Leveraging Programmatic Marketing To Drive Performance and Efficiency in a Post-Cookie World with GANTIC
Zevi Tilles, Director of GANTIC, delves into his extensive career in sales and programmatic marketing and shares how GANTIC’s brand-safe technologies offer essential programmatic solutions for today’s evolving digital landscape
Zevi Tilles is the Director of GANTIC, a newly launched affiliate company of independent full-service agency Quigley-Simpson. GANTIC is revolutionizing the way digital advertising works by offering programmatic marketing solutions, allowing access to responsive audiences without the reliance on cookies and doing all this with scale as a foundational requirement. Zevi is a seasoned marketing professional with over 20 years of experience on both the agency and AdTech side. He brings a cross-channel holistic perspective to GANTIC.
Throughout his career, Zevi has worked at the fastest-growing agencies, media owners, and AdTech companies, including The Trade Desk, Atmosphere, and Talon. Adept at engaging new clients, creative problem-solving, and achieving growth, Zevi has built a reputation for his ability to communicate, compel, and create growth in start-ups and early-stage companies.
The Continuum spoke to Zevi about programmatic marketing in a post-cookie world and the launch of GANTIC’s first product, the Cultural Accelerator Marketplace (CAMP). We also got to talk about his early career in experiential marketing, including the times he wrapped a city bus in dirty laundry and turned Times Square into Hell.
You have a long career in sales and programmatic marketing, and you recently helped launch GANTIC. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
GANTIC, a Quigley-Simpson affiliate, is a first-party data-infused, cookieless programmatic solution that builds dynamic, data-rich, supply-path optimized, category-curated PMP marketplaces. Our highly responsive first-party data is based on purchase intent and purchase behavior.
GANTIC uses first-party audience, contextual, and cognitive data. Leveraging direct integrations with SSPs, our automated curation stack becomes a powerful tool for programmatic buyers that drives both performance and efficiency by aligning demand- and supply-side technologies.
We’re using contextual signals and predictive data, which don’t rely on cookies, as well as first-party data from the publisher side and third-party data from trusted sources like the WeatherChannel, Experian, and TransUnion to create private marketplace deals. Our automated technology makes audiences accessible while ensuring efficiencies.
We pride ourselves on being brand-safe and transparent by using a solution that plugs right into what advertisers are already doing. They don't have to change anything. They can activate it on their DSP, and it’s both scalable and responsive. Also, we can do it across channels, whether it’s CTV, video, native, mobile, or display.
We also access 20 SSP partners to ensure that we find inventory that aligns with an advertiser’s target audience.
What made you excited about this opportunity?
I’ve been working in programmatic marketing for a long time, and like everyone else, I was struck by the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study. It found that the average campaign ran on 44,000 websites, many of which are merely made-for-advertising websites. It also found issues with measurability, viewability, and invalid traffic and noted the need for SSP optimization. The study concluded that there are $22 billion in efficiency gains available to the client-side marketer community.
When I started talking to Quigley-Simpson about GANTIC, I quickly understood that they wanted to address exactly these pain points. We have a massive opportunity to improve how advertisers and agencies activate programmatic campaigns. The industry is facing enormous privacy and cookie deprecation changes, which can be the catalyst we need for a better path forward. Marketers can improve programmatic by curating the most authentic supply from trusted, vetted publishers and optimizing the supply path to make data activation more cost-efficient and cookieless.
GANTIC also enables advertisers to reach the total addressable audience—combining the desired audiences and inventory drives responsiveness. Our marketplaces address these needs by using contextual, predictive, and cognitive data signals to reach the desired audiences viewing media on the optimal inventory sources. This is all supercharged by AI and machine learning to achieve outcomes that align with business objectives at scale.
I was really excited by the opportunity to build this in the early stages.
We’ll talk more about GANTIC, but let’s go back to the beginning for a minute. Can you tell us how you got your start in advertising and marketing?
I've always been involved in hyping and promoting things from a young age, whether it was a football pool or brackets for the NCAA tournament. When I got to college, I started selling advertising in the Greek directory. Syracuse University is a school with a massive community of students interested in media, and there was so much advertising and marketing around. Advertising appealed to me because it was creative and always changing.
My first job was in print publishing. I sold ads in a paper called the Philadelphia Weekly, similar to the Village Voice. I had to manage a lot of relationships around the city of Philadelphia; I would meet business owners, talk with them about their issues, and then somehow explain how advertising in the paper would really help them. That’s where I learned to sell, listen, and consult to solve business problems.
My roles evolved from there. I started to be a little bit higher up on the food chain, so to speak, and was able to engage with the larger budget campaigns, digital advertising, and the advertising agencies behind them, and that’s when I decided this was something that I could really do for my career.
“We pride ourselves on being brand safe and transparent by using a solution that plugs right into what advertisers are already doing.”
After a few other roles, you started your own marketing company with a great name: TrashTalk! What did the company do?
We were an experiential agency that added value for brands and agencies by creating an impact in a non-traditional, creative form. We specialized in vehicle advertising; we wrapped cars and pedicabs, had moving backpack boards, and even started getting into Segways. We were sort of the inventors of that medium and brought it to the forefront. We’d also have guys riding all over the city on advertiser-created routes and brand ambassadors to offer key messages, samples, branded premium items, and brand-specific talking points.
We had this one activation for a laundry detergent called ALL Small and Mighty. The selling point was that you could wash a lot of clothes with a very small bottle. So, we took loads of laundry and glued everything in them to a city bus. There were shirts and towels hanging off of the bus; it looked crazy and got a ton of attention. We won awards for that one: a Yahoo Purple Chair and an OBIE.
This was before we all had cell phones in our pockets—they were still in our cars, plugged into the cigarette lighter. “Going viral” back then was about getting some people to post to Picasa or other photo-sharing sites and get a handful of likes from their friends and family. We were marketing right to the consumers who saw our ads in the streets. With no social media platforms, the barometers for success were less sophisticated.
I love how things have evolved from there. Great creative is and will always be essential, but there’s an art to finding the eyeballs. That’s what I’ve always done, and that has become so much more sophisticated.
You’re a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. You started a second company after TrashTalk! Can you tell us about that?
After about seven years, TrashTalk! merged with a company called FreeCar Media. I stayed on for a few more years and left in 2010 to start ATM Media Network, which provided consumers with sponsored Free Wi-Fi access, brand messaging, and entertainment content. We wanted to help people make informed decisions and react to relevant local offers and insights on their growing list of mobile devices, such as iPads, laptops, and mobile phones.
I did that for six years and then there were some changes in the space. A couple of the big players consolidated, and it affected our network and what we were able to offer. At the same time, I was talking to an old colleague who wanted me to come to The Trade Desk and work with him. I decided to sell my assets in ATM and dive into the world of programmatic advertising.
The Trade Desk is a second-generation DSP designed to fix the problems in the early programmatic ecosystem. Can you explain what that means?
Sure. In any ad buy, there are two sides to the deal: there’s the advertiser, and there’s the publisher. The advertiser is the brand or company that wants to get their promotional information out there, and the publisher is the one who has access to the eyeballs. In the old days, they would call each other up and make a deal. The advertiser would say, “I want to be on ESPN, and here’s my budget,” and the publisher would tell them when and how many times their ad could run for that budget.
But then things got more complicated, mostly because there started to be so many different places for ads to run. Advertisers couldn't manage that on a direct basis over and over again. Between the negotiation back and forth and the sheer volume of paperwork that one deal needs, the process is just too cumbersome to go deal by deal. Advertisers would never be able to get to scale in the sort of way they’re doing across CTV, digital audio, or native, video, and display. Programmatic became the solution for advertisers and publishers.
Programmatic advertising essentially puts two pieces of technology between the two sides. Advertisers use a demand-side platform (DSP) to purchase ads and determine where they’d be placed. Trade Desk is the biggest DSP outside of Google DV360. Publishers then use a supply-side platform (SSP) that aggregates all of the advertising demand. A bidding process goes on between the demand and supply sides, and there's an exchange in the middle.
Google operates an SSP & DSP, which is a challenge as they have competing motivations. The DSP side is focused on getting the best inventory and lowest CPM, while the SSP is focused on getting the highest yield for their inventory. The way they handle that conflict of interest is by providing very little insight into how they achieved the performance for advertisers post-campaign. The Trade Desk was able to separate from Google because it focused on transparency, service to agencies, and providing advertisers more insight into what audiences and inventory drove the best results for their campaigns.
The education and experience that I received at The Trade Desk prepared me for the programmatic world we are in today. I feel like I have a compass that helps me get around a place where a lot of people are lost and trying to find their way.
I left The Trade Desk but kept working in programmatic advertising. Then, I took a role at Talon in a division that specializes in creative production and activation for digital out-of-home (OOH) campaigns.
“Marketers can improve programmatic by curating the most authentic supply from trusted, vetted publishers and optimizing the supply path to make data activation more cost-efficient and cookieless.”
Did you enjoy getting back to the creative side? Did you have a favorite campaign or project?
We worked on creative for the likes of Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Spotify, and Disney, so we were working on some really innovative stuff like gesture recognition and augmented reality. My favorite was definitely the event we did for Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens. We created an apocalypse in Times Square. Using an AR overlay on top of a live camera feed from multiple angles, our creative appeared on massive digital billboards. People were “seeing” themselves in the street on the billboards with cabs being thrown past them or overhead by Kraken tentacles. It was very creatively done. Neil Gaiman was there, and he tweeted that it was one of the most exciting moments of his career. It was definitely one of the most exciting ones for me.
I had a lot of fun doing creative stuff and reconnecting with the digital out-of-home space, but I felt like programmatic was still calling me. There's nothing like the impact you can make with omnichannel activation programmatically.
Plus, cookieless programmatic activation is the future. The cookie depreciation has been gradually changing how data is used. Deterministic identity is significantly shifting, with the publisher becoming the "source of truth" for the audience and the way brands reach them through their DSPs. Using the right mix of data-driven audience tools and authentic inventory is essential to a campaign's success. This is a key aspect of any brand's solution to operating in a cookieless world and what we are addressing with GANTIC.
We’ve been hearing about this cookieless world for a long time. Is it really here?
Google has decided that the cookie is going away (though they’ve put it off a few times), and Apple iOS and iPadOS 13.4 and Safari 13.1 block the use of third-party cookies across the board, which advertisers have had to evolve around.
Obviously, brands don’t want this change in the pipes to affect their outcomes—no CEO or Board is going to be okay with a CMO who blames dwindling sales on the lack of cookies.
I believe there’s a big opportunity for companies that have a vision for how to proceed. Partnering with an advertising services provider with a post-cookie solution can provide brand marketers with a beacon to navigate successfully in this storm of change.
Going back to GANTIC, you just launched your first two products. Can you start by telling us about Impact Marketplaces?
Impact Marketplaces align historical campaign response data with first- and third-party data such as purchase intent and purchase behavior. We leverage all of this through our next-generation DMP to create marketplaces that are focused on outcomes versus delivery and performance rather than just reach.
Impact Marketplaces get crafted for each brand and its KPIs. A brand could ask us to develop an impact marketplace for women over 35 interested in purchasing an economy automobile or Gen Z travelers with a household income of over $150k. Another example is a brand that wants to reach financial professionals and offers us a few attributes of their ideal customer—like they’re often golfers and sports venue attendees. We can create an Impact Marketplace to reach that audience, and it will scale at a greater rate because it is based on known purchase behavior.
We're going to be building it using the largest SSP partners and cross-channel activation, including the most impactful media with a focus on CTV and video; because we're focused on impact, we are over-indexing towards CTV and streaming audiences to reach them with powerful and compelling video assets.
Over time, as brands run campaigns, our data is going to be more precise, and our targeting pools are going to get deeper and more robust. We’ll also be using AI and machine learning to refine our audiences and find the highest indexing sites for those audiences. So, your impact marketplace will constantly be improving and optimizing, and the audience that you can target will continuously be growing.
“Partnering with an advertising services provider with a post-cookie solution can provide brand marketers with a beacon to navigate successfully in this storm of change.”
You also launched the Cultural Accelerator Marketplace or CAMP. Can you tell us what that is?
We’re matching audiences with inventory. Our first product, the Cultural Accelerator Marketplace (CAMP), is a solution to reach multicultural audiences on authentic, diverse inventory sources at scale.
CAMP has an overlay of over 250 audience identifiers, which allows us to reach diverse audiences in ways that are, again, easily accessible, efficient, brand-safe, privacy-compliant, transparent, and highly effective.
We’re really focused on removing the complexity of reaching these audiences and accounting for the brand's media spend with certified diverse publishers that we’ve curated for the media buy, as well as scalable audience-targeted media, to drive results for the campaign. This helps brand marketers account for the annual support they provide to build a larger diverse media ecosystem without sacrificing on performance and scale of their campaigns.
There’s an industry mandate that advertisers devote a percentage of their ad buys to targeting diverse audiences while supporting diverse media outlets. Advertisers are trying to keep up with how much of their spend is being allocated to diverse audiences and media, but it’s hard for them to do. It’s especially hard for holding companies that buy huge swaths of advertising for multiple clients to keep track of their diverse spend. It’s also sometimes hard to know if publishers are really minority-owned. With CAMP, we are now able to offer advertisers a solution to focus their diversity spend and know exactly where it’s going.
Why do you think these are the right products for right now?
The demand for programmatic marketplaces is growing exponentially. There is clearly a need for differentiated marketplaces beyond the walled gardens that are brand-safe, secure, transparent, and responsive. GANTIC provides brands and agencies programmatic solutions that are designed for what's next!
June 13, 2024
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