Q&A with Penelope Lloyd, Triplelift

Brock Munro
January 27, 2021
March 20, 2024
Q&A with Penelope Lloyd, Triplelift
Penelope Lloyd, TripleLift

Her background is with major publishers – including Seven, Nine, Disney and most recently Domain where she managed programmatic sales for NSW and oversaw their transition to a fully programmatic trading model.

Penelope Lloyd is Senior Manager of Publisher Client Services for APAC at Triplelift

1. What led you to start working in the ad tech industry and how did this lead you to join Tripelift?

I finished my media degree at an interesting time – being a print journalist was the most highly sought after job, TV commanded the vast majority of advertising dollars and digital was considered an easier pathway into media as the jobs weren’t in as high demand. I started my career in TV sales at Channel 7 but moved into digital as a campaign manager trafficking direct campaigns at Nine. It came to my attention during this time that the programmatic team’s methods with everything transacted in a DSP was very efficient in comparison to what I was doing!

Before Triplelift, I was working as a Programmatic Sales Manager for Domain. Domain was one of Triplelift’s first publisher partners in Australia and I was really interested in their native offering and innovative formats that could be transacted programmatically. Having spent most of my career working for Australian publishers it was exciting to make the move into ad tech for a global company.

I was Triplelift’s 4th hire in Australia and thought it would be a great opportunity to join a fast growing US tech company as it established its presence in APAC. My remit extends across Asia as well and I was very excited to gain experience working in the expanding Asian market. I manage accounts in Singapore, Vietnam, The Philippines, Hong Kong and Indonesia as well as Australia and New Zealand.

2. What are your main roles and day to day priorities?

I manage client service for all our publisher partners, like Publift, across APAC and have played a role in publisher development as well. Once a client is signed, I’m responsible for facilitating the implementation of our native ad solutions on publisher sites. We have a team in NYC who design custom templates for each individual site (over 20 in Publift’s case!) in optimal positions to run our premium in feed native units. After a publisher launches, we examine yield, assess performance and roll out additional products over time. I also collaborate with our demand sales team on providing publisher insights and product advice for brief responses and identifying opportunities like data led PMPs.

As well as our iconic native image format, Triplelift also has a branded video format. In fact we’re one of the largest sources of video in the world and this is one of the top performing formats on Publift sites. We have been doing some great work with Publift lately adding more native units on top sites like OzBargain. We have standard display as well as native and are currently rolling this out to all sites and onboarding mobile app inventory.

3. What’s a problem that you are passionately tackling with TripleLift at the moment?

Triplelift as a company has taken it upon itself to tackle the problem of illegitimate players within the supply chain. We’re promoting the need to “Practice Safe Media” as the programmatic ecosystem has a proliferation of duplication and redundancy, resulting in operational and financial inefficiencies for both the buy and sell-sides. We see the main challenges to clean programmatic media as resold impressions, ad fraud and misinformation sites. Taken together, these three problems create waste and reduce the performance of your buys.

Triplelift conducted a test which had some quite shocking results. They did a comparison of buying directly with no intermediary exchanges or resellers vs through an intermediary exchange to see how much buying directly improves your campaign performance, auction performance and bottom line. This analysis evaluated the same campaigns, launched by the same brands, bidding on the same publisher inventory, with the same bidding strategies, on the same DSP. The only difference between path A vs. B was the inclusion of an intermediary exchange, adding a hop to the transaction, and taking a nominal fee. This experience found that win rates were 3.8x higher and CPMs 28% lower when buying direct. Cost-per-click (CPC) was 220% lower when buying directly. With auction performance bids beat competitor’s bids 40% more often when buying directly.

We believe the responsibility shouldn’t fall on advertisers to police the industry, so at TripleLift, we have taken it upon ourselves to be the solution. We promise 3 things: 1) Zero resold impressions 2) Lowest ad fraud rates in the industry and 3) No misinformation sites on your buys.

4. Could you tell us more about TripleLift’s Computer Vision technology?

Programmatic advertising has become a much more legitimate form of trading and the amount of ad formats that can be traded programmatically has vastly increased. It’s no longer your remnant display monetization solution now that rich media, video, OTT and of course native, can be traded programmatically. This is something that made Triplelift unique from the start.

Our value proposition is that we design custom native templates for all our publisher partners that match the look and feel of the publisher’s site, yet these require only one set of specs and can be bought at scale through a DSP. So if we look at some of Publift’s top sites, the native ads on The New Daily and OzBargain look totally different, yet the buyer is buying them with the same creative – easy and efficient for the buyer to execute and a great customized user experience for the publisher.

Could you tell us more about TripleLift’s Computer Vision technology?

I’m most excited about what Tripelift is doing in the OTT space. We have hired a team in Hollywood and are working on an Advanced TV programmatic product in which content can be scanned and programmatic ads dynamically inserted in real time – they’re working with the big TV networks in the US and have done one test so far on Hell’s Kitchen in June. This was the first ever programmatic brand integration in TV history! We have also partnered with Media Science to measure the effectiveness of the integration so stay tuned for a case study. OTT brand and product insertion utilize our computer vision technology to identify contextual moments and surface areas to superimpose a brand’s product into the fabric of the content in a way that’s seamless and additive. So if you picture some people sitting at a table – a branded bottle can be inserted on that table programmatically in real time. It’s super cool.

5. Recently, TripleLift partnered with NewsGuard, what are some of the key takeaways regarding misinformation you would like to share with us and about TripleLift’s “help journalism” programmatic media initiative for news publishers?

TripleLift recently announced we’re working with NewsGuard which is a company that fights misinformation by rating and reviewing thousands of news sites for credibility and transparency. They have worked with agencies and publishers but this is the first time an SSP has formed a relationship with them. With our ‘lowest fraud rate in the industry promise’ we’ll be actively working to rid our platform of any questionable properties and some have already been removed. We will be addressing our publisher partners each month based on NewsGuard’s regularly updated rankings. NewsGuard assesses websites based on nine criteria like not repeatedly publishing false information, avoiding deceptive headlines and revealing conflicts of interest.

This partnership comes off the back of our “Help Journalism” programmatic media initiative which was designed to boost the struggling news publishing industry. Some of our publishers were hit hard during the pandemic with sharply declining revenue in part due to a rise in advertisers’ excluding news sites from their buys. TripleLift created curated packages of impressions to help brands position themselves thoughtfully within the world’s most respected news content.

6. What do you see as the major challenges for publishers and what advice would you give them?

I would say identity and relevance. Publishers are looking for ways to compete with the dollars flowing into walled gardens and it is a challenge to find a way to set themselves apart and create a USP that makes users want to return. I would advise publishers to invest in their 1st party data and make sure they have a single view of customers across web and app environments.

It was great to see Publift announce a partnership with Liveramp this week. Tripelift also partnered with Liveramp earlier in the year becoming the first native exchange to offer people based buying through Liveramp’s identity link and ATS. Using their person-based identifier empowers marketers to deliver their custom native ads across the Tripelift exchange and on Publift sites with the same quality and performance of the walled gardens.

7. In your opinion, what are the most important industry changes/trends as we navigate through the pandemic and into a post-Covid-19 world?

Doing more with less. I think brands will have smaller budgets and will need to advertise more efficiently. This works on both sides. Triplelift will work with our publisher partners to make ads look better, using data to serve relevant messages that differentiate from the competition. From a publisher point of view, generating higher ROI from fewer, more highly engaging relevant ads will be a focus for Triplelift in a post Covid-19 world.

I think the decline of traditional broadcast television is a trend that will continue into a post covid-19 world. The research coming out of Covid that streaming services have seen a rise in engagement across all demographics isn’t profound, however, it’s noteworthy that older demographics, traditionally more aligned to linear TV viewership have shifted to steaming services; in turn it’s likely advertising dollars will continue to shift towards digital video.

"I believe that in the future, everything will be programmatic. Programmatic advertising will just be advertising."

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