The Media Trust: What Adtech Product Marketing Really Looks Like

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Gavin Dunaway, product marketing lead at The Media Trust, shares his insights. Three takeaways:

1. Adtech marketers, especially product marketers, need to distill what problem their product solves and for whom. You can have grand ambitions, but ensure your story is also understandable on that basic level.

2. Product marketers help develop products (in collaboration with the product team), evangelize them, and iterate on them (based on industry feedback and research).

3. Product marketing is interdisciplinary. It overlaps not only with the product function but also the other parts of marketing, especially content and events, which are key to evangelism.

Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:

JZ: How has your decade of experience at AdMonsters informed your jump into your current role, which is product marketing for The Media Trust?

GD: Product marketing is key in my job, but I also do a fair deal of content marketing and event planning. My time at AdMonsters helped me understand what publishers need as well as the best ways to communicate with them. I learned how to best speak directly to the people who would get the most out of my services and also realize sometimes it's not the right fit, and that's okay. I want to make this easier for publishers. And I think I had run out of room to do that on the editorial side.

JZ: The thing I always wanted to understand as a journalist when I was checking out various companies in the space was first and foremost, what problem do you solve and for whom? There would be times when I would go to an adtech company's website, and it would take me a while to figure out who their customer was.

And that really speaks to what product marketing is, right? How do you view the product marketing function specifically? I think it overlaps with content marketing and other things.

GD: It starts with developing the product — understanding what the industry need is and using your knowledge of the industry to inform how the product should work, the features, the user interface, and overall what the market needs and how you’ll deliver that.

Then, there’s bringing the product out to the market and easily explaining the function — whom it is for, how it can be used. And then it’s bringing in the feedback and understanding how can we make this better, how can we make it more in tune with what the market needs?

JZ: We might summarize it as developing the product (in collaboration with product management), evangelizing it, and then iterating on it based on feedback.

GD: Right!

JZ: Many adtech companies have very small marketing teams. Who is the first hire? Is it a product marketer? I think I'm amenable to the idea that it probably should be a product marketer if you're choosing one — but with the understanding that a product marketer does a lot of the work of other parts of marketing. With the evangelism piece, for example, you’ll be doing a lot of content.

GD: Exactly. And that was one of the reasons I was brought into The Media Trust — to bring a journalistic touch to the issues that The Media Trust solves. Because a lot of the stuff that we do is not necessarily sexy, and it's particularly difficult. This was one of the reasons I was drawn to The Media Trust. Other ad tech companies are sending you a check at the end of the month. Your SSPs are giving you money. I'm not. Hopefully, I am preventing bad ads from disrupting your business. That’s a different marketing challenge.

JZ: You're protecting the revenue and the brand they have from erosion. But you're not sending the check.

GD: Which is a little bit of a harder sell, especially in an industry where all we ever hear is ROI, ROI, ROI.

JZ: You have to prove the negative ROI almost. If you don't invest in this, X, Y, Z could happen, and that's the problem.

GD: We've had some luck with that. For example, people might say, “We lost $150,000 to a malware campaign,” and we can help prevent that. But it is mainly anecdotal because few marketing teams are willing to admit they lost money to attacks.

JZ: So, drilling down deeper into what a product marketer really does, walk me through in a week, what are three or five of the things you're doing?

GD: If we follow that developing, evangelizing, and iterating framework, I would say with developing, first off, I'm looking at our roadmap, surveying the newest products coming to market and checking in to see if they're following the plan or if we've deviated in some way. Then, I can share my feedback on how that will affect the market based on my research and interactions with people.

Next is evangelizing. Part of that is creating messaging and sales collateral. A big part of it is creating urgency. Another is identifying the channels that need the most love, internally or externally, and focusing content efforts there.

Finally, iterating is just finding chances to get feedback from the market, whether it's from clients or prospects. Events are crucial, as are networking and constant listening. Twitter/X was a wonderful resource for this; it’s a bit less so now. Beeler.Tech — disclosure, Rob Beeler used to be my boss — is another big resource here because they have a network of publishers and share insights with various ad tech companies. I’m also benefiting from the Adtech God Slack.

JZ: What does your events strategy look like? Do you host your own?

GD: Yes, we do both. We're constantly looking at the market and seeing the best events that are going to meet our user demand. We are known for hosting karaoke nights around New York and around events that are going on. Last year we did two summits: one East Coast, one West Coast.

JZ: Do you focus the summits on an issue like brand safety?

GD: A different type of brand safety. Supply-side brand safety, because publishers have brands too, and supply-side ad tech companies also have brands that they're trying to protect. It doesn't get as much attention as demand-side brand safety, but publishers get stuck with a lot of really lousy ads that they don’t want.