Social Display: Transforming Programmatic Advertising | Mark Dinets

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Mark Dinets, Partnership Director at Spaceback. Mark joined Spaceback just over two years ago and has 15 years of ad tech experience in roles at USA today, Unruly, now part of Nexxen, and VIZIO. At Spaceback, Mark ensures that sellers and client facing teams are fully comfortable with social display and the important role that it plays in programmatic advertising. As a SoCal native, Mark enjoys golfing, checking out new restaurants, and trying any chocolate chip cookie he can get his hands on. Mark, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Mark Dinets: Thanks for having me, David. Excited to be here. David McBee: Excited to have you. Before we jump into stuff, I got to hear about this chocolate chip cookie thing. Do you have a favorite place where you get one? Mark Dinets: I've been going to the same place since I was a kid here in L.A. in Westwood Village is a place called Diddy Riese, and it is by far the best combination of sweet, savory and the right consistency. So Diddy Riese, it's been around for about 40 plus years. It's a L.A. staple. David McBee: Dang. If it's been around that long, it's got to be good. Well, let's see if we can make this interview sweet and savory as well. All right. So I want to start by letting our viewers know that Spaceback and Simpli.fi have been working together for a while now. In fact, we are just now coming up on our two-year anniversary, so congrats to you on that. Mark Dinets: Thank you. Yeah, super excited about what we've been able to do so far, where we're going. Some of those new things might include even CTV, so Simpli.fi clients and we'll get even more access to great creative automation coming down the line. David McBee: All right. So why don't we just dive into what it is that makes Spaceback so special. People may not be familiar with the term Social Display, so can you define that and walk through what that looks like? Mark Dinets: Sure. So Social Display is really just a new creative variation that the display advertising world has not really had much innovation around. And it is this ability to grab content from the social platforms, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, et cetera, and make those feel so authentic and available now to run in programmatic media as a part of a paid media campaign. And helping brands leverage their organic presence as well as their paid presence if they're most comfortable with that as the jumping off point. So bringing these really authentic versions of what people consume every day as we're scrolling on our feeds through those different platforms and now bringing that content into the rest of the web or the open web as a lot of us come to refer to that where online display happens. David McBee: All right. So pretend for a moment that I am a social media guru and I'm not super familiar with what you mean by open web or programmatic. So how do you take my social media that I've worked so hard on both organic and paid stuff and get it out there to a larger audience? Mark Dinets: Yeah, certainly. So using our creative automation software, we really help just take the URL that belongs for any of these posts, as you mentioned, paid or organic. And then we convert that into an ad that's powered by JavaScript or something else. And using a platform like Simpli.fi that is responsible for putting together media plans or layer on the right data and the right targeting, you can use then Social Display with Spaceback to help push that through into the rest of the web, which is basically like a cnn.com and ESPN your news sites that you would read on an everyday basis. And that's where you'll end up seeing a social display creative running as part of a paid media strategy. And it helps the social teams or social gurus who you just asked about feel really good about getting more ROI out of their creative that they've spent time building. It also helps to open up new inventory, new audiences, just get more exposure, because we all hate to believe it, but not everyone is on social media even though there are millions and millions of us there. But there are really other audiences to tap into when you do activate the open web or the rest of the web through a paid advertising campaign. David McBee: And these display ads, they conserve some of the elements of social? Mark Dinets: Oh, they are total authentic replications of the originals. So anywhere from the realtime number of likes, the realtime number of comments, the brand's avatar image, the amount of followers, all that stays in sync when you leverage Spaceback Social Display. And that way it almost acts as a product review that those details really speak through and combat banner blindness and connect with users in a way when they are not included, then they have lower performance than when they do include all those metrics. And so it really just is a one-to-one relationship or correlation between the creative that they built and launched, and now bringing that over into a new channel like online display. David McBee: Awesome. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk to the people who know programmatic, right? Mark Dinets: Yeah. David McBee: What about that programmatic landscape has changed over the last decade and what should advertisers know about programmatic today and in the future? Mark Dinets: Yeah. So much of the advancements have been around auction mechanics and around auction efficiency and that data piece that I was talking about. So that's where we've seen the most change happen in the programmatic landscape. Where we haven't seen a lot of change is on the creative side. The creative has been left behind, but with the invention of social, brands are really investing there first and they're putting their best content there from the get go. So what we have seen is the change in the, what's considered content, what's considered ads. And we feel like that's only going to continue to happen with technologies like ours or a lot of the other partners or vendors out there that offer or try to offer Social Display. And hopefully we all do a really good job of focusing on the creative piece as the driving force behind what's going to drive programmatic forward and have a focus more on what the user wants to consume. And we think that you'll only continue to see that happen with social being proliferated everywhere outside of its own walled gardens. David McBee: I think you make a really good point. Remember, back in the day when banner ads first came out and the whole job of the banner ad was to get you to click, so it was like, "Click here to get a new iPod," right? And you didn't even know what you were clicking on, but we clicked them, right? And then, we got away from that and display ads over the last decade or so have been like billboards. They're just the brand or a product and a tagline, maybe a unique selling proposition, very simple, but they're obviously ads. So I think what I'm hearing you say is that adding these social elements to display ads takes it to Display 3.0 almost. Is that about right? Mark Dinets: Yeah, certainly. There's just a lot that feels authentic to what users are used to consuming and social. And by bringing that over into the worlds that you and I are in, it's really only going to attract consumers to really be more responsive or to at least engage with them. We think about consuming or looking at carousels in the swipes between the first frame and the second frame. All those things can be done now in a way where it hasn't been able to, where you were stuck to some flat static image or a video that had to render some special effects. Like now through programmatic and with Social Display, you can have those exact same interactions the same way that you engage with the social platforms. Now you can do that through display advertising. David McBee: Very exciting stuff, Mark. Very exciting stuff. Hey, before we go, I just want to ask you, do you have a podcast or a book that you feel has been instrumental in your success that you'd like to share with our audience? Mark Dinets: Yeah. I'm a big Phil Knight fan, basketball fan, so I've been reading a Shoe Dog, which is his autobiography, and there's a quote in there that talks about acting with the urgency, basically not pushing off what you can do today until tomorrow. And that's always been a guiding sort of principle for me in my professional life and it's been treating me pretty good. David McBee: I think that's really good advice. I've been wanting to pick up a book on procrastination, but I just keep forgetting. Sorry I couldn't help myself. Mark Dinets: No problem. David McBee: How can folks get ahold of you if they want to learn more about you or Spaceback? Mark Dinets: Yep. I am very responsive on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out and love to talk about creative automation and its role as we continue in this great industry that we have. So they can reach out to me there. David McBee: Terrific. Thank you. Thanks for being my guest today, Mark. Mark Dinets: Thank you, David. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time.