Why This Kantar Media CEO Loves The Data

by Laurie Sullivan , MediaPost

Brands want to know where, when and how often their competitors' ads run. And they want to tie the information to the way they buy media using a variety of data. These are issues that engineers at Kantar Media have been working hard to solve, said Manish Bhatia, CEO of North America at Kantar Media, a WPP company.

Despite the difficulty of answering these questions, a few unnamed clients have been testing new technology that Kantar has been working on in the hope of making it more applicable to a broader customer base, he said.

Bhatia's demeanor lightens when talking about complicated technologies like Blockchain and how artificial intelligence wrapped in data can automate the process of bidding and serving the exact ad at the perfect time. "People make programmatic and digital technology more complicated than it need be," he said.

It's also worth mentioning that this CEO has a history of working at comScore and Nielsen, both entrenched in data.

Earlier in July, Kantar Media announced the addition of programmatic data into its ad insights platform. The platform tracks advertising across all media from digital to television, radio and billboards, and analyzes the route the ad took to serve up in front of the viewer. Bhatia cited keeping track of double and triple bidding on the same ad impressions as one of the biggest issues that programmatic solves.

Bhatia believes Blockchain can play a very important role in making the ads' journey more transparent. Right now "there are few ways for advertisers to know who all the parties were in the chain that touched the ad, and how that might have impacted cost."

Read the full article from MediaPost