Andrew Kraft’s Post

Ad Tech takes over the Jersey Shore at Barnacle Bills in Rumson, NJ! Andrew Kraft, Andrew Moskowitz, Julian Zilberbrand, Rob Beeler, Jack Wagner, Dennis Colón #nobid #programmatic #rubbernecks

To my LinkedIn Community, (post 1 of 2) I’m looking for my next opportunity, and I’m hoping you can help. After 4+ years at The Arena Group and 18+ years with a connection to Sports Illustrated, I’m hitting free agency with enthusiasm to start a new journey. I have to break this up into two posts, so first, allow me to recap where I’ve been (this is the abbreviated version, somehow). It’s been a wild ride over the last 10 years. It started leading Sports and Video FP&A at Time Inc. We had a great group of Finance professionals that have gone on to do amazing things. I was then recruited by my non-finance colleagues to lead the Video and Audio expansion efforts as General Manager at Time Inc. That effort was ultimately stalled by the sale of Time Inc. to Meredith. When Meredith announced their intention to sell Sports Illustrated, I raised my hand to join that process. What a rewarding experience. It took longer than expected (15 months!), but we had an amazing multi-discipline leadership team that persevered and got the job done. We had at least 20 investor presentations during that time, and probably 4x as many investor calls diving into the Financial model that I built. The work didn’t stop there. We now had to transition the business into a complicated ownership structure. Authentic Brands took ownership of the brand and all of its Intellectual Property, while the operations of the media business transferred to The Arena Group. We were lucky to get most of that work done right before Covid hit, but 2020 was a rough year for SI and The Arena Group as a whole. With new leadership at Arena toward the end of that year, we turned a corner and experienced a tremendous amount of growth over the next 3+ years (close to 2x revenue). Sports Illustrated was a huge part of that, but it was so much more. We instituted a new strategy that relied on rigor, coordination, communication, execution, and accountability. As our existing brands started firing (SI, FanNation, The Street, HubPages), we looked for other businesses in the industry that we could acquire and transform (The Spun, Parade, Athlon, and Men’s Journal). The kindling for the growth that these brands would end up having was the integration process post-acquisition (way too often overlooked!). We grew, we went public, we became profitable, and strove for more. Ultimately this all led to a business combination agreement with Bridge Media, new ownership of Arena, and Sports Illustrated’s media operations moving to Minute Media. I wish my former colleagues at Arena, Authentic Brands, Bridge Media, and Sports Illustrated all the best. I’m sad that I won’t get to continue the mission for growth at both Sports Illustrated and Arena.  (Next steps in post 2)

Last January, one piece of research launched a movement that eliminated over 100,000 flights worth of CO2. Today, with your help, I'd like to try to do that again. That research, published by Scope3 and Ebiquity plc, showed that 15% of brand spend was going to worthless "made for advertising" (MFA) websites. Not only was this wasting vast sums of money, the energy used to auction these ads through thousands of servers generated more than 77,000 metric tons of CO2 - the equivalent of 216,000 passengers flying from New York to Miami. This research, amplified by the Association of National Advertisers, kicked off an industry-wide effort to identify and remove these websites from the value chain. According to research published by Jounce Media, traffic from worthless MFA websites is down 50% in the past year. That's how systemic decarbonization works: advertisers pull spend and the wasteful inventory dries up. Today, Scope3 released research showing that 14% of ad placements load off-screen or auto-refresh in fewer than 15 seconds. These problematic placements - effectively, made-for-advertising placements - are now a bigger problem than MFA websites. Using aggregated traffic data, we found that there was surprisingly little overlap between the MFA websites (marked MFA in the chart below) and problematic placements. The challenge for the advertising industry is that for years we have focused on refining domain lists to include or exclude from campaigns. Domains lists were a good start, but they're not granular or dynamic enough for the modern internet. We need to build our inventory foundations around placements, and thanks to the IAB Tech Lab, we have a mechanism to do this: the Global Placement ID. It's not enough to point out that there's a problem. We need to build solutions. I'm so excited that Sharethrough is launching GMP+, the first placement-level media product that protects advertisers from problematic placements as well as high-emissions and MFA websites. GMP+ eliminates just the problematic placements, not the entire website, protecting reach and scale without exposing advertisers to worthless inventory. By shining a light on problematic placements and by building solutions to protect advertisers, we can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint - and increase the advertising effectiveness - of the internet. Please help spread this message to your network, and together, we can save more than 100,000 flights!

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