Featured partner: Drawbridge

For this quarter’s Trader’s Edge newsletter for all things programmatic, we interviewed Brian Ferrario, VP of Marketing at Drawbridge.

What sets Drawbridge’s platform apart from others?

• The Drawbridge Cross-Device Platform is a one-stop shop for marketers to buy media, reach consumers, and measure success across computers, smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs, with actionable audience insights. It’s truly an all-in-one destination. Agencies and brands have full access to the self-service platform, enabling them to set up campaigns, determine targeting criteria, manage creative assets, and understand not only ROI, but learn more about their customers, versus working with a series of siloed solutions that each specialize in one of those areas.

Who is the ideal Drawbridge customer?

• Any brand that wants to understand their customers (or potential customers) is an ideal customer for Drawbridge, for two reasons. First is the ability to reach consumers across any digital device, which, honestly, is becoming a given for today’s marketers. The harder part – and what we do well – is in the measurement and reporting. Brands need to be able to quantify the desktop or in-person purchases that occur as the result of reaching someone on mobile or connected TV, for example. Understanding and leveraging those complex cross-device and cross-channel purchase paths is what our customers come to us for.

Why are you excited about partnering with Integral?

• Similar to how Drawbridge has become synonymous with cross-device marketing, Integral is synonymous with measurement. Our missions are very much in sync, and together our products are even stronger – it’s truly a “1+1=3” equation when we work together. Viewability, for example, is a very hot topic. Our programmatic bidder does its own optimization, but when you put a pre-bid tool in place like Integral’s Bid Expert, it becomes even smarter.

What’s been the biggest challenge of 2015?

• We still spend a good amount of our time “mythbusting,” especially with new clients. Some marketers have the idea that “mobile doesn’t convert,” or “iOS performs better than Android,” or that “in-app is lower-tier inventory.” But with today’s programmatic bidders and machine-learning technology, every impression is optimized to make sure the right message is being shown to right person at the right time. Sure, it’s an ad-tech cliche, but it’s the truth.

Why is cross-platform targeting so important for marketers?

• The consumer journey is increasingly fragmented across devices and channels, and it gets worse every day with new devices coming on the market. It’s not unreasonable for a typical purchase journey to start in a retail store, move to a smartphone for a price check, and then a purchase later on desktop. Or maybe there’s something on TV that sparks research on a tablet, and then a purchase later on a smartphone. Thus, it’s becoming more important to have a 360-degree view of consumers and the understand influence that marketing has on them. Brands can’t have afford to have blind spots in targeting, optimization, or attribution.

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