Rethinking global media planning with Thalamus

What better time-saving resource for anyone trying to keep up with the fast-changing advertising/media landscape than a real-time newsfeed? This is the latest addition to the Thalamus global advertising vendor database and media planning product set to revolutionise the international industry.

It simplifies the need to check popular industry news sites as it pulls in content from every major advertising and marketing publication around the world, like AdExchanger, Digiday and Mediapost, functioning as a 'verticalised newsreader' that's complimentary to their existing data and media planning product. It's the perfect mix as the advertising community wants to have all their data, news, and communication in one platform in order to easily find data on the open web such as targeting options, data partners, contacts, reach and geographical data, creatives, and ad specs of a specific vendor.

Even better? By standardising the taxonomy and categories, this structured data is captured so that a media planner or marketer can consume data as quickly as possible, and make the relevant media buying decisions in minutes, not hours.

And while other media planning tools charge a significant amount for usage, this means they're only really large agency media planners. Thalamus aims to democratise this data so that it is available to all marketers, worldwide.

Garrett Gan, co-founder and CEO of Thalamus, Inc, tells us more...

1. Explain the origins of Thalamus.

Gan: Thalamus was started in mid-2014 when we realised that the advertising industry had no centralised database for all advertising vendors like ad networks, web publishers, and demand-side platforms. While there were many attempts at building one of these platforms over the years, most fell by the wayside, or weren't able to achieve the kind of data scale necessary to really attract marketers to consistently use it.

At Thalamus, we realised that the top industry problem wasn't a lack of efficiency when it comes to ad targeting, but rather the sheer fragmentation and confusion in the marketplace. This is especially true when you factor in the low barrier to starting a website, mobile app, or ad network, which led to a Cambrian explosion in the number of options where you could buy advertising, but nobody knows who actually does what.

The fact that the ad landscape is evolving so rapidly means it's almost impossible for media planners to keep up with all the developments, which further signalled the need for a centralised, up-to-date platform to house all this information.

As the Thalamus is the centre of the brain where all the sensory information flows before being processed in the pre-frontal cortex, we thought it would be an apt name as all the data flows through the platform before it is processed in the mind of the marketer evaluating companies.

2. Talk us through crowdsourced advertising data, both from a technical aspect and for interested parties looking to sign-up/register.

Gan: The way we ingest the information is fully de-centralised. This means anyone can edit anything, similar to Wikipedia, but we also have a centralised moderation system that ensures only relevant edits made by people at the company are actually accepted by the system.

To ensure this, we verify all users signing up, and make sure they have a specific company email. If their company email matches with the company page they are editing, we auto-accept their edits. This unlocks maximum scale of data acquisition while also safeguarding the quality and freshness of the data.

Buyers can go to the site and view all the data for free at the moment, but we will monetise through premium features for vendors in future.

3. What trends do you see as the biggest to come in the advertising space in 2016?

Gan: We see a huge trend toward branded content for publishers. With the explosion of content, editors at publications now are responsible to produce more content with less writers and resources. This pace is not sustainable if there is downward pressure on their CPM rates, and so each publication will have to come up with custom advertising executions that can be sold at more of a premium rate.

Examples of this can be seen on sites like Buzzfeed, Quartz, AdAge, Digiday, and quite a few others that have fully embraced branded content and sponsored native units, most of which are sold directly to the advertiser and not through programmatic channels.

Seems we've entered the future, where spreading a targetted brand message anywhere in the world is just a few clicks away. Visit www.thalamus.co/news and http://www.thalamus.co/ for more information on the newsfeed and media planning tool respectively.

Disclaimer: Bizcommunity is listed in the Thalamus newsfeed.