This week Jemima Villanueva, Executive Director for EMEA at The Atlantic tells us about trends in programmatic advertising, the need for trust, transparency and collaboration and her own role in the Atlantic’s relatively new European operation.

In the news round-up the team discuss which ‘Netflix for magazines’ service will succeed (if any), whether Netflix itself should launch a weekly current affairs show, and discuss what the Evening Standard’s redesign says about its five year plan. The team awards its first ever Voicey Award.

We’re reading:

In our own words: Peter Houston

This week’s guest is Jemima Villanueva, Executive Director for EMEA at The Atlantic. That means she’s responsible for the commercial side of the house, and that means she’s heavily into programmatic advertising.

Jemima’s background is with major media owners, including Hearst and Time Inc. But before she joined the Atlantic, she took a little detour into agency land to learn all about programmatic. Before joining The Exchange Lab, she had all the book learning about ad-tech but had never done it for real. She says that made her a bit a swimmer who had been trained to Olympic-standard but hadn’t actually made it into a pool.

Entering the agency, Jemima had the advantage of being able to ‘talk publisher’, translating programmatic for mere media mortals. She’s says day-to-day understanding has moved on, but there’s still a huge gap between ad-tech and the publishing community.

She said: “Never before in media has there been such a gulf in understanding between the people who build the tech, create the tech, and write the code, and the people who, at the end of the day, are paying to use it.”

To close the divide, Jemima says there is a need for greater transparency and for publishers and ad-tech to collaborate across the value chain, not just for the bits we control but for all the bits we are exposed to.

Watching the public reaction to the Cambridge Analytica revelations and the backlash against Facebook, I think that need for trust and transparency in how data is handled and targeting conducted is at the heart of media’s relationship technology.

We’re probably going to need more ad-tech people that talk publisher, or maybe more publishing people that talk ad-tech.

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