 Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
Our host, Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) and this episode's guest, James Harris (Global Media Strategy Director at WPP) provide the “need to know” about cryptocurrency including James' wonderful tale of crypto titled Gold, Greed, and Good. *** This podcast is for educational purposes. The discussion in this podcast and the links provided below are not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, financial advice, and should not be considered as a substitute for financial advice from a professional. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. #StayClassyMetaverse Here is a link to the book "Gold, Greed, and Good" by James Harris on Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gold-greed-good-cryptocurrency-revolution/dp/B09PHL2GYM Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company.
Welcome to WPP's Metaverse and More Academy Podcast! In this trailer Sara Robertson (Global VP, Disruption at Xaxis) chats with Andy Hood (VP Emerging Technologies at WPP) about the goals and expectations for the podcast series. Their casual and fun discussion provides an outline of the series and an introduction of some new terminology such as #Meetverse. Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy this episode. Please “Share” with others and “Follow” us to stay abreast of each new episode. Click here for more information about WPP, the creative transformation company. #StayClassyMetaverse
Brian ignited his digital media rocket at 24/7 in the early 00s and rose to be CEO of WPP's Xaxis and GroupM before leaving to lead what became ATT's Xandr division from 2017-2020More
Brian ignited his digital media rocket at 24/7 in the early 00s and rose to be CEO of WPP's Xaxis and GroupM before leaving to lead what became ATT's Xandr division from 2017-2020More
Strategy & Leadership Podcast 164: Martine Kalaw is a DEI consultant, trainer & author. Previously, Martine held Training & Development roles in the corporate world with companies like Macy's, Xaxis, & Walmart. On this episode of the Strategy & Leadership Podcast, Martine joins us to discuss management development with a DEI lens, viewing DEI as a business imperative, developing long term change, & more. #DEI #ManagementDevelopment #DEITraining Visit Martine's website to learn more about her work & sign up for her May 11 DEI masterclass: https://martinekalaw.com/ Check out Martine's book, ABCs of Diversity: A Manager's Guide To Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In The New Workplace: https://martinekalaw.com/book/ // Learn more about strategic planning & implementation: ► Subscribe so you never miss a video: www.youtube.com/channel/UCOHLNRrp…ub_confirmation=1 ► Get free workbook to guide you along the process: www.smestrategy.net/strategic-plann…mplate-workbook ► Learn how to successfully lead your next strategic planning process: www.smestrategy.net/strategic-plann…ng-steps-course // More strategic planning resources: ► Join our free community: strategy-and-leadership.mn.co/ ► Are you looking for someone to facilitate your strategic planning process? www.smestrategy.net/strategic-plann…ator-consultant ► Want software to track your strategic plan. Get a 90-day free trial of Cascade Strategy: www.smestrategy.net/cascade // Connect with us: Blog ► www.smestrategy.net/blog Strategy & Leadership Podcast ►www.smestrategy.net/podcast Alignment Book ► www.smestrategy.net/alignment-book Contact us ►www.smestrategy.net/contact Subscribe on YouTube ► www.youtube.com/channel/UCOHLNRrp…ub_confirmation=1 // ABOUT SME STRATEGY CONSULTING: SME Strategy is a management consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations develop and implement their strategic plans. We work with teams to facilitate conversations about strategic direction and business strategy so that our clients can focus their energy on what will move them forward faster. Based out of Vancouver, BC, we've worked with organizations all over North American and beyond in various industries including nonprofits, universities & government organizations. For more information on working with a facilitator for your next strategy session: www.smestrategy.net/strategic-plann…ator-consultant
Martine Kalaw is the CEO and president ofhttps://martinekalaw.com/ ( Martine Kalaw Enterprises, LLC); a consultancy focused on learning & development, human resources, and diversity, equity & inclusion for corporations, organizations, and nonprofits. She holds a Master's in Public Administration focusing on immigration law from Syracuse University's Maxwell School and has authored two books, https://amzn.to/3rDp3Ng (Illegal Among Us: A Stateless Woman's Quest for Citizenship) and https://amzn.to/3gRXVUV (The ABCs of Diversity: A Managers Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.) As an organizational development expert, Martine has single-handedly built and executed onboarding solutions, management and leadership programs, global mentorship programs consisting of 400+ employees, and designed and customized training for Macy's, Xaxis, Wheels Up, and Education First. Martine transforms the implicit biases of working professionals and leads “heavy” conversations related to race and legal status. She specifically focuses on unconscious beliefs towards blacks and immigrants through workshops and seminars while also equipping companies with training to up-skill new managers. Martine partners with global professionals to implement learning and workforce development strategies and solutions incorporating race and biases, manager training, and inter/intra department communication. Her soft skills curriculum is popular with late-stage startups experiencing pangs due to a merger, an acquisition, exponential growth, or a sudden reduction in business. A passionate DE&I consultant, Martine has written for publications like Huffington Post and has delivered a https://www.ted.com/talks/martine_kalaw_the_value_of_investing_versus_helping (TEDx talk )on immigration policies as they relate to equity and inclusion. She's also appeared on C-span. Outside of her work, Martine contributes thought leadership around immigration reform. She's spoken at Senator McCain's 2006 Town Hall Rally on Immigration and the U.S. House of Representative's Judiciary Subcommittee's 2007 hearing on Immigration Reform. Her story has appeared in USA Today, Metro New York, and The New York Sun. Martine is also the founder and executive director of Stateless and Dreamers Foundation (SAD), which she created after her seven-year battle with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which eventually led to her U.S. citizenship. SAD provides guidance and practical tools that stateless persons and undocumented immigrants can use to navigate between lawyers and the courts more effectively. The A World of Difference Podcast is brought to you in partnership with https://www.missioalliance.org/ (Missio Alliance). Stay In Touch: Connect on Facebook and Instagram with thoughts, questions, and feedback. Rate, review and share this podcast with anyone that would love to listen. Find Us Online: https://www.instagram.com/aworldof.difference/ (@aworldof.difference) on Instagram and https://www.facebook.com/A-World-of-Difference-613933132591673/ (A World of Difference) on Facebook, on Twitter at https://twitter.com/loriadbr (@loriadbr) & on Clubhouse https://www.joinclubhouse.com/@loriadbr (@loriadbr).https://linktr.ee/aworldofdifference (https://linktr.ee/aworldofdifference) or http://loriadamsbrown.com/ (loriadamsbrown.com)Interested in one-on-one or group coaching on how to live a life that makes a difference? Check out: https://www.loriadamsbrown.com/coaching (https://www.loriadamsbrown.com/coaching) Did you know that podcasts are a great way to grow your personal and business brand voice? Go to https://kitcaster.com/difference/ (https://kitcaster.com/difference/) to apply for a special offer for friends of this podcast. Here's the secret, we all want to feel connected to brands we buy from. What better way to humanize a brand than through sharing your story on a podcast.
Martine Kalaw is the CEO and president of Martine Kalaw Enterprises, LLC; a consultancy focused on learning & development, human resources, and diversity, equity & inclusion for corporations, organizations, and nonprofits. She holds a Master's in Public Administration focusing on immigration law from Syracuse University's Maxwell School and has authored two books, Illegal Among Us: A Stateless Woman's Quest for Citizenship and The ABCs of Diversity: A Managers Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. As an organizational development expert, Martine has single-handedly built and executed onboarding solutions, management and leadership programs, global mentorship programs consisting of 400+ employees, and designed and customized training for Macy's, Xaxis, Wheels Up, and Education First. Martine transforms the implicit biases of working professionals and leads “heavy” conversations related to race and legal status. She specifically focuses on unconscious beliefs towards blacks and immigrants through workshops and seminars while also equipping companies with training to up-skill new managers. Martine partners with global professionals to implement learning and workforce development strategies and solutions incorporating race and biases, manager training, and inter/intra department communication. Her soft skills curriculum is popular with late-stage startups experiencing pangs due to a merger, an acquisition, exponential growth, or a sudden reduction in business.A passionate DE&I consultant, Martine has written for publications like Huffington Post and has delivered a TEDx talk on immigration policies as they relate to equity and inclusion. She's also appeared on C-span.Outside of her work, Martine contributes thought leadership around immigration reform. She's spoken at Senator McCain's 2006 Town Hall Rally on Immigration and the U.S. House of Representative's Judiciary Subcommittee's 2007 hearing on Immigration Reform. Her story has appeared in USA Today, Metro New York, and The New York Sun. Martine is also the founder and executive director of Stateless and Dreamers Foundation (SAD), which she created after her seven-year battle with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which eventually led to her U.S. citizenship. SAD provides guidance and practical tools that stateless persons and undocumented immigrants can use to navigate between lawyers and the courts more effectively.The A World of Difference Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Missio Alliance.Stay In Touch: Connect on Facebook and Instagram with thoughts, questions, and feedback. Rate, review and share this podcast with anyone that would love to listen. Find Us Online: @aworldof.difference on Instagram and A World of Difference on Facebook, on Twitter at @loriadbr & on Clubhouse @loriadbr.https://linktr.ee/aworldofdifference or loriadamsbrown.comInterested in one-on-one or group coaching on how to live a life that makes a difference? Check out: https://www.loriadamsbrown.com/coachingDid you know that podcasts are a great way to grow your personal and business brand voice?Go to https://kitcaster.com/difference/ to apply for a special offer for friends of this podcast.Here's the secret, we all want to feel connected to brands we buy from. What better way to humanize a brand than through sharing your story on a podcast.Kitcaster is a podcast booking agency that specializes in developing real human connections through podcast appearances.If you are an expert in your field, have a unique story to share, or an interesting point of view-- it's time to explore the world of podcasting with Kitcaster.You can expect a completely customized concierge service from our staff of communication experts. Kitcaster is your secret weapon in podcasting for business. Your audience is waiting to hear from you.Mentioned in this episode:Join Difference MakersJoin us in our membership community for exclusive content for only $5/month at https://www.patreon.com/aworldofdifference. We go deeper with each guest, and it makes such a difference.PatreonDo you want to go deeper?Join us in Difference Makers, a community where we watch and discuss exclusive content that truly makes a difference. Give us $5 a month (the price of a latte), and join in on the conversation with our host Lori and others who want to make a difference. We'd love to have you join us!PatreonThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Martine Kalaw is the CEO and president of Martine Kalaw Enterprises, LLC; a consultancy focused on learning & development, human resources, and diversity, equity & inclusion for corporations, organizations, and nonprofits. She holds a Master's in Public Administration focusing on immigration law from Syracuse University's Maxwell School and has authored two books, Illegal Among Us: A Stateless Woman's Quest for Citizenship and The ABCs of Diversity: A Managers Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. As an organizational development expert, Martine has single-handedly built and executed onboarding solutions, management and leadership programs, global mentorship programs consisting of 400+ employees, and designed and customized training for Macy's, Xaxis, Wheels Up, and Education First. Martine transforms the implicit biases of working professionals and leads “heavy” conversations related to race and legal status. She specifically focuses on unconscious beliefs towards blacks and immigrants through workshops and seminars while also equipping companies with training to up-skill new managers. Martine partners with global professionals to implement learning and workforce development strategies and solutions incorporating race and biases, manager training, and inter/intra department communication. Her soft skills curriculum is popular with late-stage startups experiencing pangs due to a merger, an acquisition, exponential growth, or a sudden reduction in business.A passionate DE&I consultant, Martine has written for publications like Huffington Post and has delivered a TEDx talk on immigration policies as they relate to equity and inclusion. She's also appeared on C-span.Outside of her work, Martine contributes thought leadership around immigration reform. She's spoken at Senator McCain's 2006 Town Hall Rally on Immigration and the U.S. House of Representative's Judiciary Subcommittee's 2007 hearing on Immigration Reform. Her story has appeared in USA Today, Metro New York, and The New York Sun. Martine is also the founder and executive director of Stateless and Dreamers Foundation (SAD), which she created after her seven-year battle with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which eventually led to her U.S. citizenship. SAD provides guidance and practical tools that stateless persons and undocumented immigrants can use to navigate between lawyers and the courts more effectively.The A World of Difference Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Missio Alliance.Stay In Touch: Connect on Facebook and Instagram with thoughts, questions, and feedback. Rate, review and share this podcast with anyone that would love to listen. Find Us Online: @aworldof.difference on Instagram and A World of Difference on Facebook, on Twitter at @loriadbr & on Clubhouse @loriadbr.https://linktr.ee/aworldofdifference or loriadamsbrown.comInterested in one-on-one or group coaching on how to live a life that makes a difference? Check out: https://www.loriadamsbrown.com/coachingDid you know that podcasts are a great way to grow your personal and business brand voice?Go to https://kitcaster.com/difference/ to apply for a special offer for friends of this podcast.Here's the secret, we all want to feel connected to brands we buy from. What better way to humanize a brand than through sharing your story on a podcast.Kitcaster is a podcast booking agency that specializes in developing real human connections through podcast appearances.If you are an expert in your field, have a unique story to share, or an interesting point of view-- it's time to explore the world of podcasting with Kitcaster.You can expect a completely customized concierge service from our staff of communication experts. Kitcaster is your secret weapon in podcasting for business. Your audience is waiting to hear from you.Mentioned in this episode:Join Difference MakersJoin us in our membership community for exclusive content for only $5/month at https://www.patreon.com/aworldofdifference. We go deeper with each guest, and it makes such a difference.PatreonDo you want to go deeper?Join us in Difference Makers, a community where we watch and discuss exclusive content that truly makes a difference. Give us $5 a month (the price of a latte), and join in on the conversation with our host Lori and others who want to make a difference. We'd love to have you join us!PatreonThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Martine Kalaw is the CEO and president ofhttps://martinekalaw.com/ ( Martine Kalaw Enterprises, LLC); a consultancy focused on learning & development, human resources, and diversity, equity & inclusion for corporations, organizations, and nonprofits. She holds a Master's in Public Administration focusing on immigration law from Syracuse University's Maxwell School and has authored two books, https://amzn.to/3rDp3Ng (Illegal Among Us: A Stateless Woman's Quest for Citizenship) and https://amzn.to/3gRXVUV (The ABCs of Diversity: A Managers Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.) As an organizational development expert, Martine has single-handedly built and executed onboarding solutions, management and leadership programs, global mentorship programs consisting of 400+ employees, and designed and customized training for Macy's, Xaxis, Wheels Up, and Education First. Martine transforms the implicit biases of working professionals and leads “heavy” conversations related to race and legal status. She specifically focuses on unconscious beliefs towards blacks and immigrants through workshops and seminars while also equipping companies with training to up-skill new managers. Martine partners with global professionals to implement learning and workforce development strategies and solutions incorporating race and biases, manager training, and inter/intra department communication. Her soft skills curriculum is popular with late-stage startups experiencing pangs due to a merger, an acquisition, exponential growth, or a sudden reduction in business. A passionate DE&I consultant, Martine has written for publications like Huffington Post and has delivered a https://www.ted.com/talks/martine_kalaw_the_value_of_investing_versus_helping (TEDx talk )on immigration policies as they relate to equity and inclusion. She's also appeared on C-span. Outside of her work, Martine contributes thought leadership around immigration reform. She's spoken at Senator McCain's 2006 Town Hall Rally on Immigration and the U.S. House of Representative's Judiciary Subcommittee's 2007 hearing on Immigration Reform. Her story has appeared in USA Today, Metro New York, and The New York Sun. Martine is also the founder and executive director of Stateless and Dreamers Foundation (SAD), which she created after her seven-year battle with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which eventually led to her U.S. citizenship. SAD provides guidance and practical tools that stateless persons and undocumented immigrants can use to navigate between lawyers and the courts more effectively. The A World of Difference Podcast is brought to you in partnership with https://www.missioalliance.org/ (Missio Alliance). Stay In Touch: Connect on Facebook and Instagram with thoughts, questions, and feedback. Rate, review and share this podcast with anyone that would love to listen. Find Us Online: https://www.instagram.com/aworldof.difference/ (@aworldof.difference) on Instagram and https://www.facebook.com/A-World-of-Difference-613933132591673/ (A World of Difference) on Facebook, on Twitter at https://twitter.com/loriadbr (@loriadbr) & on Clubhouse https://www.joinclubhouse.com/@loriadbr (@loriadbr).https://linktr.ee/aworldofdifference (https://linktr.ee/aworldofdifference) or http://loriadamsbrown.com/ (loriadamsbrown.com)Interested in one-on-one or group coaching on how to live a life that makes a difference? Check out: https://www.loriadamsbrown.com/coaching (https://www.loriadamsbrown.com/coaching) Did you know that podcasts are a great way to grow your personal and business brand voice? Go to https://kitcaster.com/difference/ (https://kitcaster.com/difference/) to apply for a special offer for friends of this podcast. Here's the secret, we all want to feel connected to brands we buy from. What better way to humanize a brand than through sharing your story on a podcast.
As we rapidly approach the end of cookie-based targeting, marketers are seeking new strategies, technologies, and solutions that will enable them to reliably maximize the return on their media investments. In the programmatic world, this means putting more emphasis on contextual strategies that combine first- and third-party data with AI and dynamic creatives. In this episode, we explore our final 10x10 series topic, "the cookieless world," with Solutions & Innovation Strategy Head Divya Acharya hosting Oracle Advertising's Sales GVP Marc Grabowski. This conversation will walk marketers through the biggest ramifications of the impending cookieless world as well as the recommended ways to adapt to it -- including both long-established and cutting-edge strategies.In this episode we discuss:Whether the industry is prepared for the world of cookieless media.How the cookieless world will impact the programmatic landscape, audiences, strategies, measurement, attribution, targeting and ROAS.What marketers should be doing to prepare.The effectiveness of contextual advertising.Which piece(s) of data will become the most important in the new paradigm.Is third-party data dead?How can brands and marketers prepare to identify, gather, and utilize data properly?What types of technology marketers should be investing in.What kinds of skills are vital in the new environment?Episode host:Divya Acharya | Head of Solutions & Innovation Strategy, Xaxis APACEpisode guest:Marc Grabowski | Sales GVP, Oracle AdvertisingSome links:10x10 content series. 10x10 was Xaxis' year-long series covering the Top Ten Trends in digital media: Xaxis 10x10 hubOracle Advertising blog: Contextual targeting in the new era of ad techXaxis TwitterXaxis LinkedIn
In this episode of Digital & Dirt, host Ian Dallimore speaks with Roey Franco, VP of Product & Innovation at Xaxis, about the metaverse and how it pertains to advertising. They begin by discussing Roey's tech-focused and forward-thinking career. Roey and Ian then dive into all things metaverse, from the newest platforms to crypto currency transactions. Roey provides insights on the challenges and unique experiences the metaverse provides to brands and consumers. Lastly, they discuss what advertising currently looks like in the metaverse and the many possibilities for the future. Roey's career: 1:20-7:18What is the Metaverse: 8:09-10:36All things Metaverse: 10:55-26:24Advertising in the Metaverse: 26:45-43:41
Wilensky became president of Xaxis, GroupM's programmatic agency, in June, at the height of the pandemic. As one of the OG agency trading desks, Xaxis was an early mover in the programmatic space. That positions the agency well as the world becomes more addressable, from CTV, to digital out of home, to commerce and retail media.In this episode, she chats about the evolution of programmatic, how Xaxis is adapting to a privacy-first future and why communication is so important in a hybrid and virtual workplace.Listen to this episode here now and subscribe to Campaign Chemistry wherever you get your podcasts.
With the digital media industry facing more complexity and uncertainty than ever, brands are showing rising interest in outcome-based strategies that guarantee business results from their marketing investments. But some brands don't have a full understanding of what “outcome media” really is, how it really works, what it accomplishes, why it matters, or where it's going next. In episode 7 of our “People of Programmatic” podcast, part of our 10x10 series to herald Xaxis' tenth anniversary, our guests help grapple with the challenges of having to show value for every dollar spent, when to rely on outcome media — as well as its pitfalls.Episode Host:Henry Stokes, MD of Global Accounts, XaxisEpisode Guests:Emily Knight, Business Development Director, The Trade DeskMichael Siewert, Global Programmatic Marketing Director, Colgate-PalmoliveIn this episode, we discuss:The ways outcome media is defined.How brand marketers and their agencies can determine desired outcomes.The challenges that outcome media can help solve.The benefits of technology in using outcome media.How brands can embrace outcome media.What is Outcome Media?Outcome media is fundamentally about data, and about using that data across the spectrum of brand marketing and performance marketing, which have traditionally been seen as representing two sides of a divide. Outcome media brings a new level of sophisticated thinking to marketing.It allows marketers to get a clear sense of what they can expect from their media campaigns.It also allows marketers to measure efficacy in real time, to be accountable to a defined outcome.It fulfills the needs brands have to quantify results and justify their ad spend.It can connect media across channels, for example connected TV, shoppable media and performance marketing.Outcome Media help marketers focusMarketers need to think longer term, come up with a mix of metrics that prove with data and testing over time to have the best effects.They should focus on the goals, not the minutiae they measure to help reach those goals.It's imperative to incorporate as much first-party data as possible.Marketers must test, test and test toward the goal. That can range from something like performance oriented metrics to more custom solutions such as interactions with a purpose-built API.Outcome-based media will, our guests concur, be even more important as cookies start to diminish and first-party data become more important. Marketers can use the data that is available along with the metrics they've established to set hypotheses, test, analyze and continually improve to achieve their brands' objectives.Some Links:Xaxis websiteColgate-Palmolive websiteThe Trade Desk websiteTransforming media into outcomes (Xaxis)Is outcome-based media the future of media planning? (AdAge)Why outcome-based marketing is so successful (MarketingProfs)
Every digital media company is struggling to recruit and retain great talent. In episode 6 of our “People of Programmatic” podcast, part of our 10x10 series to herald Xaxis' tenth anniversary, our guests explore the new landscape of work and workers, and reveal how recruiters, managers, and executives can evolve their practices to find great people and keep them on board.Episode Host: Arshan Saha, CEO, Xaxis APACEpisode Guests:Michael Wright, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, GroupMJuli Santiago, Recruiter, SearchMax IncIn This Episode, We Discuss:The talent shortage and how to manage itHow skilled workers' expectations have changedWhether companies are to blameSolutions including culture, mindset, and rewards structuresRead full episode overview here: https://www.xaxis.com/episode-6-the-talent-squeeze/Some Links:Xaxis Careers WebsiteSearchMax, Inc Website“1 million more job openings than people looking for work” (CNBC)“U.S. job openings hit record high as employers struggle to find workers” (Reuters)“What's next for America's workforce post-COVID-19?” (PwC)“Hot ad tech job market creating new hiring practices” (AdAge)
Nishant Desai, or Nish, is the Director of Technology and Operations at Xaxis, The Outcome Media Company. Nish has 20+ years of experience leading technical partnerships, integrations, and ad operations for thousands of brands, platforms, and partners. On Marketing Today, Alan and Nish unpack the future of marketing without third-party cookies. With only a year before the change, Nish’s advice is, “Don’t panic” and look to alternative solutions. This important interview touches on the events that lead to cookie death, alternative marketplace solutions, and what marketers should be thinking about as this new landscape comes into view. Listen in to learn more about the cookie-less effect on marketers and users. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why third-party cookies are ending The benefits of a flock-based cookie solution The future of a unified ID-based ecosystem Key Highlights: [01:48] Nish’s path to advertising, MarTech, and AdTech [02:40] How computer science helps MarTech and AdTech [0316] The death of cookies [05:15] The difference between browser approach and universal idea approach [07:44] Google’s proposals for browser cookies [12:21] Roadblocks to a browser-based or FLoC based solution [16:30] Survival of the fittest [21:18] Which version is better for users [22:30] Who will be successful in the new cookie world [24:53] Will there be a growth of data stores? [27:03] What marketers should be thinking about to move forward [29:42] A defining experience that made Nish who he is today [30:46] Nish’s advice for his younger self [32:35] Nish’s recent impactful purchase [33:35] The brands, companies, and causes Nish follows [34:53] What Nish says is today’s biggest threat and opportunity for marketers Resources Mentioned: Nish Desai Xaxis Xaxis Top 10 Trends First-party cookies vs. Third-party cookies W3C Standards Organization FLoC backed by Google Universal IDs Opposing views of FLoC Brand-driven partnerships – Walmart & The Trade Desk Bitcoin Google AI Tesla AI Indoor Flywheel Trainer Example Identity – GDPR, CCPA Cookies and GDPR Subscribe to the podcast: Listen in iTunes (link: http://apple.co/2dbdAhV) Listen in Google Podcasts (link: http://bit.ly/2Rc2kVa) Listen in Spotify (Link: http://spoti.fi/2mCUGnC ) Connect with the Guest: Nish LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishantdesai/ Nish Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nishant_Desai Xaxis Twitter: https://twitter.com/XaxisTweets Connect with Marketing Today and Alan Hart: http://twitter.com/abhart https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanhart http://twitter.com/themktgtoday https://www.facebook.com/themktgtoday/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketing-today-with-alan-hart/ Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/marketingtoday See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Today we kick off our second season with our new sponsor in Mediaocean. A huge thanks for the continuing partnership. Our guest today is Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand, the cable TV sales and data company owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox. More on Ampersand and its expanding business in my chat with Nicolle. Nicolle is one of the most accomplished media innovators we know. She started her career at 24/7 RealMedia, moved on to and Xaxis and then to GroupM in senior positions. In 2018 she joined NCC Media as CEO. The company was later rebranded a Ampersand.
Almost all digital display advertising is transacted programmatically now—but that doesn't mean programmatic isn't still evolving. Gila Wilensky, president, US at programmatic media firm Xaxis, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss what Xaxis is expecting for the next 10 years of programmatic advertising, including how AI will continue to evolve in the space, how addressability and measurability will change post-cookie, and what the maturation of ecommerce means for digital advertising.
In the Sensei's Corner this week, Nishant Desai, the director of technology and operations at Xaxis is back with some major updates (this is a follow-up from Episode 27). Before working for Xaxis, Nishant was in tech support for the ad server and then moved into the client solutions for the company 24/7 real media. In 2014, Xaxis and 24/7 merged, and Nishant moved into technology and operations, where he has been working for almost fourteen years and now heads up the grid. Today's episode is the updated version from the previous episode. In today's episode, Nish covers a lot of grounds on best practices and tips you need to know in preparation for Google's cookie deprecation. Connect with: Nish Desai: LinkedIn Programmatic Digest podcast: Contact | Shownote | Website Helene Parker: Website | Linkedin | Twitter | Instagram
This week, our podcast guest is with Gila Wilensky, President of of Xaxis US. She was appointed to the head the agency one year ago, coming from GroupM’s Essence where she was Head of Media Activation for North America. In 2013, Gila joined the growing Google account at Essence and built a team to run Google’s SEM and biddable media efforts. Gila also helped Google codify its global Adwords and DoubleClick best practices. She grew Essence’s social practice by 50x between 2013 and 2016. In this interview, she talks about her path to leadership and the efforts to bring diversity, equality and inclusion to Xaxis. She speaks about the focus of outcomes at Xaxis as a core value of the programmatic unit of GroupM. She covers AI and the future of of a more efficient programmatic ecosystem. This year marks the agency's 10th year anniversary. Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.
In the Sensei’s Corner this week, we welcome Nish Desai, director of technology, and partnership with Xaxis. Founded in 2011, Xaxis is a programmatic media company that empowers its clients to reach out to their customers through different touchpoints. Today’s episode was recorded just short of a year ago, and we discussed when Google first announced third-party cookies deprecation and the effects they can have on ad spending. Although Browser IDs will not be a tangible solution based on Google's latest announcement (in 2021), the conversation with Nish really brought up some historical explanation on Cookie targeting and additional resource to consider (in 2021) Nish and I recorded an updated episode that will be published next with newer information based on the 1Q 2021. Connect with: Nish Desai: LinkedIn Programmatic Digest podcast: Contact | Shownote | Website Helene Parker: Website | Linkedin | Twitter | Instagram
How the Shifting Relationship Between Shoppers and Retailers is Reshaping CommerceIn this episode, Tim Bagwell of GroupM hosts David Haase and Sean Cheyney of CitrusAd, a global platform for retail media and data monetization, for a deep dive into the world of retail media. In this episode, we discuss: first party audiences and measurementthe impact of COVID-19 on shopper behavior and retailer strategythe expanding role of last-mile delivery services, and the value of owning the customer experience.Featuring:David Haase, Chief Revenue & Development Officer, CitrusAdSean Cheyney, SVP Business Development, CitrusAd Episode Host: Tim Bagwell, Global Market Lead for Shopbox, GroupM This is part of 10X10, our 10th anniversary content series. We’re sharing 10 months of content centered around the top 10 trends in programmatic media. Check out all the content at: Xaxis.com/10x10/
Xaxis is known for programmatic media buying – or ‘transforming digital media into business outcomes’. But how is it managing to balance artificial and human intelligence? Short-term and long-term business outcomes? Brand-building activity and performance marketing? Smart targeting and winning creative? CEO Nicolas Bidon explains how they approach these challenges, as well as those around measurement (with the deprecation of third-party cookies), using first-party data in smart ways, brand safety, and the increasing digitalisation of media channels.
2022. The Year the Cookie Dies. What’s a brand leader to do? Rob and Peter welcomed Nishant Desai, Senior Director of Tech and Ad Ops at Xaxis, and Stu Richards, Lead Programmatic Strategist at Catalyst to detail the actions brands can take this year to thrive in a cookieless world.
This week Sue and ASD talk to Sara about AI and where it is misunderstood. They also cover Sarah's history in social media, the skills needed to be ready for the digital future and the items giving Sarah comfort in these crazy times.
Hello everyone, it is #LocationWeekly Wednesday! Argo Design re-invents beer menus with digital projections, Outer teaming with their customers for neighbourhood showrooms, Scanit releasing tech to read QR and DRV codes from a distance and Pizza Hut bridging online & offline with Xaxis in Indonesia... All on this week's episode! Check it out give us your feedback after you watch our podcast.
Our Julia Rast sits down with the "ambassador of audio" Tony Hereau from Nielsen to discuss strategies and the benefits of programmatic audio.Discussion pointsAudio is a uniquely powerful way for brands to engage with consumers.New types of access and measurement that programmatic advertising affords in audio.The keys to an omnichannel strategy and driving outcomes with audio.The rise of smart speakers, and new forms of advertising.New ways of segmenting audiences using audio.Key challenges remaining for the digital audio space.Featuring Tony Hereau, VP, Cross Platform Insights, NielsenHost: Julia Rast, Global Solutions & Innovations Manager at Xaxis.
As Ampersand CEO, Nicolle Pangis and her team are working to build a smarter, more effective television ecosystem by empowering brands to seamlessly connect with audiences wherever and whenever they watch TV. Pangis previously served as Global COO at GroupM’s [m]PLATFORM where she led global product management, strategic partnerships and technology development across the largest media investment management organization in the world. Prior to [m]PLATFORM, Pangis was a central figure in the success of pioneering programmatic advertising company, Xaxis, serving first as Global Chief Revenue Officer, followed by Global COO. Earlier, she was President of 24/7 Real Media where she led the company’s business in North America and Europe. Nicolle is a member of the Ad Council Board of Directors and has been named to the Adweek 50 list, AdAge’s 40 Under 40, Crain’s 40 Under 40, and Multichannel News' Women to Watch. She was recently awarded AdExchanger’s 2020 Leadership in Advertising award. She received her bachelor’s degree in communication from Boston University and her MBA from Rutgers University. In this episode of Fairygodboss Radio, Nicolle Pangis shares her best insights and advice based on her experience of becoming a CEO. [Recorded on July 27, 2020]
"Volatility" has been the watchword of the pandemic in regards to programmatic display ad buying. Nicolas Bidon, CEO of Xaxis, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss what the programmatic media firm has experienced in recent months, and what's coming as targeting and attribution challenges mount.
WPP’s founder Sir Martin Sorrell was ousted in 2018 and is now at the top of the $2.1bn challenger to Accenture, the big consulting firms and the global marketing services holding giants and agency networks. S4 is banking big time on tech firms like Adobe, Salesforce and Google for its growth and blending those capabilities with fast, borderless content production and digital media and business transformation. S4 APAC CEO Michel de Rijk talks frankly about more acquisitions in Australia and why the consulting and communications company models will continue to struggle. See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information.
In the inaugural episode of Xaxis’ “People of Programmatic” podcast, Xaxis global CEO Nicolas Bidon interviews Ogilvy U.K. CEO Michael Frohlich on the topic of “creativity.” In this episode, we discuss:Brilliant creative drives emotion. Great creative works in any channel, including programmatic. Real-world examples show what great creative executions can do with cutting edge technologies. Integrating the work of creatives, strategists, technologists, and data scientists makes everyone’s work more effective. It can be complex to execute creative strategies in digital. But sometimes it’s rather simple. Optimizing creative and targeting drives real ROI.
Today's guest is Rouzbeh Gerami, Director of Data Science at Xaxis in New York City. Leading the Data Science team at Xaxis, Rouzbeh works on the development of ML-based solutions for real-time bidding with a focus on translating current industry and academic-based AI research into practical solutions, with special attention to deep reinforcement learning. Xaxis are pioneering what it means for the advertising industry to offer simplicity and accountability to clients. They combine unique brand-safe media access, unrivalled programmatic expertise and 360-degree data with proprietary Artificial Intelligence to help global brands achieve the outcomes they value from their digital media investment. In the episode, Rouzbeh will talk about: His journey to joining Xaxis Using Data Science at Xaxis within the advertising sector Applying reinforcement learning to real-world problems Challenges the Data Science need to overcome Top skills you need for a career in Data Science Leading the innovation-driven culture at Xaxis
Dr. Andrey Sharapov is a senior data scientist and machine learning engineer at Lidl. He is currently working on various projects related to machine learning and data product development including analytical planning tools that help with business issues such as stocking and purchasing. Previously, he spent 2 years at Xaxis and he led data science initiatives and developed tools for customer analytics at TeamViewer. Andrey and I met at a Predicitve Analytics World conference we were both speaking at, and I found out he is very interested in “explainable AI,” an aspect of user experience that I think is worth talking about and so that’s what today’s episode will focus on. In our chat, we covered: Lidl’s planning tool for their operational teams and what it predicts. The lessons learned from Andrey’s first attempt to build an explainable AI tool and other human factors related to designing data products What explainable AI is, and why it is critical in certain situations How explainable AI is useful for debugging other data models We discuss why explainable AI isn’t always used Andrey’s thoughts on the importance of including your end user in the data production creation process from the very beginning. Also, here’s a little post-episode thought from a design perspective: I know there are counter-vailing opinions that state that explainability of models is “over-hyped.” One popular rationalization uses examples such as how certain professions (e.g. medical practitioners) make decisions all the time that cannot be fully explained, yet people believe the decision making without necessarily expecting it to be fully explained. The reality is that while not every model or end UX necessarily needs explainability, I think there are human factors that can be satisfied by providing explainability such as building customer trust more rapidly, or helping convince customers/users why/how a new technology solution may be better than “the old way” of doing things. This is not a blanket recommendation to “always include explainability” in your service/app/UI; I think many factors come into play and as with any design choice, I think you should let your customer/user feedback help you decide whether your service needs explainability to be valuable, useful, and engaging. Resources and Links: Andrey Sharapov on LinkedIn Explainable AI- XAI Group (LinkedIn) Quotes from Today’s Episode “I hear frequently there can be a tendency in the data science community to want to do excellent data science work and not necessarily do excellent business work. I also hear how some data scientists may think, ‘explainable AI is not going to improve the model’ or ‘help me get published’ – so maybe that’s responsible for why [explainable AI] is not as widely in use.” – Brian O’Neill “When you go and talk to an operational person, who has in mind a certain number of basic rules, say three, five, or six rules [they use] when doing planning, and then when you come to him with a machine learning model, something that is let’s say, ‘black box,’ and then you tell him ‘okay, just trust my prediction,’ then in most of the cases, it just simply doesn’t work. They don’t trust it. But the moment when you come with an explanation for every single prediction your model does, you are increasing your chances of a mutual conversation between this responsible person and the model…” – Andrey Sharapov “We actually do a lot of traveling these days, going to Bulgaria, going to Poland, Hungry, every country, we try to talk to these people [our users] directly. [We] try to get the requirements directly from them and then show the results back to them…” – Andrey Sharapov “The sole purpose of the tool we built was to make their work more efficient, in a sense that they could not only produce better results in terms of accuracy, but they could also learn about the market themselves because we created a plot for elasticity curves. They could play with the price and see if they made the price too high, too low, and how much the order quantity would change.” – Andrey Sharapov Episode Transcript Brian: I’m really excited to share my chat with Dr. Andrey Sharapov today from Lidl, the large grocery store chain from Europe. Andrey is a data scientist. I met him at Predictive Analytics World while we’re speaking there. He told me that he was quite interested in removing the black from the black box concept that goes with predictive models. This is called Explainable AI or Ex-AI. I think this has a lot of relevancy to designing good decision support tools and good analytics that people can believe in and will engage with. There’s obviously been a lot of talk about this area whether it’s from a compliance perspective or an ethics perspective or just a customer, an end-user experience perspective. Being able to tell what models are doing and how they’re deriving their predictions has value on multiple different levels. Without getting super into the technical side of this, we’re going to talk about how explainability within machine learning and predictive models has relevance to the design and user experience of your software application. Here’s my chat with Andrey. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Experiencing Data. This is Brian and I’m happy to have Dr. Andrey Sharapov from Lidl. Did I say that right? Lidl, obviously, not obviously, maybe to our American listeners, people that don’t live in Europe. But is it Lee-del or Lie-del, the grocery store chain in Europe? Andrey: It’s Lee-del. Hi, everyone! Brian: Welcome to the show, Andrey. You’re a senior data scientist at Lidl. Tell us about your background. What are you doing with grocery data? Andrey: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me on the podcast. As you said, Lidl is one of the largest retailers in Europe. We have more than 10,000 stores. We obviously have quite a lot of data that we’re trying to put to work at the moment while building this data products. For instance, we try to create decision support tools in order to help our action planners or promotion planners to make better decisions. On the other side, we’re automating various processes like for instance order disposition which means ordering of goods automatically for all the stores. We have a lot of other use cases related to marketing and everything that has to do with business as Lidl more or less. Brian: I’m excited to talk to you about [a]particular area of interest that you have which is explainable AI. But before we get into that, I’m curious, it sounds like [you’ve touched several different aspects of the business that Lidl with some ]of the data products that you’re creating. What’s hard about getting that right? Not so much from the technical standpoint, and the engineering, and the data science piece, but in terms of someone’s doing the purchasing of the carrots and someone’s doing the planning of the promotions, tell us about that experience and how you go about getting those people the information they need such that they’re willing to use your analytics and your decision support tools to actually make decisions. Can you to talk to us a little bit about that? Andrey: Yeah, sure. As you’ve pointed out correctly, these days, it’s not really much about technology or data crunching but more about weaving together the relationship between data scientists and the business in order to get a buy-in from the actual users. Let me maybe just say a little bit about how we work on our first data product, the one that I created along with the team. We went through a lot of struggles, trying to figure out [what data scientists do or do any data engineers,],and then at some point, we’ve got product owners on the team, the people who actually talk to the business in the language that the business understands. We also got businesspeople onboard as advisors for the project. The product that we built is called a planning tool, so to say. Every week, the operational people plan a promotion for certain date in the future. They have to pick a certain number of decisions, take into account conditions of the market weather, time of the season, and a lot of other things, then come up with the number to order. The sole purpose of the tool that we built was to make their work more efficient in a sense that they could, not only produce better results in terms of accuracy, but they could also learn about the market themselves because we created a certain clause for[ instance instant]elasticity curves and they could play with the price and see, if they make the price too high or too low, how much the order and quantity would change. That’s the main idea behind the product. I guess most companies have the same problem of trying to onboard the business users. The main sort of idea or the main way of thinking, “Okay, we have AI in that.” They will search in the user, they’re like, “Okay, let’s just do it.” But most likely, it’s not that easy. We went through this experience of learning that, “Okay. Although we have the coolest algorithms in our system and from coolest people working for us as data scientists and engineers, [totally doesn’t that the final user ]??will use the product.” The way that we try to convince them was by building fancy user interface in terms of making it more beautiful, so to say, but nonetheless, they were not very convinced. As far as I know, the operational people are really hard to convince because maybe the majority of operational people try to use such tools in order to execute certain tasks very fast. They don’t have a lot of time to try to learn what’s going on but rather, they would like to do a few clicks and the job is done and they move to something else. In our case, since it was a lot of machine learning, a lot of predictions, there was this problem of trusting the system because although they could use it in this way that I just described—that they could just do some clicking and then complete the task within, I don’t know, 15 minutes maybe. But nonetheless they were hesitant to use it because there was this lack of trust to the system. They would question why the prediction is maybe a little bit higher than they expect or a little lower, and there was no way to explain it to them. You basically say, “Okay, it’s an algorithm.” This aspect was, I guess, quite crucial because in their mind they also have a certain number of rules that they follow when they do the planning. This is basically kind of an invite for the next question so to say about explainable AI that we try to show the end-users various types of explanations later in order to gain more trust from their side. I guess, as I said at the beginning, this phrase that if we have AI in the data product then they will use it, “Let’s just build it.” Well, in the end we’ve learned that it’s of course not the case. People first were very skeptical but later we’ve tried to really work hand-in-hand with them trying to polish this single feature that they had in their mind. In this way, we’ve brought in more people who’ve tried the product. Brian: You hit the nail in the head there with these technologies. Whatever is new, as we talk right now, AI is definitely high on the hype cycle, it’s not magic sauce. You don’t just stick it into the cake and then all of a sudden everything is solved. You still need to map these technologies to fit the tool into the way the customer wants to use it. In this case, the way the tool does your modeling, is it based on how, for example like a purchaser, all the factors that they were using whether it was of a calculator or some kind of a manual process in Excel, I imagine that they have some kind of a recipe that they would follow to do this prior to you doing any type of AI or machine learning to help with that decision support. Is that how you help get adoption to be higher? Is it modeled on that or were you looking at other data? I’m curious especially around like if there’s experience or maybe—I don’t know if you’d call it biased—but there might be decision points that a human would be using in the traditional or the old way that they use to do those tasks that you can’t maybe perhaps integrate into the model. Does that make them not trust it as much even if maybe you’re actually factoring in more variables that they never use to like, “Oh, well, you never had weather when you forecasted crop and prices to figure out how much to purchase or whatever. You never had that. We actually provide that, but we don’t have last month’s purchase,” so you don’t know what the price was last month. That’s a bad example but are you following what I’m saying? Can you talk a little bit to that terms of adoption? Andrey: Before we even started, people were able to plan different promotions for the last, I don’t know how many years, and the main tool that they used was Excel. People with a great number of years of experience, they put together all these datasets for themselves and they’ve developed a certain tactic for how to approach the planning. Don’t forget, Lidl is operating in about 30 countries and each country has its own secret sauce on how to do the planning. As I said at the beginning, we had one person from one of the countries; one real planner who showed us how she does it for real, what factors they consider, which logic, and from then we tried to mimic the whole thing using machine learning algorithms. Of course, machine learning can take into account a lot more different factors than human planners. But nonetheless, the results that we got were of course slightly different because with human planners—I mean, it’s impossible to get the same number for a human and machine learning algorithm. They will always kind of say that, “Okay, why is it lower than I expect? I need to understand why.” The only answer we had at the time was, “Because the model said so.” That’s certainly not enough for them. Just recently, we’ve developed quite a good relationship with Polish planners. They have similar concerns, so they tried the tool, they like to tool, but again, for them it’s somewhat hard to start trusting the system immediately. They try to plan some promotions and it was fine for them but for some of them, they got unexpected results. You hit the wall; they start asking you all sorts of contrast-effects explanations. “What if it was different then what would have happened?” Without explainable AI or any kind of explanation of machine learning, you just cannot go forward with them. This is how I would put it. Brian: I do want to get into the explainable AI piece. I’m curious though, you mentioned Lidl [is]in 30 countries. For example, the purchasing department here, are there really 30 different recipes that are valid and/or there are cultural distinctions in the way stock is purchased for stores in Germany versus Poland or is it that just these Heuristic models for doing these were kind of organically-borne in different ways in each place ? Are you guys trying to centralize that or are you creating unique models? Are you trying to map it on like, “In order to get the Polish buyer to trust us, we need to show that our model is based on the way they were doing it even if it’s a different model than we use in Germany or Italy.” Can you talk a little bit about how you make those decisions and how you keep that trust that people are still going to use these decision support tools? Andrey: As I said at the beginning, each country has a small feature when they do the planning of promotions. Lidl is currently developing various tools in order to standardize this process, but it is an ongoing thing. Like with any person, be it the promotion planner, or a bank teller, or whatever, people tend to oppose changes; they just don’t buy these many cases. It takes quite a lot of time in order to convince them that, “Okay, this is the right way to do things. We’re suggesting [you a new way ]??that is not really new, it’s just kind of more generic,” so to say. Nonetheless, they [would..] say that, “Okay. We have this one data point that must be everywhere otherwise we just don’t take it.” It’s really a matter of time, matter of interaction with the client trying to convince them that if it’s so important then we can build it into the tool, then they will go along, and they will buy it. Or on the other hand, try to convince them that that is not important then maybe they, at some point, they will get convinced. These are all the different types of things that you have to discuss with the customer one-on-one. We actually do a lot of traveling these days, going to Bulgaria, going to Poland, Hungary. Every country, we try to talk to these people directly. Try to get the requirements directly from them and then show again the results back to them and say, “Okay, we did it for you specifically so let’s work together.” Brian: I think that it’s great that you’re going out and doing that one-on-one research with your customers because that’s another way to just build support is when they feel they’re being included in the process and you’re not imposing a tool, but you’re actually modeling the tool based on them that’s another way to increase engagement. I’m curious, do you find that the unique countries, the managers, whoever ultimately makes the decision on what tools or what model is going to be used to make the final decisions, are they interested in like, “Oh, look. Italy factors in the weather. They factor in this thing that we never thought to do. We never really gave it that much weight. Maybe we should do it that way?” [Is it 30 independent recipes and then you guys have been generalizing that based on the variables that you find have the most impact on the quality of the predictions? ]??Is that shared and the countries are aware of what each other are doing or is it more like, “Yeah, yeah. That’s nice but Poland is different. We want to do it this way and we know it’s right.” Andrey: It depends. Sometimes there are certain legal things that we have to take into account that are not quite transferable across different countries, so these things, we just cannot take them into account because then the tool becomes too specific for each country. But on the other side of things that we are able to generalize we just do it simply by trying to get more data from countries or blind gate or something like that. Brian: Talk to me about how explainable AI, this technology, [is]for people that don’t know what this is. Effectively, what we’re talking about when you’re doing things like showing a prediction from a model, it’s actually showing what some of the criteria were and perhaps how they were outweighed and how they had an impact on the conclusion that was derived by the system. Is that a fair summary of what explainable AI is? Why don’t you tell us instead of me trying to do it since this is a space that you’re interested in. Andrey: Absolutely. The area that use, kind of a research area of explainable AI, it’s all about trying to understand the reasoning of a black box model. This is not a new idea. It was quite popular back in the ‘90s but then was somehow forgotten and it resurfaced back in 2016, 2017 when [?? I think it’s a name of a company??].] announced a lot of funding for this area of explainable AI. What it actually does is for instance, let’s say you have a data scientist working on a sophisticated model, whether that be a neural network or anything else, and then it produces a prediction which is just a single number or it’s a binary decision, yes or no. In many cases, these black box models are really hard to explain to a non-expert. Even data scientist, in many cases, don’t know why it predicted yes versus no. There is no clear explanation or human-readable explanation that can be delivered in this case. Unless, the whole area of research of explainable AI is trying to, first of all, come up with the whole philosophy of what an explanation really is and this is not a done deal I would say. People are still trying to understand what it really means. The second part is, “Okay, how do we generate something that a human being can understand?” Whether it be, I don’t know, some factors, “Okay, for this prediction, Factor A played the biggest role and then Factor B played somewhat a lesser role,” and so on and so on. Or even generate a sequence of rules, if [??.] rules such that, “Air temperature is higher than 30 degrees, it’s the middle of the day, then the prediction for the sales of ice cream would be high.” What I’m trying to say here is that we use this technique in order to interact with our customers. For instance, when you go and talk to an operational person, a person who works in operations, who has in mind a certain number of basic rules; three, five, six rules when doing a planning. And then when you come to him with a machine learning model, something that is say, a black box, and then you tell him, “Okay. Just trust my prediction.” In most of the cases, it just simply doesn’t work. They just don’t trust it. But the moment when you come with an explanation for every single prediction your model does, you are increasing your chances of a mutual conversation between this responsible person and the model in this case. For instance, if the model predicts sales one, two, three, four, five for the May-June and then it says, “Why is it one, two, three, four, five?” And then you say, “Okay. It’s because if regular sales in June are greater than two, three, four. It’s May or June and something else, something else.” And then this person can relate these statements to something that he has in mind when doing plenty himself. This is where this kind of the eureka happens so to say because they see that the model is reasoning in a similar way as they do it. This way, the level of trust certainly goes up and then they’re willing to try it even more. I’m aware of similar stories. For instance, Yandex has been in the business of building similar tools for their customers and they also have explanation modules. It’s not a kind of a one-shot thing that we do at Lidl but it’s gaining quite a lot of momentum, I guess. Brian: I think that’s natural that trust and engagement is likely to go up if you have this in place because as you said, people can see that the tool is modeled on the work and the tasks that they want to do, and it’s not imposing a magic answer. It’s kind of like saying, “Hey, none of you here are experienced for the last 10 years of running promotions at Lidl matters anymore. Here’s what you should do. Here’s the product. Here’s the sale price and how long you should run it for.” I think it’s just human nature, there’s a natural tendency to not want to trust that, “Well, my whole job and these activities I do are completely replaceable by a magic box.” But when people start to see how it’s actually a decision support, I think it’s natural that the trust goes up. Although having said, I’m curious, you’re using some of these, would you say this is a regular ingredient in the products that you bake-up at Lidl? The data products that you guys are working on these tools[ or this is or is this an ]occasional thing? Why or why not would it be included on everything if it’s possible? Andrey: Well, there are different cases. Certainly, explainable AI is not something that you should or must use on every situation but I’m a great believer in decision support tools and human in the loop applications. That’s not necessarily in retail but in general. Every time where people have to look at certain predictions, we try to come up with explanations or at least some sort of a strategy for, “How can we come up with these explanations?” On the other side, these techniques are very useful when you do debugging of machine learning models. Even if you are not planning to show these explanations to anybody in the business, you are still benefiting quite a lot when you’re actually developing a machine learning model by using these tools, sort of just to fill in a few words. If you can avoid all sorts of overfitting in the model or removing plenty of features that actually make a model unstable and so on. I think the main point here is that in order to build things, models, what we don’t really understand a lot of what is really going on inside when they make predictions. It would be really sad, that’s the main idea. Brian: I haven’t thought of it that way, but I could see how, even as a debug, it could be useful as you’re trying to improve the quality of the decision; the advice that the tool is generating. I don’t know if you have data or even if it’s just qualitative in nature, but having included this on any of the products that are at Lidl, do you find people trust, like once they’ve seen that the model has some explainability behind the predictions that are being made, do they tend to still pay attention to all of that going forward or is it more like, “Oh, I can see that Andrey and his team factored in last month’s purchase data plus your competitor data and that’s what I always do. Now that I know that he always does that, I don’t really need to see that every time. I’m not going to second guess as much as I used to. I’m going to trust that now going forward.” Or do you find that the explainable AI, that portion of the UI, is actually an integral part of using the tool every time? Are you following what I’m saying? Do you start to ignore that over time or do customers see that as an ongoing, useful aspect of the interface? Andrey: We don’t have the explainability to build in into the user interface at the moment. We have it as more of a PoC, we show it on the month more or less but we don’t have it as a default feature. Certainly, this should be working in a way that you described. I actually have read a few papers recently about the effect of explainability. People were tested through, I don’t remember exactly the test set-up, but the point that the researchers were making was that the accuracy of predictions within this realm of human in the loop applications does not go up. Whenever people are using machine learning model that makes a prediction yes versus no, it—altogether the performance of this blend of human and machine—does not go higher but [well-significantly ]??that they could prove it. But the trust into the system can beat those by 20% higher than without any explanation. I guess what you said is exactly the point of building in explainable AI into any tool to make it transparent and then at some point, people trusted them, they don’t really have to check these explanations every single time because they know, “Okay, we are on the same page; machine and me.” Unless, they’re trying to explore some unusual situation where they really want to test the system or learn something from that, because well, this is also a possibility for a human in the loop application when humans actually learn something new from the system. I think this another case when they would use it occasionally after that. Brian: Without getting too technical here, obviously, Experiencing Data, this podcast, is more about customer experience with data products and that type of thing, but I’m curious there maybe listeners wondering, “Hey, I have this decision support tool or this analytics deployment that’s starting to use some machine learning, it doesn’t have any type of explainability. We are seeing the same symptoms you talked about like, low engagement, people don’t trust it, we put a significant data science investment in place, is it easy to retrofit in a technology investment you may have made to include some of this such that you might be able to start to improve the trust factor or is this something that really needs to be implemented from the start and it’s much more difficult to put in after the fact? Andrey: It all depends on the system itself right now. How many models you have there? What is the complexity of the whole thing? Technically speaking, there are already a number of libraries available for doing these things. Everything is open sourced. You can just Google for words like Lime or Shep or Anchore or contact me on LinkedIn for instance. I could point you out at various sources, but the point of explainable AI is that these tools are sort of model agnostic in a sense that they just need a prediction and they need just a model, and the predictions that model produces, and that’s pretty much all. Then you can write a few lines of Python and then it’s there. You can get your explanations. The short answer is you don’t have to invest too much into getting explanations if you already have a working system. Brian: Wow. That’s kind of a little bit mind-boggling. If you hear in terms of, “Why isn’t this being used more? Is there a perception that it’s costly, or it’s more difficult than it is, or is the quality not there, or do you think the business and the leaders and the people doing this don’t think it’s necessary?” It fascinates me if it’s that simple and of the quality, if this is such an easy way to build trust, why is this not happening more? Did something happen in the night between the ‘90s and now that this kind of fell out of trend? Can you talk to that a little bit? Andrey: In my personal opinion, I think over the recent 10 years, data scientist put too much attention into getting high model performance in terms of accuracy or lower error. This whole trend of toggle competitions where you try to build super accurate model and say the opponent who gets the first price is probably hundredth of a percent more precise than you, but the main question is, “Does it actually make sense? Is it what business really wants?” In my opinion is, it’s not the case. Yeah. For scientific breakthrough, maybe yes, it is useful. But certainly, in order to gain trust, you cannot just build more and more sophisticated high-precision model. It just leads you nowhere. The other thing is that over the last four or five years, the deep learning hype took place and a lot of attention was in the deep learning area where people were all in doing neural networks and nobody really cared about explainability. It’s more of, “Okay, let’s just predict this to 99.9% of accuracy.” At some point, some executives realized, “Okay, we have a lot of these models and we have no idea what is really going on inside. As I mentioned, the DAPPER program and also GDPR regulation that came to light in May 2018, put the spotlight on the right to explainability, the right to explanations, all of these factors together propelled the explainable AI topic forward and it’s now gaining a lot more attention than before. Brian: In terms of when you get into neural nets and some of those technologies, is this technology available to products that are leveraging neural networks and some of this more complicated artificial intelligence technologies? Is it widely available to add the explainability portion? Andrey: Well, it depends on what kind of data you’re working with. If you’re working with this regular table or data, the data that is in tables, no text, no images, then it doesn’t really matter. You can take in neural net or any other model but once you go into more sophisticated realm of neural nets working with text data, then it is slightly more complicated to get it to work but it’s still possible. They could just use lime or shep. It’s very interesting what they do actually. For instance, if you try to say classify legal documents or medical documents or say fake news classifications and write yes versus no, then these explainability tools can highlight the actual words in the sentence that play the most role in terms of, “Okay, if it’s fake news, then it will underline certain words,” that a human being can get them on and say, “Okay, this content is maybe more full of feelings or calling for more action,” or something like that versus a prediction for no fake, and it’s mostly facts, facts, facts. Basically, the explainability tools, they highlight words in a sentence. In terms of images, even more complicated. There are a lot of things that are model agnostic but even more things that are not. In this case, you really have to be an expert in whatever neural net and try to get it to work. Just get a code from GitHub and try to reproduce the results of a research paper. For these more complicated cases, it’s not that easy but it’s possible. Brian: You brought up something too. I’ve heard this trend repeated too that there can be a tendency in the data science community to want to do excellent data science work and not necessarily do excellent business work—building tools and solutions that help the business. I could see how maybe some data scientists may see that’s not going to improve the model adding the explainability. “I can’t write a paper on that and build my credentials with that type of information,” so maybe that’s responsible for why it’s not as widely in use. Do you think that’s going to change? Do you think this will become more of an expectation going forward that, we won’t be talking about black boxes as much in a year from now or two years from now, do you think that’ll start to go away and expectations will change? Any thoughts on that? Andrey: The whole trend is going into the direction of explainable AI anyway for one simple reason. In the last years, AI was mostly used in the labs and probably to automate certain processes where no humans are really involved. It’s more like robotics or something like that. But these days, AI is going into various fields like healthcare, or legal domains where you deal with things that affect humans directly. For instance, how would you explain why a certain person didn’t get a low at the bank and the other one who looks very much similar got it, right. There are a lot of questions that are coming up these days because AI is touching upon some points where humans are personally involved. Because yeah, we don’t really care how some robots are moving goods at Alibaba warehouse. I mean, doing an explainability for that, yeah, maybe it’s a really sophisticated model but I don’t care. I get my goods; I order them and that’s it. But whenever things go into the direction of some social interaction or things that affect people directly, or say these high-stake decisions, then interpretability and explainability is a must. I think many people would probably choose a model that is maybe not as exact and accurate but explainable versus something that is extremely accurate but okay, sometimes it can kill you. This is kind of my logic here. Brian: That’s kind of the dividing line between the business and the human side of it. The pure data science side is that you might have a super accurate model but if you find out that they’re still buying carrots the old way, does it really matter that you have an excellent prediction on how many carrots to buy or at what price if they don’t ever take advantage of that. All of that investment is kind of thrown out the door. From a business standpoint, an acceptable model quality with a highly trusted interface and user experience might be the better business decision even if it’s not the best model quality from that perspective. I think that’s important stuff to consider in all of this as we build these tools. This is awesome. It’s actually exciting from a design perspective to hear that this is available as kind of a tool that we can implement. Obviously, context matter,and you have to look at particular domains and particular types of data and all of that but it sounds like something that—as part of our tool box—it’s something that we should be leveraging regularly when possible especially if we’re talking about human in the loop tools and decision support tools as opposed to as you said, the Alibaba robots… Andrey: Yeah. That’s [ I didn’t hear a word here]. Brian: …get my book or my shoes or whatever I ordered. Just on this topic here as we wrap up here, any broad level advice for people that are kind of looking to jump into this on making efficient data products? It doesn’t have to be just products explainable AI but just from you experience at Lidl. Maybe a mistake that you’ve realized, and you changed, and how you’re approaching your projects and building these tools. Any advice for people? Andrey: I guess the only advice I would give to anyone who wants to build a product that is used is to go to the people and ask for the actual requirements; try to involve the end-user at the earliest stage possible. I think this is the only way to succeed in the end. This is how startup fail or succeed. You have to really understand what you’re doing. At Lidl, we’ve kind of cleared the way from zero to hero over the last two years and we learned it the hard way. The more you interact, I mean it doesn’t really matter to the people because data product is a piece of software that has machine learning inside of it or algorithms in the end. Nobody really cares about how sophisticated these algorithms are. People just want to make sure that they can get the job done efficiently or have a nice experience, no bugs, and stuff like that. This is [all the same stories that was probably 10 years ago this is all the same story as 10 years ago probably]when we didn’t build any data products,[ that build]?? just regular software but again the main advice is just don’t try to build or create this ‘moon-shotty’ product within a few months and try to reiterate and try to onboard your users as early as possible. This is the main advice that I could give. Of course, use explainable AI in order to convince and gain trust. This is a must in my view. I mean, of course in the cases where someone is doing something, and no one can see him. If it’s an interactive tool, interacting with users, they have to be sure that it is doing the right thing. Brian: Great advice. People that have been on my designing products mailing list and the Experiencing Data podcast have definitely heard this advice beaten into the ground many times about getting out there and talking to people early in the process to inform what you’re doing and not working in isolation because that’s almost a sure way to produce something that people aren’t going to use because it’s full of your own bias about how things should be done, and it’s not informed by what customer wants to do. Good words, good parting advice. Where can people find out more about you? Are you on Twitter? Do you have a website, LinkedIn, anything like that? Andrey: Well, I’m posting quite a lot on LinkedIn. I have a group dedicated to explainable AI; it’s called Explainable AI-XAI. Everyone who’s interested or learning more, feel free to join or contact me through LinkedIn. I don’t tweet much on Twitter. My presence is mostly on LinkedIn at the moment. Brian: Great. I’ll definitely put those links to your profile and to the Explainable AI group on LinkedIn on the show notes. This has been really great, Andrey. It’s been great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on in Experiencing Data. Andrey: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for inviting me.
One on One with Nicolas Bidon of Xaxis by DMN One-on-One
When Nicolas Bidon talks about his business, he talks about becoming an “outcome” media company. As part of WPP and GroupM, Xaxis is a billion-dollar business — arguably the world's largest global programmatic media and technology platform — boasting some 3000 clients across 47 markets. The evolution to an outcome-based focus, Bidon says, represents a shift away from fairly crude metrics like CPMs to more real, specific business goals—with an assist from emerging tech like artificial intelligence. We get into all of that, plus some weedy topics like arbitrage, transparency and FBI investigations.
Today David is joined by 33 Across founder David Wheeler. While the biggest players in the industry like Google, The Trade Desk and agency programmatic platforms like Xaxis scoop up the majority of the $50 billion now flowing through automated advertising trading platforms, specialist services have emerged to meet marketers' needs for transparency and impact. The company name refers to the toughest crossword puzzles that can be solved if you decipher a large horizontal word in the middle of the puzzle. According to Wheeler, in many difficult puzzles these are often around 32 or 33 across. “33Across unlocks the puzzle of quality online advertising,” says Wheeler.
Today David is joined by 33 Across founder David Wheeler. While the biggest players in the industry like Google, The Trade Desk and agency programmatic platforms like Xaxis scoop up the majority of the $50 billion now flowing through automated advertising trading platforms, specialist services have emerged to meet marketers’ needs for transparency and impact. The company name refers to the toughest crossword puzzles that can be solved if you decipher a large horizontal word in the middle of the puzzle. According to Wheeler, in many difficult puzzles these are often around 32 or 33 across. “33Across unlocks the puzzle of quality online advertising,” says Wheeler.
Today David is joined by 33 Across founder Eric Wheeler. While the biggest players in the industry like Google, The Trade Desk and agency programmatic platforms like Xaxis scoop up the majority of the $50 billion now flowing through automated advertising trading platforms, specialist services have emerged to meet marketers' needs for transparency and impact. The company name refers to the toughest crossword puzzles that can be solved if you decipher a large horizontal word in the middle of the puzzle. According to Wheeler, in many difficult puzzles these are often around 32 or 33 across. “33Across unlocks the puzzle of quality online advertising,” says Wheeler.
Today David is joined by 33 Across founder Eric Wheeler. While the biggest players in the industry like Google, The Trade Desk and agency programmatic platforms like Xaxis scoop up the majority of the $50 billion now flowing through automated advertising trading platforms, specialist services have emerged to meet marketers’ needs for transparency and impact. The company name refers to the toughest crossword puzzles that can be solved if you decipher a large horizontal word in the middle of the puzzle. According to Wheeler, in many difficult puzzles these are often around 32 or 33 across. “33Across unlocks the puzzle of quality online advertising,” says Wheeler.
Programmatic technology is still largely a mystery to many marketers. Considered the Holy Grail by some, and Pandora’s Box by others, one thing is clear: it has completely transformed the way advertisers reach consumers through digital media. The ANA Marketing Futures Podcast set out to shed some light on the subject with our very special guest Matt Sweeney, CEO of Xaxis, the largest programmatic platform on the planet. Sweeney pulled back the curtain to reveal how Xaxis approaches issues like brand safety, visibility, and bot fraud. He also discussed how everyone in the digital supply chain—from agencies, to brands, to platforms like Xaxis—can be better partners in shaping the Future of Programmatic.
Programmatic technology is still largely a mystery to many marketers. Considered the Holy Grail by some, and Pandora’s Box by others, one thing is clear: it has completely transformed the way advertisers reach consumers through digital media. The ANA Marketing Futures Podcast set out to shed some light on the subject with our very special guest Matt Sweeney, CEO of Xaxis, the largest programmatic platform on the planet. Sweeney pulled back the curtain to reveal how Xaxis approaches issues like brand safety, visibility, and bot fraud. He also discussed how everyone in the digital supply chain—from agencies, to brands, to platforms like Xaxis—can be better partners in shaping the Future of Programmatic.
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Mark Grether is CEO of Sizmek. He focuses on guiding the company, and accelerating the growth of the business. Before Sizmek, Mark was cofounder and global COO of Xaxis. Under his leadership, Xaxis grew into the world's largest programmatic media company, with over $1 billion in revenue in five years.
Veckans gäst heter Jonas Vahlne och jobbar som strategichef på mediebyrån Mindshare. I veckans avsnitt pratar vi om GDPR ur ett annonsörsperspektiv. Vi håller det kort och enkelt och gör ett försök i att reda ut hur GDPR kommer förändra digital marknadsföring. Vi pratar bland annat om samtycke och vad som gäller vid datainsamling. Hur programmatiska och datadrivna köp som Xaxis och liknande kommer påverkas. Är Google och Facebook vinnarna efter de nya direktiven. Och vad finns det för positiva aspekter med GDPR för användare och företag?
This week in On Shelevs Now we review Uncanny 25 and 26, X-Axis 1-3, Age of Ultron, Uncanny Avengers, and Walking Dead. We then look at an insane amount of Marvel stuff in KAPOW News. And in Retro Reviews we look X-Force 2, Uncanny X-Men 280, and X-Factor 70.
Welcome to episode #179. On the show: Top stories featuring Facebook & Moves, Storefront, Google's contact lense camera, Pulsate's beacon-based marketing platform, Baidu's mobile wallet launch in China, Bleamcard, Xaxis, the Museum of History of Polish Jews display, Verizon's Relevant Mobile Advertising platform and Presence Orb. Our feature of the week is Grand St. - a marketplace for creative technology. Full show notes can be found here: http://untether.tv/2014/twilbm-179-with-these-bionic-eyes/
Google launched Google+ last week, and they're off to a roaring start. It's their third swing at the piñata, and they may have found the formula for knocking Facebook off its pedestal. Google's first two swings were Wave and Buzz. They both went bust, and it looks like Google has learned from their mistakes. Still […] The post Social Media: Cheap and Easy – Google Launches a Facebook Killer, Xaxis Comes To Life, And Social Networking Goes In-House appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.