MarTech Edge Interview with Anthony Berrena, Chief Revenue Officer, Playwire

Welcome, Anthony! We’d love to hear about your incredible 12-year journey at Playwire that ultimately led you to the prestigious role of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

Thank you for having me. My journey with Playwire began 12 years ago, fresh out of graduation. Initially, I was interviewing for an internship, and although I had several job opportunities, I was truly drawn to the team at Playwire.

During my early days, Playwire had two distinct platforms, one dedicated to video. I was heavily involved in getting our video player to publishers, which enriched our video inventory and allowed our sales and yield operations teams to expand. Around three years into my tenure, I took on the responsibility of managing the display side of the business as well, merging two significant segments of the business.

Gradually, I began overseeing the yield operations portion of our organization, collaborating with SSP and DSP partners, and later delving into direct sales and data sales. Over the years, my involvement with various departments gave me a comprehensive understanding of Playwire’s operations, setting the stage for my current role as the CRO.

What best practices and transformative strategies have you implemented in your role as CRO that have turned the tables for Playwire?

When it comes to best practices, it’s the team as a collective that has driven innovation. One core principle that has underpinned our strategy is the value of collaboration. Shifting away from a siloed approach, we emphasize collective efforts, where different departments come together to achieve a shared objective.

In many organizations, internal departments can sometimes be at odds over resources, but at Playwire, our ethos is about ensuring everyone wins. An example is when our yield team identifies a significant spender in the open market, they collaborate with the direct sales team to nurture and expand the partnership, ultimately benefiting the entire company.

Being able to work together, everyone wins. With the number of partners we work with, you need to build something that will work at scale. We ask how we can put tools like Revenue Intelligence (RI) into practice to do things like increase fill rates or CPMs. When we fine-tune these things as a team, we make a better product and a better team dynamic.

How does RAMP serve as a comprehensive ad monetization platform, enabling businesses to optimize and maximize their ad revenue effectively?

RAMP, or our Revenue Amplification Management Platform, brings the best of ad tech into a single tool and blends human expertise with advanced machine intelligence. The platform’s Revenue Intelligence (RI) feature harnesses machine learning and AI to ensure maximum yield on every impression for publishers.

In addition to these features, RAMP also boasts an extensive set of demand sources. From a global direct sales team to integrations with Google Open Bidding, Amazon TAM, and access to over 20+ SSPs through Prebid, RAMP ensures your business always has the best options at its disposal.

More than just a toolset, though, when businesses choose RAMP, they choose an ad tech partner. The platform offers simple technical integrations, assigns a dedicated Partner Success Manager, and provides expert guidance every step of the way. Additionally, during the onboarding process, every client goes through a full site audit.

What key metrics do you monitor to assess revenue generation, and what are the implications of these metrics on the overall business performance?

At Playwire, our focus is on delivering tangible results. To ensure we’re meeting this goal, we closely monitor a variety of ad performance metrics. The ultimate metric for Playwire is, of course, Publisher Ad Revenue. This metric is really the end all be all that our publishers are effectively monetizing their content with advertising.

Some of the most common metrics, which act as indicators of whether or not our publisher’s ad revenue is where we want it to be, include:

• Ad Viewability: This metric measures whether users adequately see an ad. The implications of this are direct. If an ad isn’t viewable, it’s unlikely to engage the user or generate revenue.
• Video Completion Rates (VCR): This covers the percentage of users who view an ad from start to finish. A high VCR tells us content is engaging, which can lead to better brand recall and potentially higher conversion rates.
• Click-Through Rates (CTR): CTR indicates the number of users who click an ad after viewing. With a high CTR, we can see that an ad’s content resonates with viewers. This might lead them to seek more information or make a purchase.
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): This metric tells us how much it costs to acquire a single paying customer from an ad. A lower CPA rate can highlight a more effective advertising strategy, which can directly influence profitability.
• Purchases: This direct metric informs us of conversions resulting from an ad. This indicates an ad’s effectiveness in driving sales, which directly contributes to revenue.
• Demographic Information: Ensuring our ads reach the intended audience is vital for effective targeting and optimizing return on ad spend. Ads that resonate with the correct demographic can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
• Time Spent: This newer metric assesses viewer engagement. Longer view times tend to signify more engaged users. This can lead to better brand recognition and trust.

How does Playwire’s DMP garner deeper audience insights, empowering marketers to thrive in a cookieless world?

As third-party cookies fade, Playwire’s DMP harnesses the power of first-party data. First-party cookies, which collect visitor data from a publisher’s website or app, are not going away. Our DMP provides access to a vast network of first-party data. Users can sort through this expansive collection and break down data into audience segments based on a broader set of interests and behavioral data.

Our DMP also emphasizes the use of standardized taxonomy, partnering with institutions like the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to implement industry-standard content and audience categorization.

Moreover, with the decline of cookie-based advertising, we’ve adopted contextual targeting. This puts ads on sites with brand-relevant content. This method relies on keywords and topics that already align with the content on the site, resulting in better audience engagement and optimized ad campaigns.

Can you highlight the core technologies that streamline and accelerate your revenue generation process?

Of course! We’ve already touched on a few technologies already, but let’s connect them to the revenue generation process:

• RAMP’s Revenue Intelligence {RI}: Revenue Intelligence is a proprietary algorithm that combines human and machine intelligence to amplify ad revenue. Utilizing the RAMP Platform, RI manages ads, analyzes data from thousands of publishers, leverages data scientists to identify patterns, and uses yield ops experts for testing.
• Data Management Platform (DMP): This platform empowers advertisers to target exactly the right audience, leading to increased engagement and efficiency in campaigns.
• Consent Management Platform (CMP): Playwire’s CMP manages user consent for data collection. By obtaining proper consent, advertisers can legitimately use user data to inform their campaigns while keeping in line with legal guidelines and user preferences.
• Header Bidding: Drive more competition with display, video, and in-app bidding.
• Identity Solutions: Playwire ID, RAMP’s proprietary identity solution, improves ad revenue while respecting user privacy. The data in Playwire ID can also be applied to custom audience segments via our DMP. We also recently unveiled our Hashed Email API, which turns a user’s email address into an encrypted identifier and then shares that identifier up the chain with media buyers. The result? Everybody wins.
• Integration with Third-Party Partners: Playwire’s technology integrates with third-party partners like Nielsen, which objectively measures audience representation. This gives advertisers additional insights and allows them to optimize ad placement and audience targeting.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) Solutions: Our DMP integrates with DE&I solutions to ensure ads reach culturally represented audiences. By targeting a broader and more diverse audience, advertisers can potentially achieve higher engagement rates, contributing to greater revenue.

What groundbreaking solution is Playwire currently developing, and how could it revolutionize the ad tech industry?

We aren’t creating one groundbreaking product; we’re creating an all-in-one platform for everyone and everything. While many companies focus on singular areas like header bidding, direct sales, or data, Playwire is pioneering a solution that encompasses all these facets and more under a single roof. This holistic approach ensures that clients have a single partner advocating for them.

With that said, one distinctive business area we are currently working on is our venture into new advertising mediums, notably the metaverse. We’ve established ourselves as one of the few partners collaborating with hyper-popular platforms like Roblox.

Given the growing importance of new digital realms like the metaverse, our early engagement in these spaces, especially with an emphasis on younger audiences, presents a groundbreaking direction in the ad tech industry. Our expertise in areas like kids/COPPA, combined with our vast array of services, makes Playwire’s solutions uniquely comprehensive and positions us to redefine the future of advertising.

How do you envision AI advancements facilitating revenue growth efforts for businesses?

We already leverage the power of AI with Revenue Intelligence. Here are a few ways how that’s happening:

• Micro-Setting Adjustments: Traditional ad revenue models often take a broad-stroke approach to impressions, which means potential ad revenue could be left on the table. AI allows businesses to make millions of micro-setting adjustment decisions on each ad impression to ensure maximum yield.
• Personalized Impressions: Instead of treating every page load the same, AI recognizes and reacts to the myriad of variables associated with each impression. This individualized treatment amplifies the potential for increased ad revenue.
• Data-Driven Decisions: AI thrives on data. With over 1,000 user data values from bounce rates to click rates and 500+ variables like device type and browser, AI can comprehensively analyze each factor’s influence on impression value, leading to more informed decision-making.
• Dynamic Setting Adjustments: AI’s potential is vividly displayed in its ability to tweak hundreds of settings across the ad tech stack in real-time. For example, RI adjusts price floors, refresh rates, and bidder orders to achieve the highest revenue for each impression.
• Cost Efficiency: AI can identify and eliminate redundant costs in your ad tech stack. It can discern where ads aren’t achieving incremental revenue to help businesses eliminate overspending.
• Automated Pricing: Tools like RAMP’s Price Floor Controller (PFC) automate the process of setting price floors on a per-impression basis. The PFC can make 1.2 million price floor changes daily, ensuring each impression is valued at its maximum potential.

What advice would you give marketing professionals constantly facing the uphill battle of scaling revenue for their organizations?

The journey to successful scaling begins with a profound and holistic understanding of your business from its foundational roots. Firstly, the principle of simplicity and scalability is cardinal.

It’s imperative to favor strategies that strike a balance between simplicity and scalability. Although there is an undeniable allure in custom solutions, it’s essential to recognize that in the grand tapestry of business, devising processes that are both straightforward and easily replicable holds paramount significance. This is especially true when you’re aiming for scalability across varied facets of the organization or a diverse client base.