For agencies, managing and optimizing campaigns across walled gardens is no easy task.
Because Facebook, Google, Snap, Twitter and Amazon each have their own ways of defining audiences and processes for optimizing spend, buyers have to launch campaigns multiple times across each of them for every client, without getting consistent insight into what’s working and what’s not.
It’s not the most efficient process or the best use of agency talent, but clients need to be on these platforms, and agencies have had no choice but to play by their rules.
But IPG Mediabrands’ chief data and marketing technology officer, Arun Kumar, saw that the tedium of buying across walled gardens was impeding his team’s ability to quickly and efficiently optimize campaigns.
“I can’t keep asking my teams to set up every campaign three or four or six times,” said Kumar, who also oversees performance marketing agency Reprise and programmatic hub Cadreon within Mediabrands. “I need to [be able to] set it up once, fix the parameters and connect into all of the platforms.”
To get around those inefficiencies, Kumar and his team began building functionalities on top of a Cadreon tool called Unity, built two years ago to optimize programmatic buys across DSPs and exchanges. Mediabrands began integrating Unity, which is still in development, with more platforms, including its internal data stack, called AMP, a few publisher private marketplaces and walled gardens including Google, Facebook and Amazon.
