Originally posted on MarTechSeries.com on June 6, 2022.

Martin Hill, Head of Programmatic at Dianomi chats about the future of marketing and martech and what B2B teams need to do to prepare better for a cookieless future:


Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Martin, we’d love to hear more about your journey in the tech market and also, what are you most looking forward to in your new role at Dianomi?

I’ve been in the industry for a long time. Most of my career has been in engineering leadership roles and I’ve built and architected platforms right across the ecosystem, touching on all aspects of online advertising and marketing. I’ve had experience in performance and branding and lived through lots of change throughout the past 20 years. That’s the most interesting thing about the industry, no two days are ever the same and just when you think you have everything down pat, things move on and there are new challenges to address.

Over the past few years I have been focused on the future and how online advertising and marketing will change and what advertisers and publishers need to do to set themselves up for success. Which is a great segue into Dianomi. Building on a strong heritage of direct, performance based contextual and native, I am working with the team to drive the programmatic transformation of the business. We will be keeping the strong foundations whilst extending Dianomi’s existing capabilities, premium audience and trusted relationships and bringing that quality to programmatic.

What are some of the key trends in programmatic ads today that you feel advertisers/marketers need to be focusing more on?

We are seeing continued growth in programmatic and the ongoing shift from non-programmatic budgets to programmatic.

The key growth areas are video/CTV and native and the headwinds the industry is facing include:

  • EU/US data sharing (Shrems II)
  • GDPR consent management (TCF2.0 invalidation)
  • Identity (3rd Party Cookies being removed from Chrome)

“Needless to say, we are now in the midst of a shifting tide in the foundations of audience based advertising as we know it.  With that change comes opportunity and those advertisers and marketers that have a plan to navigate and weather the storm will fare the best.  There will not be a one-size fits all approach and relationships will be key to make sure advertisers and publishers are aligned in their approach to create win/win scenarios without unnecessary nasty surprises.”

With the eventual death of third-party cookies; how do you feel digital advertisers and marketers need to prepare better for a cookieless future?

Advertisers and marketers need to re-build relationships with their key publishers. Advertisers are already only talking to around 40-70% of their audience effectively, or in other words they are only talking to their audience in Chrome. Their Safari & Firefox audience is already cookieless and has been for a few years. Most of their existing budget is spent across a relatively small number of publishers. They can work with their agencies and tech partners to engage with those publishers to discuss and align their goals and objectives to forge an identity and data strategy that will work within the right context to deliver the outcomes they are looking to achieve across their key partners and lay the foundations to bring to market more broadly.

How do you feel the adtech segment will evolve in the near-future to meet all of these changing industry standards and end user needs?

AdTech has already evolved to handle the cookieless future.  In fact, this is like a back to the future moment.  Relationships and context matters.  Advertisers and publishers need to foster these key relationships again and talk to each other in order to deliver campaigns successfully in a win/win way.  From a technical perspective there has also been an increased focus on Programmatic Guaranteed, Deals/PMPs and also the resurgence of context and 1st party identity.  The key aspect here is to manage these in a way that retains the benefits and efficiency of programmatic trading without introducing too much workflow overhead.  This is exactly where a good identity and data strategy paired with strong relationships and context comes in.

It’s worth noticing that until now I have not mentioned the Privacy Sandbox, Google’s initiative for Chrome to replace the various features and functionality afforded by 3rd party cookies.  This is intentional as the total output in tangible terms to date has been zero.  Apart from perhaps raising the profile of alternate names for segments; cohorts and topics.  While the Privacy Sandbox will of course be something to keep abreast of, it will never be a holistic solution and will only ever be a Google Chrome centric way of reaching your audience.

A few quick thoughts on what it takes to drive ROI with digital ads in today’s environment?

Reaching the right audience at the right time with the right message in the right place, then optimizing towards desired outcomes.  This is still the key to maximizing ROI and driving media efficiency.  It’s not that this is changing, it’s more a case of what foundations need to be in place within a cookieless environment in order to facilitate good, privacy centric, safe trading so that user data and privacy is preserved during the process.

I’ve covered the key tenets of this in a broad sense, relationships, ID and data strategy, context and optimization.  This is essentially a mix of what we have already been doing, just enabled by 3rd party cookies and MAIDs.  The future will look similar but will be underpinned with 1st party identity signals and context instead.

Some last thoughts, takeaways on adtech and programmatic best practices before we wrap up!

The time to act is now.  If you haven’t already got a plan for cookieless environments there is no better time to make a start and add incremental value while beginning to communicate effectively to your cookieless audience.

Relationships matter and you will need a flexible contextual, identity and data strategy to work across your publishers and formats.

BlackRock Head of Global Media, Graciela Benveniste in Conversation with Dianomi CTO, Cabell de Marcellus

From left to right: Graciela Benveniste, Head of Global Media at BlackRock, Cabell de Marcellus, CTO and Co-founder at Dianomi.

On Tuesday April 26th, Dianomi CTO Cabell de Marcellus moderated a fireside chat with Graciela Benveniste, BlackRock’s Global Head of Media. The conversation was part of Brand Innovators’ 2022 Spring Media Buying Summit. Their conversation focused on the evolving nature of financial services marketing and how it differs from other types of brand marketing.

Click the image to listen to the full livecast.

A Proven Engineering and Technical Leader, Martin Hill, joins from Adform to develop and lead Dianomi’s Programmatic Platform

London, New York and Sydney, 12 April 2022, Dianomi (London Stock Exchange: DNM), a leading provider of native digital advertising services to premium clients in the Financial Services and Business sectors, is delighted to announce the appointment of Martin Hill, to the newly created position of Head of Programmatic.

Martin’s appointment coincides with industry changes to Audience Based Advertising such as the phasing out of third-party cookies in Google Chrome and IDFA in Apple iOS, creating the ideal time for him to lead the development of the Company’s programmatic platform which will retain the unique characteristics of Dianomi’s Contextual Media Platform which is not dependent on these identifiers and which has driven the Company’s significant success to date.

Dianomi has built its reputation as a contextual leader serving ads for the premium segment of the Business and Finance sector with a client base that includes 7 of the world’s top 10 largest asset management companies, 7 of the top 10 largest wealth management firms in the US and half of the top 10 largest banks in the US.

With 20+ years of experience, most recently as Vice President of Solutions Consulting with Adform, Martin is a well-known industry specialist. He has significant strategic management experience and proven ability to plan, build and implement robust and scalable technical platforms.  He has led countless projects with the likes of Rubicon Project, IPONWEB, CJ Affiliate and Conversant.

“Following our successful stock market listing last year, we have been investing in tier one talent and Martin certainly falls into that category,” says CEO Ru Hodson. “The stars are aligning for our business –  with the industry looking for solutions in a post cookie environment, our contextual approach is ideally placed to expand and with Martin we intend to significantly extend our programmatic footprint whilst keeping our USP.”

Commenting on his appointment, Martin Hill, said, “I believe this a truly interesting time to join Dianomi. Our industry is having to adapt to a new order alongside the death of the cookie. So with 20+ years of delivering contextual solutions combined with truly strong relationships with leading financial brands and publishers, I think there is a natural window for Dianomi to grow in the programmatic space.”

Our CEO, Rupert Hodson, joined ECI Partners on the latest episode of their ‘Building Successful Businesses’ podcast series. Rupert gives insight into Dianomi’s journey from a start-up to a business operating across three continents, and what he’s learned along the way. Rupert also touches on how the advertising and financial services industry is evolving, and how Dianomi is supporting that change.

Listen to the full episode here:

On March 23rd, Dianomi Sr. Partnerships Director, Justin Proctor, participated in a panel during the Gramercy Financial Marketers Forum 2022: Strategic Excellence in Financial Marketing in New York. The event was sponsored by Dianomi and the panel was focused on Financial Media Strategies for Success.

(L-R) Elizabeth Coleman-Chen, Justin Proctor, Louis Cohen and Meg Sullivan at 3 West Club in New York, NY on Wednesday, March 23, 2022, discuss financial media strategies for success on a panel during the Gramercy Financial Marketers Forum 2022: Strategic Excellence in Financial Marketing.

The panel included Louis Cohen, Director, Digital Marketing & Demand Generation Leader, EY; Elizabeth Coleman-Chen, Exec. Director, Head, Strategic Content Mktg, Alt. & Sustainable Investing, Morgan Stanley Investment Management; Meg Sullivan, Managing Director, Imprint.

After discussing what media strategies the panelists thought would be prominent in the future, Proctor explained the idea that a brand’s overall media strategy is similar to a bell curve. A brand’s role is to find their place on the curve in relation to their customer’s intent and interaction with their brand to create a perfect medium of client interest, media focus and brand differentiation in that space.

Please click  here for the full report.

We are delighted to announce that Dianomi has been ranked 12th in the 2022 Annual Megabuyte Quoted25 awards.

The Megabuyte Quoted25 awards are part of the Megabuyte100 award series which celebrates the 100 best performing technology companies in the UK.

The Quoted25 awards recognise the 25 best performing, listed technology companies within the Megabuyte100 winning company universe. 

Companies’ performance is determined by their Megabuyte Scorecard rating – a proprietary, and wholly independent, benchmarking methodology that assesses companies’ performance against seven key financial KPIs.

The Top 25 UK Technology Companies are as follows:

RankTrendCompanyPeer Group*Revenue (£m)ScorePrevious Rank
1BokuBANI41.57807
2NEWKainos GroupITC234.6980
3NEWCerillionBC26.0777
4GB GroupENT217.66754
5NEWYouGovENT16973
6NEWDarktraceSI207.3471
7Oxford MetricsENT35.6369
8TracsisBC50.2468
9GlobalDataENT178.468
10NEWAuction Technology GroupBC70.0868
11Alpha FMCITC98.0768
12NEWDianomiBC28.4367
13dotdigitalENT58.12676
14NEWIdeagenENT65.6466
15Alfa Financial SoftwareBANI78.87662
16NEWCranewareGH55.764
17NEWLearning Technologies GroupENT132.3263
18BangoBANI12.1763
19NEWBeeks Financial CloudITMS11.9262
20Bytes Technology GroupVARS393.5761
21NEWElecoIND25.2361
22EMIS GroupGH159.4561
23NEWNetcallENT27.1561
24RedcentricTS91.460
25NEWBlancco Technology GroupSI36.5160

*Peer group acronyms

Software & Digital Platforms

  • BANI – Banking & Insurance
  • BC – Business & Consumer
  • ENT – Enterprise
  • GH – Government & Healthcare
  • IND – Industrials
  • SI – Security

ICT & Digital Services

  • BPO – Business Process Outsourcing
  • ITC- IT Consulting
  • ITMS – IT Managed Services
  • TS – Telecoms Services
  • VARS – Value-Added Resellers

Originally posted on Brand Innovators

by Shane Schick

February 24, 2022

When Rupert Hodson uses the phrase “content recommendation platforms,” he knows that many people in the marketing community will instantly associate it with the sensationalistic or clickbait-style headlines that appear beneath articles on their favorite websites. 

He also knows that, as soon as anyone takes a closer look at Dianomi, they’ll realize how differently his company has approached this space. 

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Dianomi has spent nearly 20 years helping brands place native ads with the ideal publishers to reach their target audience. Unlike Taboola, Outbrain or many similar content recommendation platforms, however, Dianomi has remained exclusively centered around publishers serving the business and finance sectors. 

By contextually targeting ads to professionals engaging with the finance vertical, Dianomi has been able to grow dramatically since its 2010 expansion into the U.S., which now accounts for 80% of its business. According to Hodson, its co-founder and CEO, Dianomi’s clientele includes seven of the top 10 global asset managers and six of the top 10 US banks.

Dianomi’s network, meanwhile, now spans more than 350 publishers, which offers brands access to digital channels that include web sites but also mobile apps and publishers Apple News channels. 

“The fact that we sit across all these publishers, and because we have fixed positions, we’re not competing with other sorts of demand sources,” Hodson told Brand Innovators, adding that Dianomi ensures the right experience by turning down the vast majority of advertisers that come its way because they’re not the right fit. “For an advertiser, if you’re a big US Bank, you can’t afford for your ad to appear next door to gut cleansing ads. That’s just a no-go.” Trust,Transparency and Brand safety have always been front and center of everything we do for both our advertisers and publishers

Last Spring, Dianomi completed its IPO, the first of U.K. and Ireland growth investor BGF’s portfolio companies to do so. The next step, according to Hodson, is a move into categories that interest the same high-income earners, but in their off hours. 

“We had publishers who said, ‘We love what you’re doing on monetizing our financial content, but we also have lifestyle content. Can you help us there?” he said, giving travel-oriented credit cards aimed at affluent readers who are engaging with travel content as an example. “Premium lifestyle advertisers are an exciting growth opportunity for us but again, it’s super important that we remain laser focused on creating a premium advertising environment for both our advertisers and publishers. We see automotive, travel, health and the premium end of the direct to consumer marketplace as key areas of focus.

Hodson shared some additional insights on content recommendation, native advertising and how Dianomi continues to differentiate itself: 

‘Performance Marketing’ Is Best Defined Through A Brand’s Unique KPIs

Dianomi works with plenty of advertisers who are trying to achieve conversions, but this can mean different things depending on the brand in question. Some might be looking for a click through to their website where the reader can engage with their content, but others want people to sign up for a newsletter, download an app,  sign up for an account or apply for a credit card, etc. Transparency on conversion has been a core driver of our ability to work with brands on an always on basis, as is our ability to optimize activity to conversion on a publisher by publisher basis.  

“In many ways, we work like a lab with our clients, sharing the learnings and optimizing the campaigns together and it’s very synergistic. Consequently, many of our advertisers are always-on, bidding to the efficient frontier, because there is really no reason to come off the platform if they are hitting their KPIs.

Even as much of the ad industry is trying to grasp the impact of Google’s recent decision to replace cookies with Topics, Hodson said that Dianomi, having focused on contextual targeting in its purest form since inception, as well as contextual lookalike targeting, is future proofed and well positioned to capture the opportunity that the depreciation of cookies is opening up. 

“We see time and time again that contextual targeting capabilities out perform behavioral targeting, with the latter being what the programmatic advertising ecosystem relies on. The trick is delivering contextual at scale. This is one of our core USPs.”

There Is Still Plenty Of Room For Creativity In Native Ad Experiences

Last year, Dianomi launched what Hodson called “streaming podcasts.” Readers can click “play” directly on a native ad unit and become listeners to the podcast. It’s a good case in point in how native ad creative will continue to evolve in order to provide a better user experience, Hodson said.

“I don’t quite like the phrase ‘snackable content,’ but it is that sort of approach where they’re trying to ensure that you keep that engagement,” he said. 

Marketers should work with companies like Dianomi as a sort of lab partner, he suggested, where its algorithm and team can help test variations on a campaign to maximize results. This can lead to some unexpected strategic moves; Hodson recalled one asset manager client which ended up using data it gathered through digital advertising with Dianomi on a nationwide  billboard campaign in the UK. 

Analytics Can Only Help When You Make The Effort To Produce Excellence

With 18 million articles a month running across its network of publishers, Dianomi has developed sophisticated capabilities in terms of guiding marketers to the best placement opportunities. This includes the ability to show data on content that is trending well or identifying “white spaces” that show where audiences are waiting to be provided new or different content. 

That said, Hodson pointed out that native ads need to adhere to what are considered premium best practices. Depending on their goals, for instance, some evergreen content might perform well over a longer period, while other content should be more timely. Information needs to be “digestible” for busy audiences with low attention spans. And of course, native ads have to provide genuine value.

“Our targeting will help,” he said, “but ultimately it’s reliant on  the brand producing high quality content that generates interest. That content can be in the form of written articles, infographics, videos or podcasts. It takes us back to the basics of successful advertising: delivering high quality advertising – why we focus on premium brands, into professionally curated and relevant content – our premium publisher partners, in a privacy friendly manner – targeting through context, not user data. And this is all done through our reach to over 440 million unique devices on a monthly basis.”

Brand Innovators Customer Engagement Summit – John Hancock & Dianomi Fireside Chat

On February 1, 2022, Kate Ardini, CMO, John Hancock spoke with President of Dianomi USA, Rachel Tuffney, about the importance of customer engagement and how when done correctly, it will drive customer loyalty in the long run.

Kate focused on John Hancock’s mission and how customer-centric they have become. She also discussed the importance of technology and humanizing data insights to adapt to the constant changes that take place in the Insurance industry.

Click the image below to watch the full livecast and learn about how John Hancock is engaging with their customers and learning to create partnerships with technology companies to further drive consumer interests and build brand loyalty.

  • News & views

Dianomi, a leading provider of native digital advertising services to premium clients in the Financial Services and Business sectors, is pleased to announce the following trading update for the year ended 31 December 2021.

The Group experienced strong revenue growth of over 25% compared to 2020, in line with market expectations. Adjusted EBITDA* is expected to be slightly ahead of market expectations. Unaudited cash at the year-end was £10.3 million (30 June 2021: £7.9 million).

Demand from both advertisers and publishers has been strong and the second six months of the year saw further new advertisers and publishers ‘go live’ on Dianomi’s platform, as well as growth within the existing publisher and advertiser base.

In 2021, the Group also saw significant growth in both its video and lifestyle segments; video revenue grew almost 150% year over year and lifestyle revenue amounted to over £1.5m from a standing start. Whilst both are relatively new income streams, and represent a small proportion of overall revenues, there is significant further potential.

The Company will report full year results for the 12 months to 31 December 2021 by early May 2022.

Rupert Hodson, Chief Executive Officer of Dianomi, said: “2021 has been an excellent year for Dianomi. Joining AIM in May has been beneficial as we seek to increase the number of services we deliver to an expanding portfolio of premium advertisers and publishers across the globe.  Reflecting the market, advertisers are diverting more spend to digital platforms and our opportunity is to capture share of this new spend. I believe we are well placed to do so and look forward to reporting further progress during 2022.”

*  Adjusted EBITDA is calculated as profit after tax before deducting net finance costs, tax, depreciation, exceptional items and share based payment charges

The information contained within this announcement is deemed to constitute inside information as stipulated under the Market Abuse Regulations (EU) No. 596/2014. It forms part of United Kingdom domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. Upon the publication of this announcement, this inside information is now considered to be in the public domain.

On January 13, 2022, President of Dianomi USA, Rachel Tuffney, spoke with Richard Frank, VP, Global Brand Management, T. Rowe Price about how T. Rowe Price is thinking ahead for 2022 and connecting with their audience in a more authentic way.

Frank focused on the importance of flexibility and evolution when it comes to marketing, branding, and communications, especially in a post-pandemic world. He emphasized that companies need to think about how to engage with their audiences in a more human way and make them a part of the everyday conversation.

Click the image below to watch the full livecast and learn about how T. Rowe Price is listening to their consumers and learning to weave their offerings into a conversation.