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William Lederer

Member since July 2008Contact William

Chairman and CEO, ISOCRATES LLC iSOCRATES advises on, builds, owns, and manages data-driven, mission-critical marketing and advertising platforms, technologies and processes as the Global Leader in MadTech Resource Planning and ExecutionTM serving publishers, marketers, agencies and enablers. iSOCRATES has two lines of business: Products (MAdTechBI) and Services (Consulting: Strategy and Operations; Managed Services). iSOCRATES is staffed 24/7/365 with its own proven technology-enabled marketing and advertising platform specialists who save partners money, time and achieve transparent, accountable performance while delivering extraordinary value. Savings stem from a low-cost, focused global delivery model at scale that benefits from continuous re-investment in technology and specialized training. The company is headquartered and with its expert Partner Success team based in Saint Petersburg, Florida, U.S.A., and has its own global delivery center in Mysuru, Karnataka, India. 
 Formerly, Founder & CEO, MediaCrossing Inc.; CEO, Kantar Video and Board member, WPP Digital and Kantar Digital. Formerly, Global C-level exec at TNS and Getty Images. Founder and former Chairman and CEO, Art.com. Former Wall Streeter. Adjunct Professor, Author and frequent public speaker.

Articles by William All articles by William

  • Comparing Ad Automation To Wall Street Exchanges in Programmatic Insider on 06/11/2014

    Madison Avenue can learn a lot from Wall Street about the business of automated buying and selling of digital advertising, or programmatic trading. The financial markets have been taking advantage of automated exchanges longer than advertisers and publishers have. The ad tech industry can benefit from taking a page out of the financial industry's.

  • 200 Milliseconds: Life of a Programmatic RTB Ad Impression in Programmatic Insider on 05/13/2014

    Two hundred milliseconds. Two hundred thousandths of a second. The equivalent of a slow snap of your fingers. Less than the length of a 16th note played on a piano. Digital ads are bid, bought, sold, delivered and seen in this exceptionally brief time span. The real-time trafficking process for ad units sold programmatically is incredibly complex, yet it takes place in the blink of an eye.

  • The Emerging Role Of The Independent Media Trader in Programmatic Insider on 04/22/2014

    Have you heard about the independent media trader (IMT)? This catalyst of change is an emerging discipline focused on executing ad inventory buying and selling on behalf of marketers, agencies, and publishers, and -- at times -- on behalf of its own and/or others' risk capital.

  • Thinking Differently About Agency Trade Desks in Programmatic Insider on 04/07/2014

    Just when you thought there was no more room in investment bank Luma Partners' Lumascape, with the advent of so many new programmatic business models it may be time to consider a new way to think about and characterize the current box/category labeled "agency trade desks (ATDs)." ATDs are in fact media traders, who by business design may or may not be acting purely on behalf of clients. It is becoming clear that media traders are one of two breeds:

  • What Monopoly Can Teach Us About The Video Business  in Video Insider on 08/05/2011

    While audience viewership, available content, ad inventory, and time spent are all surging, the online and mobile video industry continues to experience ownership consolidation. In thinking through video industry next steps, I am reminded of lessons learned from playing the board game Monopoly with friends and family long ago during the lazier days of summer.

  • Six Actions The Video Ecosystem Needs To Take Now To Double Video Marketing Spend By 2014 in Video Insider on 05/12/2011

    While we all have grown immensely over the past year, online and mobile video is still Precambrian: an underdeveloped, but now sizable medium in its own right. If we are going to take our act to the next level soon, there are six actions that should take priority to ready ourselves and the medium for major new investment from marketers.

Comments by William All comments by William

  • Xaxis CEO Says His Agency Trading Desk Is Not A Trading Desk by Richard Whitman (Mediapsssst on 07/22/2015)

    Brian and his team at Xaxis have done a GREAT job for WPP and its shareholders delivering peerless, scaled results while innovating all the while. The global programmatic media and marketing industry would be a small fraction of what it is today if it did not have the Xaxis vision and team, the support of GroupM, and a large number of important early adopting advertisers as clients.In a market awash in excessive, often undifferentiated inventory, data and technology, Xaxis has chosen to risk its own capital taking inventory positions and investing in technology. Xaxis should be commended for demanding higher quality and inventory workflow standards and providing critically needed market liquidity. The latter contribution is no small thing. However, by no means is Xaxis a media company nor is it a captive ad network as some may protest. Buying and selling audience does not make one a media company, creating and/or distributing content and/or building/aggregating impressions without paying for them defines "media".  Xaxis is not an ad network due to its risk-bearing nature and its commercial vision.Wall Street is very clear semantically in its definition of trading desks that bear inventory risk: they are called proprietary trading desks. If "prop traders" make continuous markets in the same type of inventory, they are called "market makers".Make no mistake: Programmatic media needs proprietary trading and market makers like Xaxis. These critically important players drive innovation and greater market efficiency while providing sorely needed liquidity. But, to confuse an ad trading desk with a media company is to confuse an agricultural commodity brokerage with a farmer.  In an alredy confused semantic programmatic jungle, let's call a risk-bearing spade a spade.Expect more Xaxis-like prop traders and market makers in future, whether linked directly to agencies, publishers, exchanges, ad networks, large marketers, or speculative risk capital.

  • #BlackandWhite by Ari Rosenberg (Publishing Insider on 12/11/2014)

    Kudos, Ari. This topic has been on my mind since late-2008 when I participated in a corporate layoff strategy session that necessarily considered various forms of discrimination. As you might imagine, the number of people of color at the managerial and executive level at this major media and marketing services company was negligible. Therefore, not having a more diverse workforce was a "non-issue". When I probed HR and my C-level peers further as to why we did not have a more diverse workforce, the consistent answer that came back: not enough relevant applicants. Other than a larger flow of Ivy, hidden Ivy, and international graduates, IMHO not much has changed since then. I think answers to solving this problem lie, in part, in: 1)Sustained special effort being made to promote, highlight and give more public exposure in mainstream industry leadership development programs, events, publications, organizations, etc. to those talented professionals that come from minority cultures; 2)Minority recruiting and training outreach needs to occur earlier than college graduation. In my case, I have been teaching and mentoring diverse college and graduate school students for the past 20 years. It works and the satisfaction you derive from it delivers a profound personal and professional ROI. One benefit for both parties: developing an appreciation for how different points of view and life experience can influence your approach to opportunity identification and problem solving. 3)Promote in a timely fashion and pay fairly people of color. Really. Parity in our field has not yet been achieved with the majority culture. Especially if you are female. This is just wrong. If our industry improves in this area, word will get out soon enough and will act as a magnet for talent. Diversity pays and is the right thing to do. The sooner our industry and its leaders recognize it, the richer we and the larger culture we serve will be.

  • Real-Time With Bill Lederer On Efficiency, Transparency In Programmatic by Tyler Loechner (RTBlog on 06/13/2014)

    RJ, An independent media trader may or may not offer full transparency to buyer or seller depending on what is possible and what contracts have been negotiated. There is no simple answer as the rule set for publishers, agencies, and advertisers vary dramatically. For example, there are plenty of premium publishers that do not want their brands or pricing revealed to protect their rate card negotiations. Similarly, performance-based pricing arrangements like CPA for advertisers or white label trading desk arrangements with agencies and publishers often do not allow for full transparency, unless negotiated upfront. MediaCrossing, as an independent media trader, offers as much in-market, post-campaign, and detailed invoicing as we are permitted and as much as we are contracted to provide. I totally disagree with your assertion that ipso facto "full service" DSPs provide full transparency. This comment is naive, as the actual business practices in ad tech are far more predatory than your comment suggests.

  • Watch How An Impression Gets Traded In 200 Milliseconds? (It Will Only Take You 135,000 Milliseconds) by Joe Mandese (Real-Time Daily on 06/10/2014)

    Thanks for the shout out, Skip. Love your columns, btw. Really smart and useful. We at MediaCrossing are hoping to improve on this video and the related infographic that can be found on our corporate website as the community evaluates them and the programmatic industry continues to evolve. Please send me any additions or corrections any time. Bill Lederer Founder, Chairman and CEO MediaCrossing Inc.

  • When Agencies Exceed Goals Should They Be Paid More? by Mike Drexler (MAD on 06/11/2014)

    Incentive pay is a great idea especially in a field as potentially transparent and accountable as programmatic media. Let's try it. Unless you are a company with something to hide or cannot handle the potential earnings swings, what do the rest of us have to lose? My concern is not incentive pay. I concern myself with fair, auditable and consistent end-to-end measurement on both sides. This remains a nearly impossible challenge for most of us.

  • Data Quality Is Key To Addressable TV Ad Accountability by Larissa Faw (MAD on 06/10/2014)

    I find Cody's comments about this summary report covering this challenging topic naive, ungenerous, and uninformed. We programmatic people benefit directly from SMG's pioneering work. I know I have. Helen Katz, the SMG team and their clients should be lauded for the investment in time, money, and reputation they have risked so consistently to bring real innovation to such a stodgy, yet powerful medium. It would have been far easier to quit along the way given the institutional, quality, and economic challenges faced just trying to deliver more relevant messages to audiences more efficiently. The fact that SMG has been so willing to share with others outside their organization their learnings is a gift to each of us whom have benefited from their diligence and insights. I say this as someone who has spent thousands of hours working on building, fixing, deploying and optimizing set top box measurement, addressable TV, online and mobile video measurement and analytics, and now programmatic digital. These challenges we face as addressable media practitioners are non-trivial and will remain so for years to come. Caveat emptor, especially when we rely on non-real time measurement, modeled 3rd party audience data, very small sample sizes, and black box methods of validation, but let's keep at it...it's worth it. I just wish the cost of the media and data didn't absorb so much of the efficiencies we seek.

  • The Madison Avenue-Wall Street Industrial Complex -- Part Two: Transparency by Joe Mandese (RTBlog on 12/13/2013)

    As one of very few firms seeking to be wholly transparent with buyers and sellers of digital media, MediaCrossing salutes those fostering this conversation. Too bad so many advertisers and publishers who are most disadvantaged by the current paradigm are not as appalled and vocal as the ad tech journalism and analyst community that sees the same challenge we at MediaCrossing do and are now writing about it. Until Advertisers are as demanding about how their money is being spent and the return they are getting for their investment and until publishers require end-to-end visibility on the resale of their inventory, there is little reason to believe the ecosystem will be as demanding as we are on the subject of transparency. Going back to the Wall Street parallels, the same environment existed for decades until greater market competition arrived and, much later, regulation. Greater efficiency, transparency, quality, and liquidity(the last two topics Joe has not yet covered but should) on Wall Street came from innovative startups who acted as catalysts driving change or outright closure of entrenched, conflicted middlemen who bore little risk and failed to attack their longstanding business models. Importantly, with transparency Wall Street has necessarily created the commodification and commoditization of tradeable assets and services. Is our industry really ready to handle the fallout of what we seek? The Wall Street-Madison Avenue Industrial Complex(WSMAIC) cannot rationalize itself without breaking a few eggs. Will you be holding the shell or the skillet? The souffles that will result should find a ready market...ultimately.

  • The 'Madison Avenue-Wall Street Industrial Complex' by Joe Mandese (RTBlog on 12/12/2013)

    Nice wordsmithing, Joe. History will doubtless record we are in the earliest stages of a massive transformation of this opaque, inefficient, and illiquid 12 digit global market that will benefit from financial and commodity trading best practices. As a media trader committed to reinventing media buying and selling by providing explicit benefits to both buyers and sellers, MediaCrossing looks forward to the day when those selling the picks and shovels mining these new opportunities share more of the benefits with those they are intended to help.

  • Kantar Media Letting Agencies Compare Exchanges, Ad Tech Vendors by Tyler Loechner (Real-Time Daily on 11/08/2013)

    Really appreciate the improvements Kantar has made to SRDS since its purchase from Nielsen. In particular, adding more digital publishers and vendors and more attributes on each is key. Next, better usability and workflow integration would be helpful.

  • Visible Acquires Cymfony by Laurie Sullivan (MediaDailyNews on 04/06/2012)

    Congratulations, Rich. This combination makes good sense for all parties and represents improved client capabilities and value, as well. If you need sophisticated, technology-enabled US or international social media analytics and insight with or without high touch, this combo is the way to go.

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