Originally published on LinkedIn June 18, 2017, click here
After over a decade working at some of the most storied companies in advertising technology, I’ve decided to join Jay Sears and the media vertical team at Mastercard Advisors. Our team enables advertisers (or as Mastercard calls them, merchants) to leverage transaction based insights to add efficacy to their existing planning, activation and measurement efforts.
The advertiser wish list has always been to be able to “close the loop” between advertising, audience definitions and actual purchase activity. Mastercard has done just that for advertisers in the retail, restaurant, travel and telco sectors. They’ve built products that are powerful tools for advertisers who want to equate digital ad exposures to sales and sales lift in order to understand consumer purchase behaviors and enhance existing planning and activation efforts in advertising.
I was really attracted to Jay Sears’ vision (in his article Crossing the Rubicon to Mastercard. Priceless) laying out some of the larger trends and rationale for Mastercard and its role in the media sector. The conclusion for advertisers is that the technology and the tools are available now to analyze the effects of advertising activities to real business outcomes (and not just proxies of the outcome like traditional “performance or direct response metrics”).
The Road to Commerce
The last decade of my career has been spent building the new data-driven infrastructure and related business processes to connect global advertisers to digital audiences. I have watched “RTB”, or real-time bidding, evolve from its very early days (when I was at Yahoo! Right Media) when data driven advertising was still a “good idea” into an entrenched ad business transacting billions of dollars in global advertising spend. I’ve been lucky enough to be part of helping the advertising business change from a blind/bulk-sold media business into a surgical/data-driven outcome-oriented practice. Throughout these changes, the central theme has been data.
Why Mastercard? A Fortune 500 global technology company, Mastercard has been recognized for innovation and changing the world for good. But when most people think of Mastercard, they think of credit cards not technology or data. However, Mastercard does not issue a single credit card. Mastercard, at its core, is a technology company that owns and operates a global payments network. Mastercard provides this technology to issuing banks or other emerging payment platforms such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Square who in turn provide the consumer the actual plastic or platform she carries in her wallet or on her mobile device. The Mastercard global payment network spans 43.3 million acceptance locations (merchants), and processes 142 million transactions every day. In total, there is a staggering amount of transaction data that’s being managed to provide this service.
Fifteen years ago, Mastercard realized they could provide insight, analysis and guidance to its issuing banks and merchants about market trends by leveraging anonymized aggregations of this data. To provide this value, the Mastercard Advisors division was created. The Advisors business includes the media vertical solutions that empower advertisers to drive better business outcomes.
As advertising and commerce come closer together, there is an opportunity for consistently collected, carefully managed, transaction-based insights to provide value throughout the advertising workflow of planning, activation and measurement. I look forward to sitting down with you — advertisers, agencies, media owners and technology platforms — to explain how Mastercard is helping advertisers in the retail, restaurant, travel and telecommunications sectors drive better business outcomes across existing efforts and infrastructure.
