In our newest Thought Leaders Circle video IRIS.TV CEO Field Garthwaite discusses the challenges and solutions associated with metadata in the ad tech industry. Garthwaite addresses the lack of standardization in how content data, particularly genre classifications, are communicated within the bid stream—a critical component of programmatic advertising.

FIELD GARTHWAITE:I like to equate all of ad tech to real estate—there's always a broker on either side. Right, so as you know, there are sellers, there are buyers; they both have technology platforms that speak to one another.

A big challenge for them has been that there hasn't really been a standard for the way things like genre get passed into what's called the bid stream, and so that's a big problem. One publisher says, you know, "romcom." Another says "comedy_raunchy," another one says "COMEDY_RAUNCHY" all uppercase! You know, like, so there are almost like thousands of these different variations; they all hit the buy side instantaneously, and then they can't make decisions on them.

So there's actually no buying platform that can target these genre signals at scale, and that's research that was done by Janus Media because of just this fragmentation. So we're really solving this data fragmentation, this data interoperability, and standardization problem that's existed around content data.

There's a lot of buying that's done on identity and audience, and when you have the big screen in your living room and you're trying to target someone, which is done using a household ID, it's a bit of a dice game if you're reaching the right person, right? So, on average, you have two and a half people in every US household. That means that if you're doing, you know, a targeted segment tied to an individual that's in a household, at best, you have a 40% chance of reaching them.

So you're paying for data that kind of has pretty low fidelity unless you actually also understand the environments in which it's running. You know, there's going to be certain content that the teenage daughter or son is going to be watching versus the mom or the dad in the household. And so, if you actually have this signal to understand where the ads are running, it's extremely valuable, both for targeting as well as for reporting.

And now we have products on both sides of the market. We recently announced a product with Integral Ad Science where they're doing post-campaign measurement and understanding where the ads ran as well.