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The Refresh News: DoubleVerify & Rockerbox: What This Acquisition Means for Measurement
00:21:57
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- [00:00]
Host
This episode is brought to you by Zeta Global. Do you know what it takes to transform marketing into a data driven profit center? Are you able to align the C Suite around your AI vision and strategy? Zeta Global has the Playbook to help you get started. Download Driving growth in the AI era today at ZetaCMO AI Book. Again, that's Zeta CMO AI Book welcome to today's episode of the Refresh by Market where we bring you the latest and greatest in advertising news. Don't forget to follow the Marketecture account on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for more news. Related Content before we start, I wanted to cover some architecture, media announcements Market Thriving in Chaos conference is on March 17th in New York City. It is almost sold out so if you've procrastinated you need to stop now and go to Marketlive.com and buy your tickets. There is nothing I can do when we have no tickets left. Also, Miami Lights Our party is set for April 28th and we're ready to outshine the sun with our fabulous neon theme in Miami. We're also presenting Preach on the Beach, a video series featuring executive interviews and a fun and relaxing setting. If you're interested in sponsoring, visit@God events.com and click the sponsorship box. Now to our podcast today. I'm thrilled to have both DoubleVerify and Rockerbox joining us today. With DoubleVerify's work in digital transparency and Rockerbox's approach to measuring campaign performance and attribution, our guests truly bring a wealth of experience and a fresh insight into how technology is reshaping our space. I'm excited to have Doug Campbell, Chief strategy officer from DoubleVerify, and Ron Jacobson, co founder and CEO of Rockerbox. Guys, welcome. Thanks for being here today.
- [01:59]
Doug Campbell
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [02:00]
Ron Jacobson
Thanks.
- [02:01]
Host
Excited to be here, Ron. Congrats, congrats on the acquisition. It must feel great as a founder to finally feel that the hard work, sweat and tears has paid off.
- [02:10]
Ron Jacobson
Yeah, no thank you. I mean it's definitely been an exciting journey. It's been a long time coming and just really happy to see that. For my the teammates that help build Rockerbox, our investors, all of our partners that I think we're putting Rockerbox in a really good position for the future. So very excited about the news and what lies ahead.
- [02:27]
Host
I agree. I feel like the focus on attribution on top of just the transparency that DoubleVerify has been focusing on, especially with all the recent news around URL level reporting is really important for the industry overall. Maybe I'll Kick this first question over to Doug, if that's okay. Ron. I just want to understand, Doug. When you were exploring the acquisition and you were looking into Rockerbox as a company that you wanted to add to your existing portfolio of services, what made Rockerbox stand out and what does this mean for your users?
- [02:55]
Doug Campbell
So, you know, first and foremost, when we look for, you know, any kind of acquisition, we look for a great team and we look for great people. And we found that for sure in Ron and Rick and actually the whole team, they are super smart, they're very client focused, they're able to operate with agility and in a kind of constrained resource environment. And so all of that kind of adds up to a very important component of why we do any kind of acquisition. And we found the same thing in Cybids a year and a half ago and it was a great success and we expect the same thing here. The second thing is, you know, being able to offer a very strong measurement and activation as sort of our core and leading to more performance as we move through optimization and then into measuring outcomes. This fit perfectly in that journey. So we go from, you know, high media quality to optimization to measuring the outcomes and then back again. And that loop is incredibly important to all of our customers. And we are really thrilled to have Rockerbox come and join Divi.
- [04:12]
Host
So how does attribution work with Rockerbox? Maybe this is maybe more for you, Ron. What does this acquisition mean for you in terms of the data available to you now that you didn't have prior? What does this mean for your existing clients? But how does attribution work at Rockerbox and what is it exactly that you do to help connect these dots?
- [04:31]
Ron Jacobson
Yeah. So I'll start with what does Rockerbox do? Our goal is to help measure outcomes for some of the most sophisticated brands and advertisers in the world. And to us that means, as you know, an advertiser spending dollars across many, many channels, from social to search to CTV to linear tv, it becomes significantly more difficult with each channel, each incremental dollar spent, to actually know what's working. And that's really where Rockerbox starts, is how do we help brands measure if their ad dollars are actually driving business outcomes? Purchases, site visits, email signups, you name it. That's the core of Rockerbox. We've added to that different ways to measure from medium mix modeling to incrementality testing, great solutions to help to really validate and then potentially calibrate that day to day reporting layer. But again, all coming together for a cohesive platform that makes it hopefully as simple as possible to measure what's working and to invest more in those areas and frankly to divest from areas that are underperforming what this kind of means combined perspective. I think in the short term we have a really focused product roadmap for the year that DoubleVerify is very excited about. I'd say though, as we look further out, I think there's a lot of really interesting opportunities. I think DoubleVerify brings really interesting data that could be really complementary to what Rockerbox is already measuring. Not just is it performing, but some of those more upper funnel KPIs that we just don't have access to today. I think being able to layer that on top of Rockerbox is super exciting. I think be able to feed our outcome data back into Cybid so that they can actually drive performance against the end outcome is a no brainer. And we've already done some POCs with double verifying that and had a lot of success. So yeah, I think there's a lot of potential that's additive to what Rockerbox has today, which I think is great for our customers and hopefully also really good for Double Verify's customers.
- [06:11]
Host
Has doubleverify historically had measurement solutions or has it mostly predominantly been brand safety fraud prevention solutions? I'm familiar with DoubleVerify, but I know DoubleVerify as more of a brand safety solution and market fraud prevention. Maybe some viewability, but not necessarily on the measurement piece. Is that a new focus for the company moving forward or has it always been there and you're just, you know.
- [06:35]
Doug Campbell
Doubling down, you know, as our core business has always been exactly what you're saying. It's been fraud, it's been viewability, it's been brand safety and suitability. And then we also have attention that we measure along with that is sort of more of a performance product. But this is the first time where we have begun to think more again kind of holistically from how do you build something that's very, very important to your clients? You build it by having a strong media foundation, then you optimize and that's the Cybids part of the business. And then you measure those outcomes in order to go back to the bottom and build that loop. And I think that's, that's what we're the most excited about. It's kind of completing that loop through really high media quality optimization and then measuring the performance of that makes sense.
- [07:30]
Host
That sounds like it would be of great value to users and potential new users. Does, does this mean any major integrations for existing partners? Do you need to retag anything? Is there a rollout phase or process or do existing publishers you work with today flip a switch and get access to everything you need?
- [07:50]
Ron Jacobson
There's definitely going to be a rollout here. I think Rockerbox particularly works more on the advertiser side. I think us trying to figure out with Double Verify, really thoughtful, go to market across all their customers is a bit of a no brainer in terms of how can we expand Rockerbox to their really great customer base. But as Doug mentioned, this is a bit of a, it's a new type of measurement in the sense that it's going further down the funnel than Double Verify has provided in the past. So, so there is going to be some implementation work for those advertisers to potentially get up and running with Rockerbox, something we feel very comfortable doing. We've done it for hundreds and hundreds of brands. But I think as we tell the story to Double Viru my customers, I think personally they'll be very intrigued and you know, we can, we can make a good case for why it makes sense to do that integration work.
- [08:31]
Host
Why does it make sense? So, just curious, right? There's going to be advertisers listening to the pod, there's going to be agencies, there's going to be ad tech companies. Why should they integrate this and why should they roll this out? What are like the key benefits, maybe the top two or three key benefits of doing this for let's say an advertiser and to justify the work and the roadmaps. Because as you know, sometimes companies are short on resources, they need time to roll things out. It's common problem everywhere. But to motivate them to move forward quicker, what do you think are those key? Three or four points, you know, so.
- [09:01]
Doug Campbell
There are three or four really kind of big benefits. First of all, when you think about what we're trying to achieve here, the advertiser is looking at how they spend their dollars and how they spend it really, really efficiently. And so what we do in our core business is that we help them ensure that there's no fraud, that it's brand safe, that it's viewable. So we increase the quality of the media that you spend on and then we help you optimize that media and that's through cybids and on different platforms across the ecosystem. And then the new part is the ability to then go and measure exactly how effective that ad spend is versus the outcomes that a brand or an advertiser or an agency wants to achieve. And so as it turns out now you have a fully integrated kind of stack between making sure that everything that you spend your money on is high quality, is well optimized and actually performs for you. And so that's the, that's sort of the promise of sort of the integration. And then, you know, Ron, do you want to talk just a little bit about kind of how you all think about, you know, what, what the key benefit is from sort of like measuring outcomes across, you know, your clients.
- [10:27]
Ron Jacobson
I mean it just gets very difficult for these brands when they're across a really wide range of channels with a wide range of different tactics from upper funnel media to more bottom of funnel retention or retargeting to really start to keep their finger on the pulse of what's working. I'll give you like an example. You're a brand that's spending on Meta and CTV and you're running email retention and you're also looking into some open web. It's hard to know which of those different channels is what's moving the needle. And that's exactly where our Rockerbox comes in. We help them understand what's the journey, what's the path across all those channels that let someone to convert. What's the benefit of adding Internet new channels, something like linear TV or ctv, maybe decreasing your time to conversion or increasing your roas your return every ad spend. So it's taking the high quality ads that are being served that have been proved to be high quality based off double verifice technology and now asking the next question, next logical question, which is not just were they high quality but what are the outcomes they're driving? And that's exactly where rockerbox comes in.
- [11:30]
Host
Awesome. We'll kind of move on to some more questions mostly around transparency. The industry has been hot with transparency as a topic. We hear it all the time, it's constantly on LinkedIn and in the trades. You, you recently announced your URL level reporting. I think I caught on Friday you announced something related to making this available on supply side platforms as well. I may have caught that. I don't know if I read the entire article, but can you, can you fill me in on, on what that means for your advertisers? There's millions if not billions of domains that pass through so the amount of data that's being passed along is massive. What is the value there for advertisers and how do you recommend they manage this?
- [12:14]
Doug Campbell
So you know, again, transparency is, you know, the foundation of sort of all trust in digital advertising and is a foundation of the products and services that we provide to our advertisers across the entire ad spend landscape. As we provide more and more data, more and more insights, they have the ability then to go in and look at what we provide in a basically an increasingly transparent way. We've always given this, so this is actually, believe it or not, is not something new. We've always given URL insights or insights to exactly how brand suitability and safety is classified. But now what we're going to do is not only are we going to continue to provide it on demand, but we're going to provide it inside our pinnacle UI that we provide to our advertisers. And very soon we'll also provide data, like a data stream that will come directly to any place that they want to use that data. And the benefits to them is really twofold. The first is being able to see and ingest that data in a way that before was a little bit more bespoke and it was just asked for on an ad hoc basis. So this will increase the automation, make it easier and then taking those insights and understanding exactly what classification categories we provide so that you can get very, very granular as an advertiser, where you want to place your ad spend and what is and is not brand safe. So before what we provided and will continue to provide our hierarchies of classification and now we're going to give you exactly how that classification is broken down so you can make more granular decisions. And we hope that this goes on to help, you know, many parts of the ecosystem. So for example, news, where we hope that when people understand that news content can be both, you know, worrisome but also can be a great place to advertise. And instead of having, you know, just sort of turning off anything that has to do with news, now we give you more granular controls so that you can feel safe in all of your advertising, both on the open web or inside of, you know, news publishers or actually any publishers across the ecosystem. So that that's the benefit of, of what we hope to provide.
- [14:55]
Host
Okay, so you mentioned something that this was already available, but like ad hoc on request. I had actually posted that somewhere saying, I think they already provide this. So is this really more about just the ease of access to this information, really integrating into your UI and then giving others the control and the insights for them to do as they please with it really?
- [15:17]
Doug Campbell
That's right. That's exactly right. To make it more useful to them. And what we found is as we get better and better at providing more detailed information, our advertisers, especially the ones that are very sophisticated, always ask us the question, what can we do with this data now? How can we make this data more valuable to us? And that's essentially the question that we're answering with our URL reporting both inside our UI and then more towards the end of the year, you know, integrated in any place that they need or want.
- [15:50]
Host
I saw you added more categories. I think one of them was like highly illicit, do not monetize peer to peer sharing for potentially illegal downloading, I guess sites. Do you feel that that would, would create the right level of controls for advertisers to be able to say, okay, these are, these are things I should definitely stay away from and these are excluded instantly or how does that work?
- [16:14]
Doug Campbell
Yeah, that's a really great point. So in the way that we think about how we protect our advertisers and actually how we protect the ecosystem from funneling money to highly illicit sites where there's absolutely terrible content, what we want to do is we want to provide more and more control for our advertisers so that they understand exactly how to do that and we make it easy. So by having sort of a highly illicit, do not monetize content category, we allow them to just check a box and they don't have to worry about it anymore. And peer to peer sharing and streaming is also a problem where we've seen in the past, not just us, but others have seen problems with highly illicit content. And so we also give the option to turn that on and off as well. We've always provided the option for anything that we don't classify because we classify obviously very large sites, but when it gets down to very, very small numbers of impressions, difficult to classify the entire Internet. So we've always had a place for advertisers to say, hey, if we don't classify it, or we don't, we don't think it's worth categorizing, then don't advertise against it. We've always done that. But these are increased safety precautions for all our advertisers.
- [17:32]
Host
Great. And what does this mean for supply side platforms? So ideally you're working with advertisers now you're integrated with supply side platforms. Is that just for the demand side platforms that are integrated with the SSPs? Is this a publisher solution or ease of integration? What does that mean?
- [17:49]
Doug Campbell
So you know, we, we right now our data is Available, you know, for pre bid inside of all of the DSPs. And we get questions from our advertisers who say, you know, hey, we work with an SSP or we want to do a deal with an ssp. And so can you also make your data available on the supply side so that we can also just look to get a deal ID or something to help us understand and make sure that what we're doing on the supply side is also safe. And so if you think about it, it's really just the mirror image of providing the data on the DSP side. Now we will also provide it on the SSP side.
- [18:30]
Host
Fantastic. Ron, now that you are part of the DoubleVerify family, are you retiring? Is it time for you to buy a yacht or are you still working hard building phase two of Rockerbox?
- [18:42]
Ron Jacobson
I'm going nowhere. The one thing I expect to change is I'm now going to be adding guacamole to my Chipotle orders. That's the big change in my life.
- [18:49]
Host
Yeah, that's an extra dollar.
- [18:52]
Ron Jacobson
I've always avoided it and now I feel like, you know what, I worked for a while to build Rockerbox. I've earned that, but I get it. Well, we always think about a Rockerbox is what were the series of resources we needed to get Rockerbox to the next stage. And there are many different avenues we could have looked at there. There's crazy capital, there's finding great companies to work with and double verify. Just the more Rick and my co founder Rick and I thought about it was the perfect opportunity. It brought us the resources, a company that's global in nature, some of the biggest advertisers in the world. The prospect of bringing Rockerbox's technology to all those advertisers is unbelievably exciting. So I'm more pumped than ever.
- [19:28]
Host
I'm pumped too. I think it's great news. I've heard a lot about you in particular, Ron. I've heard great things in the market. So also I'm happy this worked out for you and that you're part of the DV group now. Final question for you. When we talk about attribution, what is the secret behind it? Are you utilizing more AI and better data? What is the attribution process and how are you connecting all these dots? I think you touched upon it earlier in the podcast, but really focusing on what this means for advertisers and how you're doing it without releasing any proprietary stuff. How is your product really different than the other solutions in the market.
- [20:08]
Ron Jacobson
I think a lot of times people focus a little bit too much on the final mile of measurement, which is okay, now that we have all this data together, let's actually evaluate it and measure what worked versus what didn't work. And I think that's really downstream of all the difficult work, which is how do we get all the data centralized, how do we get it all clean and normalized and in a consistent taxonomy? How do we strike partnerships that get us access to data assets that aren't available off the shelf, use your data for paid social channels and things like that. So I think a lot of that work is actually the most difficult part. And where Rockerbox excels that also leads us to do things like how do we, how do we try to connect the dots? And we believe firmly that there, there is no silver bullet there. Every channel has a different methodology you have to use. And we've invested a lot of time and money in figuring out what is the right way to connect the dots between CTV and Outcome compared to paid social and Outcome compared to direct mail and Outcome. And they're all different. So all of that though is the kind of the dirty. I think it's fun, but other people think it's not necessarily the most fun part of building a business. That's the hard work that then enables the cool. We have everything, we have a very clean path to purchase now let's measure it like that last step is actually simpler once you have the right foundation. So I think that's where Rockerbox excels and it probably goes from even before Rockerbox. Me and Michael van der Rick me were both at AppNexus managing integrations, supply side integrations, DSP integrations, integrating platforms is kind of all I've done my whole life. But it's, it's worked out well, I guess.
- [21:35]
Host
Awesome. Well, Ron and Doug, thank you so much for being here today and thanks for just giving me some insights into to what you guys have planned this year. I wish you both much, much success moving forward.
- [21:45]
Doug Campbell
All right, thanks very much.
- [21:47]
Host
Thank it.