Navigating the Future of TV Ad Tech: Insights from Mediaocean's Ramsey McGrory and Drew Kane

I recently sat down with Mediaocean’s Chief Development Officer, Ramsey McGrory, and Chief Transformation Officer, Drew Kane, to discuss the future of television advertising in general and ad tech’s role in that future in particular. You can watch the resulting video here, but what they had to say was so insightful that I decided to turn it into a full-on Q&A.

ALAN WOLK (AW): Can you explain what Mediaocean does and where it fits in the overall ecosystem?

RAMSEY MCGRORY (RM): Mediaocean is the end-to-end workflow and set of applications that process over $200 billion of media spend for the largest advertisers. We provide the applications that plan, execute, measure, and pay for all of the investments of the Ad Age 200 advertisers, globally. We also have the activation or ad tech applications of video ad serving, dynamic creative optimization, primary ad serving, and identity management. It's a core infrastructure that the largest advertisers and agencies use to manage their advertising investment.

AW: Who are your clients?

DREW KANE (DK): Our client base consists of both agencies and brands. On the infrastructure side, we work on behalf of agencies, who are our main customers, and they're working on behalf of the advertisers. In other capacities, we work either directly with advertisers or in conjunction with our agencies.

AW: We hear a lot about advanced currency and measurement. Can you explain, in layman's terms, what exactly that is?

RM:  Advanced measurement is one of the hottest topics. It's simply saying, in a world where linear and digital are being delivered to consumers, can we do a better job at measuring? Who has been reached, how are they being reached? How quickly is that data being processed? And can the buyers and sellers be smarter about how they transact together not just using the roughly 200 Nielsen age demo combinations, but actually using first party data and third party data and using streaming data.

AW: Can you tell me about your new product, TV IQ?

RM: TV IQ is a set of applications that allow us to address key imperatives in the industry, such as audience-first thinking, convergence, and automation. It's about understanding all the different ways you're reaching consumers and how to do it. We're trying to automate these fragmented processes across all the different media types across planning, activation, and measurement to make it easy for those advertisers and agencies to spend the billions of dollars that they do, and be able to do it with visibility, transparency, and efficiency.

AW: Drew, can you tell what a Chief Transformation Officer does?

DK: As a Chief Transformation Officer, I work on the shift from our existing platforms to an omni-channel platform. It's not solely about changing technology, but a very holistic approach to transformation. It's happening on the level of people, process, technology, and data. We're trying to look out as to what this will look like, five years from now, 10 years from now, and knowing that everyone's going to be on their journey, at a different pace.

AW: What are some of the roadblocks to achieving more unified measurement?

DK:  One of the roadblocks is the need to standardize and scale. Standardizing scaling doesn't necessarily mean everyone will need to abandon their “secret sauce.” However, there are certain common elements that must be standardized. For example, not everyone consistently uses an ad ID today. Being able to implement some set of standards is essential so that folks can trust what they're doing, and you can operationalize. Another roadblock is that just because there's more data doesn't always mean it's better. You really want to understand what business outcomes you're trying to achieve, and through these advances, how are we getting there.

AW: Contextual targeting is often talked up as the next wave for streaming TV as it seems to solve a world of pain around issues like privacy and transparency. Are you seeing contextual being talked about or used more these days?

RM: Contextual has always been around, and it got more attention as people thought cookies were going to go away. The general trend is that there is a move towards seller-defined audiences being much more important because cookies and device-based data were much more limited. Contextual can be an important part of a strategy, both in terms of defining an audience and also helping to protect the advertiser from showing where they shouldn't be.