The foundation of our mission is dependent on measuring and optimizing every dollar of our advertiser client’s investment and the entire portfolio of our media owner’s assets. We will not be valuable and fully useful unless we can properly influence a high majority of our client’s advertising dollars or portfolio.

In order to do this, we need to focus on coverage (the amount of impressions our clients are buying or selling that we can track) and measurability (the amount of impressions we track that we can properly measure without compromising the integrity of accuracy). We will strive to not be the company that just explains what happened in the past, but the company that provides tactical suggestions on what they can do next to better optimize their objectives. This will require us to enable complex planning, forecasting and workflow integrations but it will be worth it since we can actually help our clients capture the intended value of advanced measurement, versus just giving them a story of the past with no way to actually add value going forward. We will focus on all linear TV, OTT, digital and social channels; we will deliberately not get into print, traditional radio or out of home advertising. Additionally, in order to add more value to our clients and ecosystem, we need to work with our advertiser clients to move beyond vanity metrics and encourage them to bring sales, conversion and attribution events into brand marketing and not just performance marketing.

The future leading independent cross-media measurement and optimization solution needs to be the industry’s solution. We need to build tools and workflows to empower the various different stakeholder relationships in our ecosystem. We cannot build brand only solutions that do not enable the agency to be successful and we cannot build agency only tools that don’t allow the brands to gain more visibility and control over their destiny.

We need to build solutions that evolve the brand and agency relationship from today’s standard of procurement driven pricing or FTE models to accretive business value generated relationships and KPIs. We need to provide the advanced measurement capabilities for brands to measure what matters, evolve their advertising practices to smarter, data-driven approaches that eliminate waste and give the agencies the tools they need to properly optimize to those metrics and have the ability to differentiate and add unique value like it once was many years ago. We will not be long term successful if we build for one party and not both.

The tip of our spear will always be measurement and optimization. However, often times the most effective way to actually capture value for the client is to make things simpler and easier by integrating directly into 3rd party buying platforms or in some cases directly into the supply.

In order to get the planning data and availability of unsold inventory to properly recommend optimizations, we need to integrate into the media marketplaces. By integrating into these media marketplaces, we will have the ability to integrate into programmatic workflow tools that automate the execution, activation, buying and selling of advertising. Since we always have to be the neutral measurement and optimization party, we can never make more money on recommending parts of inventory over others due to us making more revenue. Additionally, we need to allow the client to determine their preferred mechanism of integration. Some will mandate 3rd party buying platforms and our measurement and data will be integrated directly into those platforms. Some will want direct to supply integrations and we will integrate in some cases directly into the supply chain. Perhaps the most important piece of maintaining neutrality as it pertains to 3rd party buying platforms and supply integrations is that we can never compete with the major platforms that we measure. We need to be the agnostic measurement and optimization layer that integrates into buying platforms to make things easier for our clients as a central workflow hub, but never push capturing media budget in a way that these platforms find competitive - we need to be pushing more budget to them versus taking away budget.

A large amount of attention and media investment occurs where no deterministic 1:1 impression data (eg. Linear TV, OTT, CTV and any other household level device) exists. Providing measurement and optimization on 1:1 impression level data that is all person level devices is one thing, but having the ability to ‘interoperably’ and accurately combine household level device data with person level device data is core to our value proposition and mission.

Additionally, there are some areas of measurement that are broadcasted to places where you don’t have the full deterministic or census view of how many impressions were delivered (linear TV) that were not served digitally or have gaps in the data sources to capture this. Since the combination of household level impressions, broadcast TV and non-census level source data accounts for a large amount of all consumer attention and investment dollars, we have strategically decided to not rely on 3rd party sources to give us their ground truth data that was not originally designed for cross-media measurement as part of our processing and data science methods. We will design and operate a modern TV viewership footprint for a cross-media world that is highly fungible and easy to integrate into external impression data. While primarily being a self-service software provider, owning a proprietary first party data asset that is renowned for its accuracy, skew correction, fungibility and cross-media use case driven design will allow us to provide more value than other competitive software providers and if we decide to license this data to enable other software providers, we will be well positioned to ride their upside as well.

We need to realize that we are trying to disrupt a very large and traditional industry with new data-driven approaches that fundamentally change all existing workflows that have existed in some circumstances for over fifty years.

We need to be clear that the end game is to provide self-service software and/or API solutions to the industry with no high touch service layers. We actually want to create value added service layers on top of our infrastructure so that other organizations can create business models and add enough value on differentiated services on top of our technology solutions. However, we cannot be overly eager and aggressively force everyone to abandon a service based industry for a self-service software solution overnight. There will be large variations of our client’s technical levels and ability to operate for themselves. Some will just outright need the help and service to make the change management process less disruptive and to create a bridge from the old way to the new way. We need to take a stance that the industry will be exponentially more efficient in 10 years, not 2 years. Because of this reality, we need to focus our product development cycles on self-service software but properly service the industry to help immediately provide value by meeting them where their needs are at today. Some software companies look down upon service layers on top of their infrastructure, we will not. We will look to partner deeply and strategically with our clients to understand their business intimately and eventually teach them how to fish for their own when they are comfortable and ready to make that move.

It is the golden age of TV viewership with more content created and viewed than ever before, yet traditional rating systems show a sharp decline in TV programming.

This discrepancy indicates that legacy systems are unable to properly measure the shift and fragmentation of consumer attention from the legacy way of all viewing coming from the main linear TV source in the living room to a variety of sources, mediums and devices across the web, mobile apps, smart TVs and other streaming apps. Connecting all of these viewership trends in a holistic and deduplicated view has not been done before because the legacy measurement panels do not support these use cases. Given our unique position in the marketplace of being a measurement and optimization provider with its own fungible TV viewership asset that was designed for a cross-media world, we have the ability to service the industry with the cross-media currency that it needs to flourish. We need to work very closely with advertisers, agencies, broadcasters, cable networks and distributors to create a TV currency that connects all TV viewership in a flexible measurement framework that allows for guarantees, forecasting, and interoperability into other channels. Given a currency is fundamental to how buying and selling is done in advertising, we need to partner deeply to ensure minimization of business risk from shifting from legacy solutions to our more modern approach. Working closely with the sell-side of the marketplace will allow us to add more value to the buy-side and working with the buy-side will allow us to add more value to the sell-side with everyone being able to guarantee on what they actually are looking for versus vanity or proxy metrics. Doing this correctly should increase the ROI of advertisers and increase the revenues of the sell-side at the same time by eliminating common waste of impressions that were egregiously over frequency and dramatically off-target.

We need to think about building a business that lasts 50 years like traditional measurement and currency companies.

In order to do this, we need to ensure we always maintain independence from a governance and ownership structure. We cannot have our agenda be compromised by one party or overly optimize to certain groups of the industries. Additionally, we need to be creating business models that allow for long term viability with the ability to evolve and adapt quickly to the forecasted and expected sea change of consumer privacy regulations. We need to optimize our business operations to be highly leveraged in order to increase efficiencies each year over year. Choosing a measurement and currency partner is not a light hearted choice. We need to instill confidence in the industry that we are stable and long term viable with minimal risk of shifting their business models to be predicated on our solutions. While we anticipate that we will be in high growth mode for many years to come and don’t want to optimize to turn a large profit, we want to invest aggressively back into the business while being responsible with the “earn the right to invest” mentality.

We need to be thinking about consumer privacy by design at every turn we take. The core of VideoAmp’s mission revolves around the three-way value exchange between consumers, publishers and advertisers. This is the time we think about consumers.

We need to push the industry hard in a world where full consumer opt-in is explicitly requested and clear as day about what publishers and advertisers want to do with their data. The world of long paragraphs of legal text that no one reads as a game to the consumer to just press ‘agree’ needs to be over. Consumers need to be educated and have full control in regards to how and if their data will be used. Today’s privacy tools and infrastructure are mostly designed, predicated and governed by legal contracts; not technology, meaning that data is sent to a 3rd party with no actual auditing or visibility into what that 3rd party is actually doing with it. This lack of transparency enables issues and security risks to the consumer even if they opt in their data to be used in a certain way. We should not leave consumer privacy to be governed and trusted by 3rd parties’ best efforts to properly steward the consumers data. We need to design privacy infrastructure from the ground up that provides mathematical and technological guarantees on proper use case enforcement and full ‘anonymization’ that prevents re-identification. We need the entire industry to move to technological primitives such as: differential privacy, secure multi-party computing, homomorphic encryptions, synthetic data and federated learning.