MDP Meredith Corp

By Mike Shields 

Meredith Corp., the owner of local TV stations and publisher of magazines like Parents and Better Homes & Gardens, had a problem.

The more partners the media company plugged into for ad technology, measurement and data, the harder it was to find out basic information about Meredith's digital ad sales operations, according to Matt Minoff, senior vice president and chief digital officer for Meredith. For instance, it became harder for his team to determine how much money Meredith's various websites made from programmatic advertising in a given day, he said.

One might wonder: Couldn't Meredith's existing ad tech partners provide that information? Isn't data the precise thing that digital advertising software is supposed to be good at?

According to Mr. Minoff, ad tech partners are great at telling a publisher how much they are making for them individually. But tying together information from all of those partners is a big challenge.

"If I wanted to know what I made yesterday, the number of reports you need to aggregate and look at is fairly overwhelming," said Mr. Minoff.

In 2015, Meredith started working with Staq, a company that promises to help publishers pull together all of their ad performance data -- from impressions delivered to revenue earned -- in one tool. Think of Staq as the publishing world's answer to the various marketing cloud offerings from companies like Adobe and Oracle.

Last month, Staq, which has raised $8.63 million to date, installed Andy Ellenthal as its new chief executive, replacing Staq founder James Curran, who became chief product officer. Mr. Ellenthal previously held senior roles at a variety of digital ad companies.

Given the current climate in digital advertising -- with industry leaders like Procter & Gamble's chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, calling for more transparency and questioning the very value of ad tech -- Staq sees an opportunity to present itself as an antidote of sorts. In fact, in the company's pitch to media companies, Staq emphasizes its ability to help them provide more clarity to advertisers, while also helping them gain back more leverage.

That approach has helped Staq land 10 major publishing clients since the beginning of this year.

"While advertisers are frustrated by the number of partners, standards and metrics required to do business today, publishers bear the brunt of the work," Mr. Ellenthal said. "Staq [helps] publishers create transparency but also control. With buyers putting more pressure on publishers, STAQ gives the tools to not only address these concerns, but also gives publishers the same sophisticated view as advertisers."

It seems the more complex the digital media business gets, the more need for software intermediaries. Indeed, not only does Meredith manage multiple websites that each employ a handful of programmatic partners, it is also providing advertisers an ever growing list of complementary data tracked by specialists who measure things like ad viewability and audience measurement.

Plus, even the ad campaigns that Meredith sells directly often include ads on platforms like Facebook, YouTube and other outlets. Each of those digital platforms offers its own data sets.

Five-year-old Staq says it can help customers pull in data from 400 different ad tech partners. The firm's clients include a growing list of big media names likes Hulu and Warner Bros.

"Over the last 10 years or so, the amount of data has exploded for publishers," Mr. Ellenthal said. "Our customers work with excess of 25 partners and receive something close to 4 billion cells of data."

Given that data overload, "you could spend 100% of the time aggregating data," Mr. Ellenthal added. "That can cause [a business] tremendous pain."

And these days, any web publisher needs to be spending as much time as it can trying to scrape and claw for the shrinking percentage of digital ad spending that isn't going to Google and Facebook. Part of the two companies' huge advantage in the market -- besides their size -- is their ability to offer marketers robust data on consumers for ad targeting purposes, not to mention powerful ad technology and teams of engineers focused on ad products.

Rather than share a cut of their revenue, publishers pay Staq a monthly fee to use their software, similar to the steady revenue streams touted by many "software as a service" companies in the marketing technology sector.

Not only does Staq promise publishers more visibility into their multitude of data sources, the firm says media companies can more quickly spot problems in their vast ad tech operations, such as broken links, ads that aren't rendering, or basic IT hiccups. That visibility should allow publishers to make fixes quickly and save lost revenue.

For example, a publisher may notice that certain kinds of advertisers are paying higher prices on inventory at certain times of day from other parts of the globe, enabling the site to redistribute activity accordingly, said Rich Caccappolo, chief operating officer of DailyMail.com, which is a Staq customer.

Mr. Caccappolo said Staq helped his company realize the importance of header bidding early on and which partners were delivering the biggest bang for their buck.

"Initially, for us this was about catching problems faster and keeping track of your overall prices," he said. "Then, you start to use it in a proactive fashion. Not just managing downside but using it for upside potential."

Write to Mike Shields at mike.shields@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 14, 2017 06:14 ET (10:14 GMT)

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