It's been a while since I chatted with long-time media maven and
former Horizon Media Chief Digital Officer Donnie Williams, so I was pleased when he reached about about his next new gig: Chief Strategy Officer of Media Consulting Group. What's that you say, you've
never heard of MCG? Well, you definitely will.
As luck would have it, MCG falls into a rapidly growing segment of the market -- programmatic inventory "curation" -- that I've been looking into
recently, mainly because I've been getting lots of pitches about it, including some startups like MCG, Chalice AI, SWYM and others.
And from what I can tell, all of them have unique
differentiated ways of curating programmatic inventory and most are utilizing some AI-powered technology to help them do it, though some lean more toward the supply- or demand-side.
So I asked
Williams to explain -- in his own words -- what differentiates MCG. You can listen to him explain it verbatim in the sound bite above, but bottom line is that Williams believes MCG is both the most
media-neutral buy-side solution and also accomplishes a super important task: translating the terminology between the supply and demand sides into a unified taxonomy so nothing gets lost in the
suffle.
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"MCG is doing something I've wanted to see in this market for a long time," he explains, adding, "They are buy side aligned,
independent, and operate inside the existing pipes — DSPs, SSPs, and deal IDs — that agencies already use, so there is nothing to rip and replace. The combination of human strategy and
agentic execution on the supply side is a meaningful step forward for how programmatic is run. I'm excited to help shape what comes next."
On that coming next part, Williams told me MCG's
roadmap includes a plan to begin correlating how its proprietary method of inventory curation actually moves the needle for advertisers by mapping it to so-called "outcome" measures and KPIs of that
ilk.
In the meantime, stay tuned for news about other Donnie Williams projects, although the avid New York Knicks fan will be staying pretty close to TV for the next week or so.