How Group Black’s Kerel Cooper is trying to solve programmatic’s bias problem at the industry level

Following an on-stage conversation at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in December, Kerel Cooper, president of advertising at Group Black, joined Digiday once again on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast to dive further into his continued efforts to shed light on the legacy programmatic media buying practices that often disadvantage Black-owned media companies. Working with ad verification firm Double Verify, Group Black pulled together research that illustrates just how much ad inventory on Black-owned media companies is cut from media budgets when rudimentary tools like keyword blocklists and domain-level categorization are implemented in media buys. Now, Cooper is working with his partners at DV to raise awareness of these findings to educate the buy-side as well as work with trade organizations to create standards for not eliminating large swaths of Black-owned media from programmatic spending. In this conversation, Cooper talks about the results of the research with DV as well as how the deprecation of the third-party cookie is changing the way advertisers are up-ending their programmatic buying practices this year. Get more from Digiday with the daily newsletter, sent out each weekday morning. Visit digiday.com/newsletters to sign up.