Insights from the Programmatic Trailblazers will feature video interviews with some of the brightest minds in programmatic, ad-tech and digital who will be sharing their insights, discussing trends, and addressing challenges within the industry.

An elevator pitch for your session: Why should people come and see you at the Programmatic Summit in 2024?

Dan: We believe that AI is creating a paradigm shift within digital media and advertising, and we’re harnessing it in ways which will transform what verification can do for advertisers in terms of helping them drive real business outcomes. So, this is seismic change that’s happening right now.

Why is it important to have an event like the Programmatic Summit?

Dan: We’re a global company. We aim to safeguard advertisers and their media investments around the world – and we do that across every channel format, platform, impression everywhere. Australia and APAC in general is a very important region for us. It’s high growth, many of the multinational customers that we serve in one place also operate out of Australia, and so having campaign continuity and consistency is an imperative for us.

What are your top three words describe programmatic in 2024?

Dan: Performance-oriented, algorithmically-driven and optimizing and corresponding to real outcomes like never before.

What do you think the biggest challenge for programmatic is going to be in 2024?

Dan: AI, these are two powerful vowels in the industry and the world as you know, and we’re absolutely harnessing them for good but they’re also contributing to many of the issues that we seek to combat. AI is fuelling the creation of content and much of it is algorithmically driven to drive monetisation – which means it’s salacious, it’s inflammatory, it can be fake or misleading – and so that’s one issue.

Another one that AI is propagating is fraud. So fraudsters are absolutely harnessing the power of AI. To whip up new variants and schemes that can emulate user behaviour, real human being behaviour, like never before and that’s another thing that we’re combating.

A third I would say is MFA, so made for advertising sites. Like with content generation, MFA, which are sites whose sole purpose is to drive monetisation, in some cases are publishing thousands of articles a day in multiple sight simultaneously to try to enhance that yield. And so it’s AI, again, force for good, It’s contributing to the issues. We’re fighting fire with fire, but increasingly, there will be a volume of content that constitutes a reputation minefield for advertisers that they’ll need to navigate. I think the assumption that AI and how it can be harnessed by users for creativity or businesses for efficiency, only operates on the good, white, and positive side of the fence. It is equally applicable on the dark side. And in the last year we saw two times the number of mobile fraud schemes, CTB fraud schemes, all propagated by AI. And MFA site, which in many cases are of dubious quality or 20% of the programmatic bid stream, and that was a revelation for many advertisers.

80% of bit of internet traffic last year was video and increasingly AI for deep fakes and pretending to be one thing that it’s not – mobile spoofing, CTB inventory and monetising some of the most lucrative placements – is only gonna increase in velocity. AI is phenomenal and it’s gonna absolutely pull humanity forward and the internet forward, but increasingly buyer beware, because many of the issues that we worried about in the past will only accelerate and become more severe with the advent of AI on the fraud or misinformation or other quality issue scale.

Why are you passionate about the subject that you are speaking about?

Dan: DoubleVerify is a verification company, which really is just a euphemism for media quality and performance, but at our heart we’re an innovation enterprise. Our job is to harness technology in such a way that we can ensure media quality performance and outcomes for the advertisers that we serve.

That is as noble a role as you’ll find in adtech and digital advertising. The added reason why I personally am so passionate is that there is a very important by product of what we do. You know, we’re in the business-to-business space where we serve global brands and their agencies and we help make their advertising better. We make it more accountable. We eliminate waste. We help them identify greater performance that helps a CPG brand sell shampoo or a car brand put users in seats of test drives, etcetera. But when we do that, we actually support the fair value exchange that is the internet. When you or I, or somebody in Argentina goes online and you watch a video and I download a piece of content or someone else plays a game, the cost of that experience to you and me is zero. Because advertisers pick up the tab and they’ll only do so as long as they feel like there is a material return on their investment. If they’re getting ripped off through fraudulent inventory or they’re stepping on mines in terms of brand safety and suitability because they’re content adjacency is harmful to their equity, they’ll withhold spend which means good publishers and app developers will have to monetise in a different way and enter a whole new world of micro payments and paywalls that will gate our access to content.

So, when verification works and we harness technology to do our job the best way that it can be done, we support a free and unfettered internet for all of humanity to the benefit of all of humanity. And that I think is something that has nothing to do with our business model or how we earn revenue, but is essential for the planet.

I think the one thing that I would like to like to proffer is if we talk about, you know, technology and the next wave of how it will be transformational for our business – there is this shining star out there for us, which is algorithmic dynamic octa optimisation. And so previously, all of our data and all of our segments could be implemented programmatically in a static way. You know, you choose a viewability segment you identify your brand’s safety and suitability profile, you defend against fraud. But with the new advent of AI and what we can do all of our data – in addition to a brand’s own first party data, bid stream data, third party data – can go into a dynamic regression that identifies of all of these datasets ,which ones will be most impactful on what the brand wants to accomplish. And that will increase efficiency. It’ll increase effectiveness. And for us selfishly, it’ll transform the value of verification data for programmatic buyers.

The Programmatic Summit – in Melbourne on Thursday, 29th February 2024 and in Sydney on Thursday, 7th March 2024 – will bring together 650 of the smartest minds in the digital marketing and advertising industry.