Omnicom Media Group’s chief activation officer Megan Pagliuca, speaking on the last day of Digiday’s just-concluded Media Buying Summit in Miami, broke some news onstage, announcing a new brand purpose initiative as well as its status as an inaugural media client for data clean-room solutions being launched by Disney.

The purpose-driven effort, called Red Thread, essentially traces a thread through the supply chain, with the goal of guiding OMG’s clients to content that has the most positive impact. It operates across several media-related avenues: misinformation/disinformation in journalism; fraud prevention, particularly in connected TV; diversity in content creation; and data ethics.

Mis/Disinformation
“You had the consequences of people just blanket-banning news, rather than supporting publishers with editorial integrity,” explained Pagliuca in a conversation with Digiday editor-in-chief Jim Cooper. OMG has partnerships with tech companies to curate inventory at a more granular level, which has been integrated into the Omni platform. “We’re looking to include rather than exclude,” she added.

Fraud Prevention
As for the fraud prevention, Pagliuca said OMG hopes other buy-side agencies and publishers will join the partnership with IAB Tech Lab to curtail CTV fraud more widely and effectively. “There were so many fraud schemes that we weren’t impacted by, or limited impact because were on top of that best practice,” said Pagliuca. “Pushing publishers to have more granularity in inventory signals, ID signals and fraud signals. We don’t have consistency about inventory signals like pod position or show or genre or placement, just this lack of transparency that could be there,” she said.

DE&I
Pagliuca said this element builds on OMG’s prior efforts to support minority content creation and investment through partnerships with SSPs including Colossus SSP. That includes influencer marketing and supporting diverse creators to become minority business owners. “If you think of the challenge of all agencies wanting to spend more money with minority publishers — there’s a supply problem. So we’re attacking it at its core by creating more supply,” she said. Pagliuca said she’s getting clients to distinguish the paid social part of influencer marketing from organic efforts to apply more data rigor to evaluating the impact of each. Technology also enables OMG to better determine the most effective micro-influencers, who she added “are very connected with their audiences.”

Data Ethics
OMG is working with privacy software firm Sourcepoint to create a score that can identify and call out dark-arts practices among publishers, including intentionally confusing disclosures around opt-in consent on their sites.

Clean room with Disney
Separately, Pagliuca said OMG has signed on to be an initial media user of Disney Advertising Sales’ data clean- room solution, which generates advanced pre-planning insights, activation and cross-portfolio measurement for users. “I expect us to have it for this year’s upfront,” she said.

Powered by Disney Select, the content giant’s extensive library of more than 1,000 first-party segments, the data clean room is also being used by car retailer Drivetime, and is being sanitized by tech vendors Habu, InfoSum and Snowflake, according to a Disney statement.

“It was important for our clean-room offering to be cloud agnostic to provide brands with scale and variation, as diverse as their respective industries,” said Lisa Valentino, Disney Advertising Sales’ executive vp of client solutions and addressable enablement.