Programmatic IO kicks off with a fireside interview with Ben Lerer, CEO of Group Nine Media and Managing Partner with Lerer Hippeau Ventures. As a major investor in DTC, media and technology startups, Ben is well positioned to comment on trends during Covid pandemic and key opportunities for media companies during this period of global crisis and dramatic change.

2020 has been a wild ride and there's no sign of things settling down for Q4. The programmatic world is not immune, with supply duplication at an all-time high. This session will explore what's driving this increase, share surprising case study results, and offer tips to help you harness control.

In this info-packed, data-driven session, eMarketer principal analyst Nicole Perrin shares the firm's latest US programmatic forecast and explores the factors influencing spend across channels, formats and devices through 2021 and beyond. You’ll learn:

• How much US advertisers are investing in programmatic across display, mobile, video and CTV
• How macroeconomic challenges and pandemic-related shifts in consumer behavior are changing buying patterns
• Other factors buyers and sellers need to know through 2021

Bloomberg Media is a publisher with data in its very DNA. In this session, its chief product officer Julia Beizer offers a holistic model for the use of first-party data to support a publishers' audience initiatives - including subscriptions - as well as the marketing objectives of brand partners.

 Advertising has always been a wild west of methods, metrics and measurements. With the loss of third-party cookies, the media eco-system loses another important foundation and faces further uncertainty. In this talk, Nico addresses the biggest challenges for media optimization and what brands can do to get the most out of their media campaigns. 

Michael Smith joined NPR as CMO in April, in the midst of COVID-19 and on the cusp of a racial justice revolution. Both are massive trends that all companies are grappling with right now. In this session he talks about NPR's digital transformation, its monetization approach and other key initiatives.

Petco has epitomized digital transformation, while still maintaining a major brick-and-mortar presence. And a large part of this evolution happened in its marketing department, where CMO Tariq Hassan has directed strategies to make Petco smarter about its own customers, its omnichannel initiatives and brand strategy. In this fireside, Tariq will discuss how he saw these efforts through, and how they have helped Petco navigate the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Phasing out third-party cookies is creating interesting challenges to effectively target users for advertisers. Coupled with the existing and emerging laws, like GDPR and CCPA, there is increasing pressure for innovative ways of targeting user activity. While we are also making progress with technology, we are also rethinking and revisiting basic targeting principles that today can be innovative. Contextual advertising, historically implemented through keyword matching or standard contextual categories, holds a lot of promise. In this session, we’ll take a look at a novel contextual advertising method through a different lens—Page Context AI. Attendees will receive a first-hand exploration of this invention as it fits with developments and trends in the industry.

Attention-grabbing headlines might lead you to believe that EVERYBODY is in-housing media. The reality is more complicated. And it should be – in-housing media is not for the faint of heart. There are strategic, financial, organizational, infrastructural and technical considerations that brands in-housing some or all of their media management must contend with. Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell will present new research on the state of media in-housing, lay out the primary models brands are choosing, and – for those in the midst of figuring out the best model for them - provide a roadmap of steps to take to minimize bumps along the path to full rollout.

We’re nearing an end game that will see third-party cookies and mobile advertising IDs limited as consumer identifiers, being replaced with...what, exactly? IAB Tech Lab started Project Rearc as a global effort to develop a new foundation for addressability in digital marketing, and is now playing a key role in the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media. In this session, Tech Lab will provide an update on progress and next steps.

What can marketers do with an identity graph? Cadent Chief Data Officer Jamie Power will talk through the importance of efficiency, effectiveness and reach in a cross-channel television campaign, and why an identity graph at the core is critical.

As European holistic skincare & beauty brand Weleda pursued growth in the U.S., the company captured audience segmentation data from its programmatic channels to inform its marketing efforts across all channels, including influencer, print, retail marketing and more. In this session, Weleda’s VP marketing for North America Randi Jachino will provide direction for advanced omni-channel segmentation using programmatic data sets and how to use those insights to lead a full roadmap across all channels for success.

TikTok is in the headlines right now, but it’s also been working its way onto the media plan over the past few years. What started with trends and dances has become a cultural phenomenon and an effective way to reach broad audiences who aren’t spending time in traditional channels. TikTok is taking advertising seriously. It recently launched a self-serve ad platform and a business hub to house forthcoming ad products and it’s been on a hiring spree for advertising and marketing talent. Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s VP of global business solutions, will share what we can expect as the company’s ad platform matures and go deep on TikTok’s approach to growth in the coming years.

Join MoPub's Sr. Director of Professional Services & Partnerships, Casie Jordan, and Gram Game's Head of User Acquisition, Tatyana Bogatyreva, as they discuss why you need to be in-app to effectively advertise in digital. These two ad-tech industry titans will take you through best practices for buying mobile app supply programmatically in 2020, how to assess your budget allocation, optimization tactics, and more must-have insight for the savvy strategist.

There are over 100,000 websites and apps that conduct RTB auctions, and each operates dozens of supply paths. The scope of the supply path optimization problem is too big, so buyers create SPO shortcuts. They partner with preferred exchanges, or they disable reselling, or they configure always-on private marketplaces. But what if you could solve the SPO problem path by path for every publisher on the internet? Join this session to learn how industry transparency initiatives are enabling a bottoms-up approach to supply path optimization.

It’s becoming more challenging every day to understand your audiences and effectively advertise to them. With shifting consumer privacy preferences to global legislation and the eventual demise of third party cookies, marketers and publishers need a solution to bridge the identity gap and deliver revenue while honoring privacy preferences and maintaining a good consumer experience. In this session, learn how to take a multi-pronged, results-driven approach to tackling a future without cookies.

The great identity disruption of 2020 is generally thought to be limited to browser-based internet activity. Is that correct? In this session, Roku’s Bill Simmons will discuss the evolving identity landscape for TV – both addressable and linear - and what publishers and advertisers can do to prepare for the future.

Procter & Gamble continues to set the pace for advertising industry transformation. In recent weeks the company signaled plans to negotiate directly with TV networks and thereby bypass the traditional agency-led upfront. In this session, Eric Austin – Senior Director, Brand Building & Media Innovation – will discuss the company’s evolving media strategy and its latest thinking about programmatic investment.

Publishers analyze datasets from a multitude of sources on a daily basis. Unfortunately, this data is isolated in limited platforms or BI tools that lack industry context and credibility, all while adding to operational complexity. Unlocking the true value of your data sets involves a data integration journey that improves decision making and reduces costs. Pieter Mees examines the problem and the many exciting possibilities for publishers able to break free from the current paradigm.

The New York Times' Marketing Media and Advertising teams partnered to develop an enterprise-wide approach to yield, which unlocked technical expertise needed to efficiently and effectively manage onsite media. This resulted in increases to ad revenue and subscriptions, but most importantly improved our reader experience. We also discovered opportunities to test and learn utilizing paid media through programmatic channels. Now it’s time for other publishers to do the same! 

Learn how an identity infrastructure powers the full spectrum of solutions from first-party data resolution to decentralized peer-to-peer connections and the key strategies needed for your competitive edge and business sustainability.

The rapid growth of OTT/CTV and addressable advertising means marketers, buyers and sellers must understand a great deal of complexity in order to optimize their ad investments across “all of TV.” This session will delve into key ad spending trends across OTT, CTV and linear TV, and will also highlight best practices for utilizing granular pricing data to optimize TV investments on a cross screen, cross-platform basis.

Dynamic creative has evolved from optimizing simple creative versions to personalizing messages using data and automation. Now, it needs to bridge the gap between driving engagement and delivering sales in order to get ahead of the leap we saw in US ecommerce penetration: 10 years’ growth in 3 months during Q1, 2020. In this session, you will learn key trends fueling ecommerce and performance marketing. 

• What personalization mean in the world of direct-to-consumer
• Essential technologies to bridge the “personalization” gap

The times have changed and marketers, agencies and publishers need more data handling capabilities than what most DMPs can offer. The CDP is the latest technology promising to fill that void, but how do you transition from one technology to the other in a way that’s economical and effective? In this session, Ian Hocking, VP of digital at Hong Kong’s paper of record the South China Morning Post, will dig into how his team moved the publication to a CDP, how the latest developments around privacy and ID management impacted this transformation, and key things to know before you get started. He’ll also discuss what the future holds, and possible solutions to the challenge of activating off-platform data and matching it.

The acceleration of ecommerce during the virus pandemic has created new data signals and advertising opportunities. In this session, Criteo CEO Megan Clarken will share her view of current retail trends, drawing on the company’s own data, and discuss what those trends will mean for advertisers and publishers. 

This session is for all the innovative marketers out there looking to learn about the game-changing power of deep learning and the adaptive algorithmic advertising it empowers. It’s the latest innovation in performance marketing, powering consistent results at scale.

Hear from Jeremy Fain, deep learning expert and CEO of Cognitiv on how you can leverage the power of this new self-learning AI to improve your customer journey, drive ROI on your marketing campaigns, and transform your own expectations for what great performance really means in today’s media landscape. He will also cover the industry-wide need for marketers to understand and focus on incremental lift and how deep learning also makes this finally possible.

2020 has been a hard year for a lot of people and businesses, but after more than half a year of volatility, patterns have emerged around the companies that have managed to stay afloat and, in some cases, get even stronger. In this presentation, JMP Securities managing director Elgin Thompson will outline how different categories of tech companies have been able to pull through the pandemic, and how they might continue to succeed despite lingering uncertainty.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the travel, tourism and hospitality industries, upending the travel experience as we know it. As countries begin to re-open and restrictions ease, when and how will the world begin traveling again? Has the traveler mindset shifted forever? What are travelers looking for from brands going forward? Tripadvisor will share valuable first-party insights marrying traveler behavior with consumer sentiment to answer these questions – and will present possible future scenarios for travel ad spend. 

Heading full speed toward 2021, certain issues continue their prominence. During this session, we will dive into programmatic areas top-of-mind for both brands & agencies – CTV, fees, data, privacy and more.

Ask a marketer what they care most about right now, and you will most likely hear about their need to fully leverage their treasure troves of first-party data. Ask a marketer about their greatest challenge, and they will likely point to the risks and dangers of harnessing their customer data. In this presentation, Lauren Fisher will present significant new research on this topic based on a study conducted jointly by Advertiser Perceptions and AdExchanger. What are the business risks associated with structural changes to user identification online, including browser/OS restrictions and the end of the third-party cookie? How are marketers preparing? And how do they view the coming wave of solutions that are being engineered to assure continuity of addressable marketing? Lauren will also touch on how marketers are viewing Google, Facebook, Amazon, LiveRamp, Neustar and others offering identity solutions.

2020 has brought a dramatic acceleration of e-commerce, and with it a need for the world’s largest brands to reassess their distribution and marketing strategies. In this session led by Sarah Hofstetter, board member at Campbell Soup Company and president at Profitero, Kraft-Heinz’s top ecommerce leader will discuss changes underway at the food an beverage giant, including how it is using the data generated through digital sales channels to level up its product and marketing. 

It’s no small task for publishers to differentiate themselves in an ecosystem that trades primarily on commoditized, scaled identity, price, and black box algorithms. With consumer privacy taking pole position and all but first-party identity dissipating, now is the time for publishers to re-establish their value in the market. Join Nicole Lesko, SVP, Data, Ad Platforms, & Monetization of Meredith Digital, as she walks through how Meredith is doing more with data through Meredith Data Studio. She will break down the platform inputs, outputs and the use cases addressed both today and in the future.

With stricter privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, and most browsers sunsetting third-party cookie usage and in-app trackers, the industry is searching for alternatives to third-party audience targeting and moving toward privacy-friendly solutions that do not rely on personally identifiable information. This session will explore driving performance with contextual targeting, while highlighting how semantic science is powering sophisticated contextual strategies that go beyond traditional keyword lists.

Jayne Peressini, senior director of mobile marketing and growth at Electronic Arts, will be the first person to tell you that she's messed up a lot on the road to success – and she’s here to share her war stories so you can learn from her mistakes. Peressini will share insights on how to combine growth with retention at a global level, how to figure out the right media mix and the dos and don’ts of building a kick-ass programmatic practice in-house. (Hint: The key is diversity.)

 With everything going on in today's world outside our industry, the need to transition to our new world without cookies might seem like a long time from now. But this transition is not an overnight process, so with new solutions, standards, and regulations right around the corner, it is time to get your Identity strategy and practice in place. Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal of Prohaska Consulting, will share with his team what you can and should do now to get ready as a Publisher, Brand, or Tech firm to ensure your business and customers can still be accessed accurately and appropriately with impactful personalized messaging.

Every day, as people go about their daily lives, they engage with media in varied environments across numerous devices, channels, platforms. It’s this fragmented consumer attention that brands want, and they spend millions of dollars and countless hours creating content to get it. Join Derek Wise, Chief Product Officer at Oracle Data Cloud, and Cecile Blanc, Sr. Director of Global Solutions and Innovation at Xaxis for a compelling fireside chat where they share how advertisers can thrive with an omni-channel strategy by using data and technology to unify planning, activation, and measurement. Derek and Cecile will discuss the cutting edge trends, formats, and challenges shaping digital advertising today, while also sharing how advertisers need to adjust to meet the moment and facilitate meaningful connections between brands and consumers.

With the rise in awareness around incrementality in advertising, all the major platforms – Facebook, Snapchat and others – are running lift studies for brands. But they are NOT all reporting the same thing. In this session we will explore the nuances and set out some best practices for running incrementality and lift measurement studies.

The industry has already made substantial progress on solving for identity in a post-cookie world. Among the most important players in this technology race is The Trade Desk. In this session, CEO Jeff Green will discuss the company’s Unified ID 2.0, announced earlier this summer, and offer a preview of what to expect from the company in 2021. 

Time to celebrate! Join fellow attendees for some live music, trivia, fun and laughs during our virtual networking party.