VaynerMedia’s Anthony Scarola is betting on a cleaner, greener supply chain

The programmatic supply chain is notoriously complex, but VaynerMedia’s Anthony Scarola doesn’t shy away from complexity. In fact, he sees the opportunity to maximize client investment by cleaning up the supply chain.

Scarola, the agency’s programmatic lead and vice president of media, is working toward a future where the supply chain is cleaner, greener and shorter and each step of the user journey is accurately measured and accounted for.

He spoke with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik about simplifying buying paths and measurement as the programmatic lead in an agency known for social.

What gets you most excited about the future of programmatic when you look two to three years out?

The biggest one that comes to mind is the programmatic supply chain becoming cleaner and greener and shorter. Which I’m really excited about because you think about it in the future — anything that you’re talking about from a supply perspective, I would hope is a one to one.

So you’re going directly to the inventory. It is transparent. You cut out all the intermediaries. You cut out waste, while also having a better and more effective CPM that goes toward shaving more of that transparency. You give back to a client [and] that helps us optimize.

Absolutely. It’s like: “It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your media dollars are?”

Yeah. You have to know that answer. We already kind of know that now, but I think we will become even more informed as we cut out those intermediaries and we get more of that transparency.

You are the vice president of media and lead programmatic at VaynerMedia. From your perspective, what sets your approach to programmatic apart from the rest of the industry?

At Vayner, we have a very specific mantra where we want to be able to say social lives at the heart and at the middle. And then we complement afterwards with everything that we’re doing in terms of supporting our clients. So while that’s the heartbeat of our agency, that’s where we take all of the wins, learnings and speed in which we action on as we do in social, and we try to apply them to all other channels.

That’s what’s really cool and unique, because we’re able to then take those similarities that we find and that we clearly can find that are working in social — like how you go about targeting cohorts? Or how can we find a one-to-one relationship of cohorts in programmatic and do that as a targeting methodology?

So many people see social and programmatic as two ends of a spectrum. And I love that idea of finding ways to bridge them both and taking a holistic approach.

Yeah, that’s one of the bigger things that we try to tell our clients too. Whether it’s a QBR (quarterly business review) or we’re going through tactical planning, it can be looked at as one and the same, even though that could be a little bit different in that sense.

While yes, they might be different plans and different budgets associated, the core principles still apply — as to how we’re looking at measuring, creative, how we’re going about optimizing, how we’re going about targeting the right folks. That all remains the same and very consistent, whether that’s search, social or programmatic, for everything. That’s what’s really exciting too. Because we want to be able to have it be a consistent narrative and not feeling like each channel lives very differently from each other, but, rather, they live in unison and in harmony.

From a measurement perspective, have you been able to prove out the value of that agility?

Yeah, a lot of that from the agility side, that’s obviously something that we preach. But how are you really going to show it? I think a lot of what we want to be able to show is around what [a client’s] goals are. [It’s] “How is my brand growing and then how is my ROI improving?”

So those are really the two aspects that we’re going to be laser-focused on. And, typically, what comes up. And from that it’s really using, you know, the right foundational elements to really prove that out. So with growing the brand, you think about that more upper funnel. And when you think ROI, that’s more lower funnel, OK.

We want to then be able to measure and look at that very distinctly. But also tying it back at the end as well is super important. So they’re not really like left field, right field — but working as a team at the end. We’re then looking at it from an architecture of short term with testing, learning — and then long term being more around modeling.

In the more the day-to-day, we’re trying to push the algorithms — in programmatic in particular — [to] truly be optimizing towards a CPA or ROAS. And then ultimately at the end, really trying to tie it all together with [answering], “OK, what worked? What didn’t work?” That helps us inform the goal [moving] forwards, and [we’re] taking tangible results and directly actioning off of them.

As you talk about measurement across the funnel, something that comes to mind is last-touch attribution. Do you think that we’re evolving beyond that and really starting to understand attribution across the funnel?

Yeah, that that’s something that we’ve been trying to — I think as an industry — we’ve been trying to tackle for a while. That’s no surprise. Last-touch is still very much prevalent. Multi-touch is still getting more and more use case out of it.

I don’t think there’s a silver bullet at this point in time. But I do think there’s probably going to be more of that emphasis and more of that, you know, more of a bull’s-eye [on] putting more weight around the media being in-market and what has really helped the user journey. Because maybe [a user goes] through 20 touchpoints before they convert.

[And] how are you really accurately weighing those different touchpoints?