Is it possible to clean up the digital advertising market, providing the same level of information for both buyers and sellers? With Stijn Gimbrère, Media Futures Market

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

It’s fair to say that one of the markets that has become most complex and least transparent in the digital age has been advertising. The market was described in 2016 by Marc Pritchard – the Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble, both the world’s biggest consumer goods business and the world’s highest-spending advertiser – as “murky at best, fraudulent at worst”.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Dutch media entrepreneur Stijn Gimbrère, Founder and CEO of Media Futures Market. Media Futures Market is an innovative platform that directly connects buyers – that’s brands and their agencies – with high-quality media owners and publishers selling advertising inventory. In a market that’s been weighted for too long against advertisers – whose budgets fund every link in the chain – Media Futures Market’s mission is to provide buyers and sellers with the same information; simply, clearly, and transparently .

Before founding his current venture in June 2020, Stijn cut his teeth at the Dutch media network, RTL Nederland, before holding a variety of strategy and corporate development roles at advertising platform SpotX. he identified the gap in the market for his new venture while on a round-the-world trip with his wife, just pre-pandemic.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 4 April 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

For too long, middlemen who only erode value have squandered advertisers’ marketing budgets. Stijn is driven by a desire to bring transparency to the advertising market. One of the ways Media Futures Market does this is by enabling buyers to “compare apples with apples” and understand what an investment on one media property will deliver compared with any other.

Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Alphabet (Google, YouTube) make it easy – though not totally transparent – for buyers to know what they’re buying. By making it easy, they account for up to 80% of the online ad market. But there’s huge value in other properties and platforms, and Media Futures Market makes it straightforward for buyers to know where the value is for them.

As a data storyteller, Stijn appreciates the need to “read the room” and understand the likely data tolerance of those you’re speaking to. You need a different type of narrative – and a different blend of narrative and numbers – if you’re talking to a CEO compared with a Finance Director. Knowing your audience is, for Stijn, a critical dimension of being a better data storyteller.

Media Futures Market first attracted media attention – from the Dutch equivalent of the Financial Times – by telling a data-driven story which showed the numbers in the advertising market don’t add up; that demonstrated the poor value many buyers were getting. This was particularly true of the unregulated, automated, programmatic advertising market. That – Stijn says – was the Wild West. Thanks in no small part to businesses committed to transparency and information symmetry like Stijn’s Media Futures Market, the days of the Wild West are rapidly becoming history.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Media Futures Market – https://mediafuturesmarket.com/en/

Stijn’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijn-gimbrère-830b852a/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.