MDC's Herman in Interview Prior to September 25th Panel (Part 1 of 2)
Posted by Jay Sears on Wed, Sep 23, 2009 @ 02:12 PM
Today we are running Part One of our Q&A with Darren Herman, Founder & President, Varick Media Management (MDC Partners). This is part of our series of Q&As with top agency execs on our upcoming panel discussion, "Agency Demand Platforms: Is Everyone a Media Trader?" during Advertising Week this Friday, September 25th at 11:00am until 11:45am.
Herman joins a panel of agency executives with similar responsibilities including Quentin George, Managing Partner, Cadreon (Interpublic); Matthew Greitzer, Vice President of Search Marketing and Head of ATOM Systems at Razorfish; Curt Hecht, President, VivaKi Nerve Center, VivaKi (Publicis); and Nathan Woodman, Managing Director, Adnetik (Havas). ContextWeb's Jay Sears will moderate a discussion about the "demand platform" strategy of each company.
To attend the event as a guest of ContextWeb and the ADSDAQ Exchange, you can register here. ContextWeb's ADSDAQ Exchange is donating $25 for every attendee to GeneratioNext.
We'll be posting Q&A with panelists and further information leading up to this event, so make sure you subscribe to our Internet Advertising blog, follow ContextWeb on Twitter and join the Ad Exchange Traders Group via LinkedIn.
Your Name: Darren Herman
Your Job: President and founder of MDC Partners' Varick Media Management. I lead a brilliant team of investment managers, account, yield, and platform folks who are building the next generation media and audience platform and capability.
Your Company: Varick Media Management is wholly owned by MDC Partners, the publically traded Canadian based advertising holding company that owns such prominent agencies such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners. VMM provides it's advanced media capability to both MDC and non-MDC agencies and brands directly with active clients in automotive, retail, entertainment, telecommunications, fashion, financial services, travel, and other large categories.
How much digital media spend does your agency control?
We do not disclose figures on a per agency basis.
How many publishers did your agency purchase from last year?
VMM purchases from hundreds of publishers but has an advanced buying platform to make purchasing across such a large quantity of publishers sustainable.
How many ad exchanges and ad networks did your agency purchase from last year?
VMM was created to maximize the reach across multiple inventory sources that have an advanced technical backbone such as ad-exchanges and advanced ad networks. We also find that publishers are creating their own internal exchanges and we do participate with them. We have access to over 20+ various inventory sources that we currently are active with through our platforms.
What percentage of your media spend in 2008 was allocated to ad exchanges and ad networks?
Since this is a large composition of VMM's buys, we see this upwards of 85%. As we onboard additional exchanges and networks, we see this number increasing over 2010 and 2011.
Describe your demand generation platform, Varick Media Management.
Established in early 2008, VMM has created a capability through strategic partnerships and unique IP around advanced audience reporting across quantitatively intense inventory procurement strategies. If one were to create an agency and technology infused company today, VMM would be just that. Some would call VMM a "Demand Platform" but we still do not know what the definition of a "Demand Platform" is.
Are these demand side platforms complimentary to or in conflict with current ad exchanges such as Yahoo!'s RightMedia and ContextWeb, Inc.'s ADSDAQ Exchange?
This all depends on how you define "Demand Platform." Our platform and capability works across many different exchanges, networks, and private publisher platforms which ultimately makes it very complimentary to all of the exchanges out there because we bring liquidity. We find that having as many inventory partners as possible allows us to have the breadth and reach required to serve even the most discriminating client.
You have many large, Fortune 500 clients such as Panasonic, BMW, Presidio International, Bank of NY Mellon, and Windstream Communications. What language do you use to describe the opportunity around your demand generation platform to a client? And what scale does this solution have to provide in order to be relevant and capture their attention?
Well, this is our secret sauce so publishing it to our peers and competitors may get me in a lot of trouble with my boss and head of our holding company, Miles Nadal. After speaking with the Chief Marketing Officers of our clients, they find that the more we talk about the technologies behind VMM, we start to confuse our clients and it becomes a much more complex conversation than it should be. The benefits of what we are building are simple: deep optimization for precise targeting and insights into different audience segments both quantitatively and qualitatively.
In an agency demand side platform, how important is impression based valuation and bidding? And what common attributes of an impression do you use to assess value-Context? User cookies? User location?
You need to understand the value of each impression in order to know which to buy, trade or reject, and this is core to our process and technologies. With advertising exchanges, we get to purchase impression by impression and as they move to real-time (some are already there, but only a small percentage) the opportunity becomes even more significant. Because of the relationships we have with many different data partners, we are able to predict the value of each impression as we look at attributes like demographics, sociographics, financials, ethnographs, location, context, etc.
In this new real-time world, will there continue to be "blind buys" or "blind network buys"?
Yes, there will be, as some publishers will want to mask their inventory based on certain circumstances. We've seen that this is much less attractive to our client base and we tend to focus on transparent inventory.
Thanks, Darren!
Tune in tomorrow for Part Two of our Q&A with Darren Herman.
Need to register for this Friday's panel discussion, "Agency Demand Platforms: Is Everyone a Media Trader?" during Advertising Week (Friday, September 25th at 11:00am until 11:45am)?
To attend the event as a guest of ContextWeb and the ADSDAQ Exchange, you can register here. ContextWeb's ADSDAQ Exchange is donating $25 for every attendee to GeneratioNext.
We'll be posting Q&A with panelists and further information leading up to this event, so make sure you subscribe to our Internet Advertising blog, follow ContextWeb on Twitter and join the Ad Exchange Traders Group via LinkedIn.
Subscribe to our
Internet Advertising blog, follow
ContextWeb on Twitter and join the
Ad Exchange Traders Group via LinkedIn.