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Fixable

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Boost your confidence (w/ Master Fixer Ian Robertson) 35:40

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Anne and Frances are back with a new season of Fixable to tackle a subject that impacts everyone’s experience of work: confidence. In this episode, the pair sit down with Master Fixer Ian Robertson, a professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin and author of the new book How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief, to discuss where confidence comes from, how to inspire confidence in others, and how to deal with overconfident leaders. Ian also shares his confidence framework and explains why anxiety is actually your friend. Follow Hosts: Anne Morriss ( @annemorriss | LinkedIn: @anne-morriss ), Frances Frei ( @francesxfrei | LinkedIn: @francesfrei ) Follow Hosts: Anne Morriss ( @annemorriss | LinkedIn: @anne-morriss ), Frances Frei ( @francesxfrei | LinkedIn: @francesfrei ) Guest: Ian Robertson (Instagram: | LinkedIn: | Website:) Links https://anneandfrances.com/ https://ianrobertson.org/ How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief Subscribe to TED Instagram: @ted YouTube: @TED TikTok: @tedtoks LinkedIn: @ted-conferences Website: ted.com Podcasts: ted.com/podcasts Subscribe to TED Instagram: @ted YouTube: @TED TikTok: @tedtoks LinkedIn: @ted-conferences Website: ted.com Podcasts: ted.com/podcasts For the full text transcript, visit ted.com/podcasts/fixable-transcripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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Weekly in depth interviews with the pioneers who built the first two decades of advertising technology

69 Episoden

#Tech #Business #Marketing #Martin Kihn #Ad Tech

Paleo Ad Tech

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Weekly in depth interviews with the pioneers who built the first two decades of advertising technology

69 Episoden

#Tech #Business #Marketing #Martin Kihn #Ad Tech

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Paleo Ad Tech

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67. Ramsey McGrory – DoubleClick to Mediaocean via Right Media 36:54

vor 1 year36:54

36:54

Ramsey McGrory started his career in the U.S. Army and later found himself at the mighty DoubleClick in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com boom as an ad sales exec “banging the phones” selling direct-response ads to finance and insurance companies. He joined the seminal Right Media in 2004 as VP of platform and ad sales, staying on after Yahoo acquired the company in 2007. Later, Ramsey was CEO at AddThis , acquired by Oracle, and president at Scout Media before joining his old friend and former PaleoAdTech guest Bill Wise at Mediaocean, where he is CDO. As Ramsey tells Marty in this fascinating episode, he fell into advertising by accident in the 1990s after starting his career in New York at Citibank, working on then-trendy derivatives; a hiring manager moved over to a little-known startup called DoubleClick and suggested he join up. Ten interviews later (none with founder Kevin O’Connor), he was hired as a display ads sales rep, a career change for this former Army logistics specialist. He thrived on the chaos and excitement of the boom. “It was a very diverse community,” he recalls. “You’d get the super-engineering quant types, you’d get the creative types and everything in between.” In the process, Ramsey learned a lot about how to make advertising work on the internet as part of a direct-response group (distinct from the more premium DoubleClick brand-sales group) led by Bill Wise and Mike Walrath. The process was manual: he got a daily spreadsheet describing publishers, impressions, cost, conversions; and he would make tweaks to targeting and frequency capping. Daily frustration led to innovation, years later: “The concept of Right Media came out of DoubleClick’s unwillingness to invest in an ad server and a media business that was focused on meeting direct-response goals,” Ramsey says. DoubleClick went through 7-8 rounds of layoffs after the dot-com crash as the brand-ad market cratered and colleague after colleague was called into the HR office on the 13th floor of the luxe “Click City” on 33rd and 10th. Ramsey’s niche in direct-response stayed relatively steady: “How many times have these direct response advertisers said, if you’re meeting my goals, I’ve got unlimited budget?” Ramsey followed ex-DoubleClicker Mike Walrath to Right Media, which Walrath founded in 2003 in the offices of Joe Zawadzki’ s Poindexter (later called [x+1]). Of course, Right Media gained an inestimable asset when the technically-brilliant Brian O’Kelley joined and a series of fundamental ad-serving and network innovations unrolled, setting up the era of RTB. Ramsey describes a market with rampant impressions on sites like MySpace, requiring scale (O’Kelley’s specialty as an engineer and the topic of his Princeton thesis paper) but also inspiring new ideas. Optimization was primarily by “suppression.” Meaning: the advertiser picked a price point (e.g., $2.50 CPM) and inventory would be optimized by changing geos, websites, frequency — optimization happening by removing placements, which lowered scale and decreased spend. The team experimented, creating campaign segments at different price points in the ad server. This tactic raised the frequency cap for ads: “You’re bombing the same ad unit and the ad unit is effectively sort of competing with itself,” Ramsey explains. At this point, O’Kelley had one of his insights: “Brian looked at it and said, ‘We just built this wrong.'” Meaning: the ad server (called Manage) optimized inventory against a set price. But what if that model could be changed — what if campaigns could flip the model from optimizing inventory against price to optimizing price against inventory? Thus: dynamic pricing. It was a fundamental conceptual and technical change. Now theoretically every advertiser could look at every impression, which improves yields for publishers. Advertisers were told that the eCPM (average CPM over the campaign) could be lower overall than the previously-set price but the scale would go up 5X (say) because more inventory is available. This technology, rebuilt by O’Kelley, became Yield Manager, and it was licensed to a number of ad networks including Right Media’s own. At this point the 3-4 networks in the group noticed they had all trafficked demand and supply tags into one another. This observation in turn led the ad server to morph into the first “exchange,” where users (at first, ad networks) would have a “seat” and connect to other seat-holders without having to use a lot of cross-tagging. This was the pioneering Right Media Exchange (RMX) of song and legend. The only tags used were the creative tags on the page. There was an auction for each impression. However, a limitation was that all the intelligence required had to be synched into the exchange. (This data-sharing requirement made some large buyers like P&G uncomfortable.) The next evolution was the emergence of DSPs and SSPs which pulled decision intelligence from the exchange itself into buy- and sell-side platforms. How did buyers and sellers react to the idea of an ad exchange? At first, Ramsey says, it was not difficult to describe an auction — after all, everyone knew how the stock market and paid search ads worked, — but “dynamic pricing” made buyers uneasy. The Right Media sales team came up with the idea of “PANT People,” styrofoam figures brought into meetings to demonstrate for visual-tactile learners how the platform worked. PANT stood for the parties in the exchange: Publisher-Advertiser-Network-Technology. The challenge with dynamic pricing was that it made ad serving fees (then materially higher than today, say, $0.05-0.07) difficult to forecast. Objections were met by focusing the market on eCPM and setting a maximum bid that was higher the eCPM so more inventory could be accessed. After Yahoo’s acquisition of Right Media, Ramsey stayed at Yahoo for four years, which he says he enjoyed. He started at Mediaocean eight years ago as CRO, building a sales function beyond the original holding-company core and now shepherds mergers and acquisitions, of which Mediaocean made 10-12 in recent years. The largest of these was Flashtalking, run by PaleoAdTech guest John Nardone , which powers the fast-growing digital component of Mediaocean’s business.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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66. Daniel Jaye – starting it all with Engage 46:13

vor 1 year46:13

46:13

Daniel Jaye was co-founder in 1995 of Engage, a pioneer in bringing database marketing to the internet. A competitor of DoubleClick, Engage built arguably the largest database of pseudonymous profiles at the time, and Daniel and his team created innovative technologies for ETL, large-scale analytics and behavioral targeting. Daniel was also the man behind much of the technical resourcefulness of the ad network Tacoda. In 2010, he co-founded another technically ingenious startup called Korrelate, an ad attribution solution. Today he is CEO Aqfer , a marketing data plataform-as-a-service company based in Florida. An astrophysicist inspired by Tom Swift stories in his youth, Daniel began his adult journey in management consulting and then joined Epsilon, where he worked on an early pen-based PDA before enlisting at Fidelity. At the time — as Daniel tells Marty in this erudite episode — there were two companies pushing the boundaries of data management: Walmart (supporting scale) and Fidelity (supporting complexity). At Fidelity, Daniel’s job was to run its Teradata-based massively-parallel processing (MPP) environment. In this era before Hadoop, Daniel developed a global reputation as a cross-platform high-scale data management expert. This reputation reached the ear of David Wetherell , the energetic CEO of CMGi, and Wetherell approached Daniel with a compelling (if rather vague) idea: “Bring database marketing to the internet.” It was 1995. Netscape was one year old. At the time, CMGi — the name stood for College Marketing Group Inc. — had a database of consumers linked to their book- and magazine-buying behaviors. So it could be used to tie people to their areas of interest and serve marketers. Seizing the opportunity of the nascent internet, Wetherell used some smart acquisitions to amass a warchest to fund a successful venture arm and an operating division to build its own ideas. At its peak during the dot-com boom, CMGI was a massive holding company with a roster of storied internet brands: Lycos (search engine), GeoCities (web hosting), Planet Direct (portals), FlyCast (ad network), AdKnowledge (ad server), etc. It eventually had 5,000 employees and $1.5 billion revenue and was #7-9 in terms of web traffic to its properties. The New England Patriots’ stadium was called CMGi Field. Daniel became CMGi’s acting CTO with the proto-database project as his day job. The company was based at Brickstone Square in Andover, Mass. After a privacy audit during his time at Fidelity, Daniel realized that there was actually no need to have personally-identifiable information (PII) to do the analytical work for database marketing: segmentation and list management. PII could be appended later, but it was not needed for analysis. “That’s what actually inspired online profiling,” he recalls. “We could raise the bar versus traditional direct mail because we did not need to know who you are in the real world in order to make … advertising and content relevant to you based on your interests.” So Engage was built on the Fidelity-inspired direct mail idea to build anonymous profiles, plus cookies. Daniel’s first technical challenge was scale, handling clickstream data and data from portfolio partners like Lycos. “I knew that the tools didn’t exist,” he admits. So he had to build them. He ended up crafting three products: The first parallel-ETL tool for data processing An analytics tool for discovery and iteration Interest-based anonymous profiles (which they called “cybertargeting”) At the end of 18 months, the tools were real. The first (called Engage Fusion) and the second (Engage Discover) were soon sold to the data warehousing company Redbrick for about $10 million. CMGi kept cybertargeting, which became Engage. Engage’s solution for cybertargeting could process log data and online event data — and then create cookie-based profiles to target and measure marketing campaigns and analyze web traffic. By 1998, DoubleClick had gone public and CMGI wanted to get into the ad serving game. It acquired Accipiter for $35 million, a rival of the on-premise ad server NetGravity (later acquired by DoubleClick). In the spirit of building things that don’t exist, Daniel also filed what may well have been the first patent for cookie-synching. So while PaleoAdTech’s friend Lou Montulli may have invented the cookie at Netscape, Daniel says, “I am the inventor of all the evil uses of cookies [wink].” There was also an algorithm that determined peoples’ interests from their browsing behavior and, eventually, got at various levels of interest. While Engage now offered an integrated data and ad server platform, it had challenges. It was difficult (aka impossible) to build an internet data-selling business until the real-time bidding era a decade later, when Exelate and BlueKai realized Engage’s original data-network dream. There was the persistent, rarely-discussed problem of decaying profiles and stale data. So while at one point Engage may have had 130 million unique profiles in its database, only a portion of them were actually useful. CMGi went public in 1999, launched its own ad network called AudienceNet (combining Accipter and Engage profile data), and was hammered of course by the dot-com meltdown that began in 2000, laying off staff and selling assets. For various dot-com financing reasons, the company didn’t have the cash to endure and eventually dissolved. After an exciting interlude at Tacoda — which we will (Marty hopes) discuss in a future episode [in the meantime, enjoy this previous episode with Tacoda’s founder Dave Morgan], — Daniel resurfaced in 2010 with Korrelate, an ad analytics company. It emerged from an problem related to AOL’s acquisition of Tacoda: how to get AOL’s other properties, like Ads.com, to work with it. Daniel’s solution included a forerunner of header bidding he called federated RTB (sold to Operative Media) and Korrelate, which tied digital clickstream data to offline events like sales. It performed online-to-offline attribution. Korrelate could tie ad impressions to offline sales — for example, partnering with Polk for DMV registration data, — as well as give marketers insights into the impact of their digital channels on sales. In this way, General Motors learned that their online form wasn’t nearly as powerful as their configurator for predicting sales. Ultimately, Korrelate couldn’t compete with Datalogix , which sold media targeting data and provided its measurement service like Korrelate’s for free. “We were competing with free,” he says. “And I learned my lesson then about selling analytics standalone.” Korrelate ran into trouble in 2014 and was sold to JD Power. Today at Aqfer, Jaye says, he’s still in a position to make use of his prolific technical imagination. “What I do,” he says, “is I sell the technology that I’ve had to build in every company … as a platform.”…

Paleo Ad Tech

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65. Adam Singolda – the tabula rasa of Taboola 32:37

vor 1 year32:37

32:37

Adam Singolda is the Founder and CEO of Taboola , a performance-focused advertising company he started in 2007 after spending seven years as a cryptological engineer in the Israeli Defense Forces. Today, Taboola is a public company with 2023 revenues of $1.4 billion (and growing nicely ), around 2,000 employees in 22 countries, 18,000 advertiser customers reaching 600M daily users. It acquired Connexity (formerly Shopzilla) in 2021 for $800M, expanding its offering into commerce- and retail-focused recommendations and ads. It’s based in NYC and still has a large presence near Tel Aviv, where it was founded. Taboola took a circuitous route to its present incarnation. As Adam tells Marty in this lively episode, his vision after leaving the IDF was to start a company that was a video recommender system — to the solve the problem, he says, that he never knew what to watch on TV. Initial investors were friends and family and, on one memorable occasion, an acquaintance of his mother’s Adam accosted at a bat mitvah to which he had not been invited. Adam was always self-directed. Living in Israel as a kid, he tried to start a babysitting and tutoring syndicate and then a short-lived text-based news-and-entertainment alert company he called 24Go. And he had an entrepreneurial family: his father Avi Singolda is a well-known studio guitarist and band leader in Israeli who once played “Here Comes the Sun” with Sir George Martin (“the only time I’ve ever seen him nervous,” Adam says of his father). The name Taboola came from the Latin tabula rasa (“blank slate”), combined with the “oo” motif from successful internet companies Facebook, Yahoo and Google; and the domain taboola.com was available for $10 in 2007. The company had a hard time finding a business model, and Adam admits that in the beginning he didn’t know anything about the ad business (a trait shared with many PaleoAdTech founders). At first, he pitched publishers on the idea of paying a fee for a video recommendation engine; then he tried a revenue share from money made from recommended videos. Neither worked. “I almost shut down Taboola three times,” Adam says. “It’s a very hard moment because you’re very small, when you’re a company of 10 people or 15 people and you know, and nobody else does, that you have money for a month or two. It’s really stressful.” It was only in November, 2011 when for the first time Taboola allowed someone to pay them to be discovered on someone else’s site that “the revenue started to go up and to the right.” Adam doesn’t name his first client but admits it’s a large publisher we all know (like Forbes, perhaps). The idea of a content-and-article recommendation engine with sponsored links mixed in with organic links was born, and Taboola did not look back. The company went from almost no revenue in 2011 to $200M in 2014 and is on track to $2 billion by 2024 or so. It charges a CPC (which varies from pennies to dollars per click) or sometimes a CPM and shares some of the revenue with publishers. Its customers are “performance ninjas” who are looking for traffic and action, not upper-funnel branding. The algorithm uses pixels on the advertisers’ pages to see if ads result in actions, which improves targeting. So Taboola functions like a performance ad network. There were always competitors, including RevContent and Outbrain . The latter and Taboola were reportedly involved in merger talks for years that fell apart near the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020. In 2021, Taboola went public via a SPAC on the Nasdaq exchange at a valuation of about $2.6 billion. Adam’s goals remain lofty and he admits he’s an optimistic person by nature. He sees Taboola as a content recommendation engine for the open internet (outside the gardens), and the acquisition of Connexity as a way to become the web’s product recommendation engine. Recent features include Maximize Conversion, which is a kind of autopilot for outcomes similar to Google’s PerformanceMax, and an AI-enabled ad-design tool.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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64. Greg Smith – Boomerang-ing through DoubleClick, EchoTarget and Aniview 26:58

vor 1 year26:58

26:58

Greg joined DoubleClick in 1998 as a product manager after a stop in management consulting, and he became passionate about the early retargeting solution for advertisers called Boomerang. In 2005, he founded dynamic retargeting company EchoTarget, which was acquired by Acxiom in 2007. Today he is GM North America at Aniview , an Israel-based video monetization platform for web, mobile and CTV. Joining the diabolically-hot DoubleClick in NYC in the ’90s via a headhunter, Greg was hired by product leader David Rosenblatt, later to become the company’s turnaround CEO. At the time, Rosenblatt ran a small group called Closed Loop Marketing, one of DoubleClick’s three lines of business. (The other two were Wenda Millard’s media network and the original DART ad server.) Rosenblatt’s Closed Loop Marketing unit also had three power plays, as Greg tells Marty in this far-ranging chat. One was what would become DART for Advertisers; another was Boomerang cookie-based retargeting; and the other was DataBank, an ad database that helped tracking and conversion optimization. Sensing its potential, Greg adopted Boomerang and convinced the bosses that it should be part of the media group, under Millard; and thus it was moved. It was an incendiary time, with the legendary parties (just mention “Oompah Loompah” to any staffer of that era and watch their reaction). The staff doubled in 2000, its last boom moment for a long while. Retargeting “was successful right away,” Greg reports. With an early customer “we doubled click rate” — but more important, customers like Victoria’s Secret were able to show much better click-to-conversion rates using retargeting. The music stopped — for everyone — in 2001, and Greg in time found himself at Cendant , a megacorporation with some holdings in travel. While there, Greg was exposed to a technology which he believed could be configured into a dynamic retargeting solution. Rather than a static tag, like Boomerang’s, it could provide data about origin and destination of a trip, which might then be populated into an ad. Greg founded EchoTarget in 2005, using the dynamic tech and the Right Media and DoubleClick exchanges. Early customers like Spirit Airlines adopted what EchoTarget called “dynamic retargeting,” and the company claimed click-rate improvements from 2x-8x. It was an advantaged data solution, although competitors like Dotomi appeared. Greg at the Ad:Tech event Eventually signing up non-travel customers such as Nestle Waters, EchoTarget’s portfolio remained about 70% travel-focused at the time of the company’s acquisition by Acxiom in 2007, for an undisclosed amount. Today, Greg is GM North America at Aniview, which he describes as an “end-to-end video platform company,” predominantly serving publishers. It offers a video player, video ad server, CMS and server-side-ad-insertion for CTV. The biggest component of Aniview’s business is a marketplace.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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63. Jason Fairchild – developing GoTo, OpenX and tvScientific 29:40

vor 2 years29:40

29:40

Jason was the co-founder with his fellow Yahoo veteran Tim Cadogan of OpenX, a pioneering ad server and then programmatic exchange that launched in 2008. Today he is co-founder and CEO of tvScientific , a CTV-oriented programmatic platform. Jason began his journey in business development in Southern California at one of the original ISPs, Earthlink , which persists to this day. Then living in Pasadena, he was an avid follower of the Idealab incubator, led by the monumental Bill Gross , who became a mentor. One of Idealab’s startups that Jason noticed was GoTo.com – and he joined as one of the company’s first two dozen employees, powering business development and deal-making. As Jason tells Marty in this penetrating episode, it “almost didn’t matter” what GoTo actually did, so eager was he to join the Idealab orbit. As legend has it, GoTo started as an algorithmic search engine, until Bill Gross came back after a weekend’s thought and decided it should try something that had never been done before: rank results based on how much advertisers bid on the keyword(s). Paid search was born. It was a tough sell, as Jason admits. Advertisers had to become comfortable with keywords, bidding, measurement, a whole new vocabulary and method of paying for attention and intent. Ironically, it took the dot-com crash to catalyze GoTo’s business, as cash-strapped marketers realized search was a (seemingly) highly-accountable channel. GoTo (then renamed Overture) was acquired by Yahoo in 2003 for a reported $1.8 billion . Jason and Tim Cadogan founded OpenX in 2008 with the idea of building a “more real-time” version of Right Media. Originally offering an open source ad server, the founding pair assumed their thousands of ad-serving customers would happily join a proto-exchange and provide a willing source of inventory. They were wrong. What followed was a “brick by brick” assembly of an exchange, in the midst of the financial crisis. It was slow going. The build required recruiting a publisher, putting them on the exchange, then finding a buyer; and so on. What tipped the scales was a deal with Fox Audience Network, which was flush with user-level data from its MySpace acquisition and looking for a way to use that extend its inventory elsewhere. OpenX joined with the MediaMath DSP to do an experiment with Fox that provided an “aha moment” — and OpenX shifted from slow-growth to hyperspace. During his wind-down at OpenX, as Chief Revenue Officer and global expander, Jason started to become interested in Connected TV as a programmatic possibility, and by 2020 he has left OpenX to co-found tvScientific. Bill Gross was an early champion and investor, as was #PaleoAdTech friends’ Joe Zawadazki and Eric Franchi’s Aperiam Ventures . tvScientific’s mission is to make CTV as easy to buy as search and social, activating a heretofore dormant long tail of smaller advertisers outside the top 500 who dominate 85% of TV ad spend.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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62. John Nardone – Flashtalking about Modem Media and [x+1] 31:00

vor 2 years31:00

31:00

John is President at Mediaocean and former CEO of Flashtalking, which Mediaocean acquired in 2021 for a reported $500 million . He led [x+1] into Rocket Fuel and MMA before that — and his real #PaleoAdTech cred was acquired during his time at legendary Modem Media in the mid-1990s, when he was involved with the very first paid ad campaign on the internet. As John tells Marty in this raconteurial episode, his collegiate dreams of being a psychiatrist were derailed by a frat brother’s father who happened to be Bill Tragos (the T in TBWA), who delivered a rousing talk at Duke to a susceptible young Nardone. John joined Ogilvy in 1988 after business school and was there less than a year before Martin Sorrell staged a hostile takeover, freeing hundreds of employees and losing American Express as an account, feeing hundreds hundreds more. It was a crash course in the bipolarity of the ad business. John landed at P&G as a brand manager, and then Pepsi, handling the Stoli Vodka account, before being recruited to join Modem Media by its charismatic founder, G. M. O’Connell . Then a 12-person shop in an unfashionable part of Connecticut, Modem can claim to be the first digital agency, building multi-media, CD-ROM and then internet-focused campaigns for clients such as General Electric and Coors. It was Coors’ clear Zima beverage brand that brought John into the internet age, when they were one of 12 sponsors for the first-ever paid campaign on Wired magazine’s Hotwired.com. (For more on this epochal campaign, check out our Steven Comfort episode .) The cost was $15,000 for the three-month beta trial, which John says “seemed outrageous.” The AT&T ad that was also part of the campaign gained at 25% click-through-rate (likely an all-time industry high) due to its novelty, and John tells Marty the mind-numbing way these ads were measured: log files were printed out and individual “gifs” were counted, manually. The world awaited its first ad server, which was forthcoming (see our chat with Kevin O’Connor ). Did those banner ads on Hotwired.com seem revolutionary or just a gimmick? “It did [seem major],” recalls John. “G.M. was an evangelical character. After he sold Modem he went off to live in Patagonia for ten years and sort of disappeared from the industry, so people forget how incredibly charismatic and passionate he was that digital technology was going to change advertising forever.” After a stint at MMA, an analytics company, John found himself a first-time CEO at [x+1], the latest incarnation of Poindexter Systems, founded by Joe Zawadzki , who later founded Mediamath. It was 2008, and John inherited a difficult situation at a difficult time; shortly after raising money, the market turned and he was left with a single client (Delta Air Lines) and nothing to do but try to “turn lemons into lemonade,” in the words of his CTO. So the team rebuilt the tech stack and delivered a proto-DMP, capable of developing targeting insights based on first-party databases (such as Delta’s SkyMiles accounts) and using those insights for website personalization, landing-page personalization and then ad targeting. [x+1] was ready to be part of Google’s first RTB experiments in 2010. The company was acquired by Rocket Fuel in 2014 for an estimated $230 million. #PaleoAdTech has long been interested in probing the mysterious inner-space that is Rocket Fuel’s history but has so far been frustrated; and so it proved this time, as John would only say “It’s probably a story for another day. [Rocket Fuel] was not our intended destination. We had a different suitor that we thought we were selling the company to and at the last moment, quite unexpectedly, that suitor dropped out. Rocket Fuel was the only one left, and so they won the bid.” Ultimately, Rocket Fuel became part of Sizmek in 2017, and Sizmek itself filed for bankruptcy two years later. John’s next stop was Flashtalking, a dynamic-creative technology provider. Challenged by Adobe’s deprecation of the Flash format, he was forced to diversify into measurement and analytics — acquiring Encore from our friend Steve Latham in 2018 — and rich media. And as we have seen, Flashtalking became part of the Mediaocean family in 2021.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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61. Jonah Goodhart – Colonize-ing Right Media and building a Moat 37:02

vor 2 years37:02

37:02

Jonah Goodhart is a co-founder of Montauk Labs , a technology venture studio. Jonah was the CEO and co-founder of Moat ( acquired by Oracle in 2017), founding investor of Right Media ( acquired by Yahoo in 2007), and co-founder of WGI Group, an entrepreneur investment fund. Goodhart was a recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2017. Jonah was also a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Council on Technology and Innovation. [Note: a more in-depth bio and discussion about Jonah’s intriguing career — which spans the arc of ad tech from the 1990s to today — can be found in this previous discussion with Marty , as well as of course in the episode itself.]…

Paleo Ad Tech

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60. Katrin Ribant – giving us the data on Datorama 28:26

vor 2 years28:26

28:26

Katrin was a co-founder of Datorama in 2012, and the platform was acquired by Salesforce in 2018 for a reported $800 million. Datorama built an innovative data aggregation, transformation and visualization engine that allowed digital marketers to understand campaigns holistically and in detail, and to optimize ROAS. It proved particularly attractive to large media agencies. These days she is an angel investor and CEO of the early stage startup Ask-Y, also in the data analytics space. A native of Belgium, Katrin began her advertising career around the digital planning function at Havas, first in Belgium and then in London. Her domain was digital marketing analytics, and she ended up guiding Havas Digital’s Artemis platform. Artemis came to Havas, a French holding company, via the acquisition of Hook Media, an agency founded by Don Epperson, who became global CEO of Havas Digital. As Kat describes it, Artemis was basically “what we would later call a DMP,” but aimed at measurement, not tracking. Its user data was incorporated into Havas’ Adnetik platform, an early agency buy-side platform or DSP. (Epperson later went to Simpli.fi and is now CEO of FreshBooks.) A moment of reckoning came when Google acquired Havas’ favored ad server, DoubleClick, and the team began to wonder what might happen if Mountain View restricted access to ad serving log-files. (This happened, but it took a while .) Prudently, Havas looked for viable alternatives. It first tried Atlas, then owned by Microsoft, but was not able to match Atlas’ data aggregations. Next stop was MediaMind, formerly Eyeblaster, a rich-media ad server. (MediaMind was later acquired by DG, morphed into Sizmek, acquired Rocket Fuel, was acquired by Vector PE in 2016 and filed for bankruptcy in 2019.) Havas endured a “long and involved” integration with MediaMind. During this project, Kat met two Israeli MediaMind technicians who would become her co-founders: Ran Sarig and Efi Cohen . The three bonded over the programmatic shift around 2007-08 and recognized there was an opportunity to provide some kind of data management/measurement tool for regular people aka marketers. “We felt there was a real opportunity in this,” she recalls. “And so we decided to quit our secure high-paying executive jobs and become scrappy entrepreneurs.” Datorama’s first logo – later redesigned Very quickly, the trio recognized that “the issue was ETL for non-technical users.” Media practitioners in those days had to handle multiple data sources in different formats, somehow synthesize and organize them, and provide useful reporting and optimization — all using Excel. They decided to build a tool that could relatively easily ingest and harmonize campaign-level data, then provide B.I.-like visualization and data exploration. The vision didn’t change, and “we never pivoted,” Kat says. Datorama’s first US offices near Union Square, Manhattan Funding was a challenge for three first-time founders — two Israelis, one a (then) non-US citizen in America — so angels and friends were enlisted. Early on, a large agency signed on, and thus was Datorama’s core buyer base defined: media buyers of significant scale, including the then-nascent category of trading desks. Salesforce acquired Datorama to join its Salesforce Marketing Cloud in 2018. (It is now called Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence.) Katrin was invited to her first Dreamforce in 2018 to showcase the acquisition. Katrin on stage at Dreamforce 2018, shortly after the acquisition by Salesforce. Katrin left Salesforce in 2022. After some downtime, Kat came to a realization: “I realized that I do need to create and that I love data, and that was simply part of who I am. And I decided that I was going to try again.” Her new venture, Ask-Y, is “a full stack operational analytics platform.” It’s in an early stage, too early to describe in detail, but Kat is excited about its prospects. It may even have a generative AI component. Asked whether there really are not many women in ad-tech or if it’s just that #PaleoAdTech bookers are biased, Kat admits: “When we [i.e., Kat and Marty] started, it was a very much of a male-dominated area. I spent my entire career mostly being the only women in the room. So I think that really is factual.” “It is changing now,” she continues, “and that’s great. But you can’t change the past.”…

Paleo Ad Tech

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59. Andy Atherton – optimizing Yahoo, Brand.net and AppNexus 30:08

vor 2 years30:08

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Andy was VP of pricing and yield management at Yahoo and helped lead a revamp and professionalization of the portal’s approach to pricing and selling ads. He brought on both Rapt (via our previous guest Tom Chavez ) and Right Media (via Brian O’Kelley ) to improve yield management and to gain access to demand on RM’s exchange. After Yahoo, Andy co-founded Brand.net, a media buying platform for upper-funnel campaigns, and was SVP and GM of Marketplaces at AppNexus. Today he is Chief Operating Officer at Solestial , a company in space tech that develops solar panels. After graduating from MIT, Andy was a management consultant and later got into the nascent digital music scene at IUMA and EMusic . And at the height of the dot-com boom on the west coast, he was President and Co-Founder of Optivo, which provided pricing optimization software for e-commerce storefronts. Optivo launched in 1999 and was a casualty of the market meltdown. In 2002, Andy brought his passion for price optimization to Yahoo, which was entering a new and more energetic era under the Hollywood player Terry Semel. Andy’s job was to help maximize the monetization of display ads on Yahoo’s properties and network, forecasting supply and demand, and revamping sales processes. His boss was the legendary Wenda Harris Millard , who had lately been at DoubleClick . “So you know, looking in the rear-view,” he recalls, “we had two years of panic selling and an inventory glut. … [Wenda] was strategic enough to look forward and say, as the market rebounds, we’re going to have … increasing sales discipline and increasing inventory constraints.” Changes included a revamped algorithm that didn’t “hammer [people] with continual ads” for maxed-out brands like Columbia House; a new (real) rate-card and price-data cleanup; and a new incentive structure for the sales team that took into account price attainment and not just total revenue. Andy brought Tom Chavez’s Rapt into Yahoo, realizing that its focus on hardware pricing optimization was beside the point; the underlying math could work for ads. “I remember vividly sitting in Tom’s office,” Andy tells Marty and Jill in this illuminating episode, “going like ten rounds with him, ‘Oh, internet media is going to be a thing, trust me. This is worth you tweaking your model a little bit, move away from hardware’….” He encountered Brian O’Kelley in a vivid scene previously recounted to loyal listeners by O’Kelley himself. Right Media’s co-founder Mike Walrath had pitched Yahoo on its optimization capabilities, but Andy needed demand and supply; O’Kelley tried again, flying across the country to meet with Andy during a work-from-home Friday in San Francisco. O’Kelley described the proto-network he was building at RM, and Andy admits “he got me excited.” In time, Right Media was acquired by Yahoo. Andy co-founded Brand.net in 2007. Its mission was to programmatize the buying and selling of digital ads for premium and upper-funnel inventory rather than remnant and class-two, which was basically all other programmatic. It required building forecasting and delivery management solutions, quality filtering and measurement of offline sales in partnership with Nielsen. The company was acquired by Valassis in 2012. Our hero’s next stop was AppNexus, in 2012, working for his old friend O’Kelley, who hired him to open a SF office for the company and work with big brands. Andy managed the Microsoft relationship and the FBX integration – back when Facebook was in the programmatic space, and was still called Facebook. He was most associated with Twixt , a buyside programmatic reserve workflow tool developed by AppNexus, and coordinated with the acquired sellside tool Yieldex . In concept similar to Brand.net, Twixt aimed to make the buying and selling of premium and direct-sold ads more automated and efficient. He describes Twixt: “So essentially you’ve got what amounts to like a Google sheet between the media planner and all the publishers. Where you’ve got this sort of integrated media plan at the line item level that connects to the ad server and actually creates the booking.” Circa 2013, Andy wrote an impassioned series of columns on programmatic reserve for AdExchanger. Unfortunately, Twixt was ultimately shuttered in 2016 after a major holding company deal fell through. The cause: a significant investment made by rival holding company WPP into AppNexus, which was seen as a potential conflict. After AppNexus, Andy applied his hard-won expertise at Healthline Media as SVP and GM. Since 2021, he has worked at Solestial, which is a company in the space tech, um, space. Why did he leave ad tech after all those years? “I wanted to do something that I believed in,” he admits, “was excited about; you know, that I would do almost if I wasn’t getting paid.” You can read about his exit from the industry and much more on his personal blog here .…

Paleo Ad Tech

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58. Jeff Hirsch – all the -Clicks in SoCal lead to AudienceScience 29:19

vor 2 years29:19

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Jeff was founder and CRO of the FastClick ad network, acquired by ValueClick. He was later the CRO and then CEO at AudienceScience, which may have invented the DMP for clients WSJ and P&G. He was also CMO at SundaySky and Chief Commercial Officer at Pubmatic. Today he is a strategic advisor with Pubmatic, based in NY. Jeff spent the dawn of the internet and its frenetic aftermath in the luxe milieu of Santa Barbara, where a number of pragmatic ad tech players got their start (e.g., AdECN, Commission Junction, The Trade Desk). As he tells Marty in this fast-paced episode, his parents were entrepreneurial; his dad claims to have invented a punch-card driven dating service, which helped him meet his second wife. In 1996, Jeff wrote a business plan for a company he called AdClick – in those days, a “-Click” was required to indicate both hipness and proximity to DoubleClick, as our previous guest (and InterClick founder) Michael Katz told us . To prep, Jeff “actually printed every page you could find on the web about online advertising.” AdClick didn’t click, but Jeff was able to take the business plan into ValueClick’s original founder Brian Coryat, who signed him up to build publisher relationships. ValueClick was an ad network that sold excess (so-called “remnant”) inventory from publishers using a CPC model. CPC seemed more accountable than CPM, but it put a burden on the network to get the math right (buying CPM, paying CPC – it’s complicated). This is a formula Advertising.com later mastered. ValueClick managed to go public in early 2000, just before the crash. (DoubleClick had invested $85 million in the company for 35% stake pre-IPO, interestingly.) Using the IPO cash, ValueClick then swept up a number of affiliate and other networks including Commission Junction and ClickAgents. (It later rebranded as Conversant, was acquired by Alliance Data, and lives on within Epsilon.) Also in 2000, Jeff left ValueClick and started FastClick, another ad network. Originally a version of ValueClick that was designed to be faster (co-founded by aerospace engineers from UCSB), the dot-com meltdown required a retooling toward a CPA model. This model was even more mathematically demanding but did well during hard times; FastClick signed up Casale Media, Right Media, and others as customers. By the time of its IPO in 2005 (5 years “to the day” after ValueClick’s), FastClick said it had 9,000 third-party web sites in its network reaching 112 million unique U.S. internet users. By this time, Jeff had made his way back to ValueClick as SVP of business development and helped in the acquisition of FastClick for $214 million. In 2006, Jeff’s adventure with AudienceScience began when he was brought on as CRO, becoming CEO in 2008. AudienceScience began life as digiMine, which merged with CoRelate to become Revenue Science. CoRelate was co-founded by our previous guest Omar Tawakol as a recommendation engine for ecommerce sites such as Barnes & Noble. Publishers installed the system on their websites and gained insights into groups of visitors, or audiences, and by 2002 or so publishers such as the Wall Street Journal were moving it toward segmentation and targeting, focusing on unsold inventory. This move is its claim to being the first publisher DMP. After Jeff joined the company, it rebranded as AudienceScience and started an audience-based ad network, in time becoming one of the top 10 US networks with a true marketer-side DMP, which caught the eye of P&G. P&G was turning against media agencies’ opacity and fees, and in 2008 signed with Right Media’s exchange. But P&G had issues with RM because it was both a tech and media partner (Yahoo owned RM at this point), and there were some limitations in the RM product. Herein enters previous guest Bill Wise , a Right Media/Yahoo mainstay who introduced P&G to AudienceScience. “Yahoo didn’t really have the PMP chops to be able to support it,” Jeff recalls. “So Bill [Wise] and I talked and my goal was to get Yahoo to basically white-label us to P&G and create a contingency that would mean that Yahoo would eventually have to buy AudienceScience.” P&G’s famous Project Hawkeye started as a three-way relationship between Yahoo/Right Media, AudienceScience and P&G. AS acquired a DMP from Germany called Wunderloop in 2010. That and other moves cemented AS’s relationship with the client, who became by far their biggest source of revenue. It was a mixed blessing, as Jeff recalls. Around 2009-10 P&G shifted over to AS for technology and buying, and its ambitious Project Hawkeye aimed to build “a global system housing all of its data across all of its brands in multiple markets.” It made P&G likely the first big brand to in-house media, putting multiple regions on the same platform. AS became known as a strident in-housing advocate , and it moved out of media into the DMP technology business. However, AS wasn’t allowed to talk about P&G. It was a poorly-kept secret, but it was a commercial handicap. Then P&G’s vocal CBO Marc Pritchard started to complain frequently and publicly about the digital ad ecosystem in aggregate (aka “ crappy supply chain ”) and eventually ditched AudienceScience in 2017. “The first time that the relationship between P&G and AudienceScience was spoken about publicly was when we broke up,” Jeff recalls. AudienceScience closed up shop within a month. During Jeff’s seven years there, it went from 80 to 220 employees and gained an estimated $300 million in fees from P&G. After the AS adventure, Jeff joined SundaySky as CMO and in 2016 became CCO at Pubmatic, a leading SSP. Pubmatic IPO’d in 2020, and Jeff recently transitioned to a strategic advisory role with the company.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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57. Mike Yavonditte – optimizing Alta Vista, Quigo and Yieldmo 32:13

vor 2 years32:13

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Mike Yavonditte is the CEO and co-founder of Yieldmo , an advertising platform specializing in mobile, optimization and curation. He was formerly CEO of Quigo, an innovative semantic ad network that built a formidable competitor to Google’s AdSense and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for a reported $340 million. Before that, he worked at Alta Vista and Juno, a pioneering ISP that launched a number of luminous ad tech careers at the dawn of the internet. Mike’s journey began with a “desktop news” startup, built with his first cousin Ray LaChance, which was scrutinized, rejected and then copied by Halsey Minor’s then high-flying CNET. He left that startup in late 1994, around the time of the launch of Netscape, and joined ZDNet (Ziff-Davis) and then DE Shaw, the technical publisher that incubated and ultimate spun-off Juno. Juno greeted the dawn of online advertising and simultaneously spawned multiple proto-legends, including Gokul Rajaram (later of Google’s AdSense) and David Jakubowski (later of Facebook, etc.). Juno was a free ISP that subsidized its email service with targeted ads, using demographic data. Mike’s next stop was AltaVista, at one time the leading search engine, which had both pay-per-click (ultimately outsourced to Overture, formerly GoTo.com and the inventor of PPC) and banner ads tied to keywords. Mike was on the team that signed strategic partnerships with big-money advertisers, many of them dot-coms flush with IPO and venture capital and in need of click-driven traffic to their sites. AltaVista displayed banner ads linked to keywords entered by the searcher After the crash, Mike relocated back to NYC and met with a couple of Israeli co-founders of Quigo, which they pitched to him as “the world’s best web crawler.” Impressed, he joined the four-man team as CEO and helped redirect the founders from their original strategy of selling to governments. Quigo was a legitimately advanced web crawler, capable of locating and analyzing text deep in the cryptosphere of the web. Quigo’s next move was to package semantic analysis of web pages it had crawled, using ML to identify keywords (topics) that could be associated with the page and pushed to search engines, which used the topics for indexing and SEO. The semantic analysis tech competed with Applied Semantics , acquired by Google (for AdSense); and addressing the void after the Semantics acquisition, Quigo licensed its tool to Google’s then-search competitors, including Overture and Yahoo. Ultimately, Quigo took the semantic tech back from the licensees and built its own stack to compete head-to-head with AdSense. The company was successful in signing premium publishers, including CNN, Fox News, ESPN and Time, Inc. The latter deal encouraged AOL to acquire the company in 2007, the same year it acquired TACODA ; it was folded into Advertising.com and became a part of AOL’s publisher offering. After a break from ad tech, Mike got back into it in 2012, co-founding Yieldmo to build measurement and testing tools for the then-new mobile ad formats. “Everyone was so obsessed with [mobile] programmatic,” he remembers, “but I didn’t [think] that a lot of people were going to build testing systems and measurement systems and all the things that you might have to build in order to test new types of ad formats. And so we decided that we were going to do that and ultimately merge it into the programmatic world.” Yieldmo became known for its creative mobile ad formats (which Mike points out are often patented). The best-known is probably the ‘ hyperscroller ,’ which determines where the person is on the page relative to the ad tag and the viewable window, and uses motion to capture attention, giving the viewer the illusion they are controlling animation in the ad unit. Today, Yieldmo is focused on ML/AI and analysis of its data set, aimed at the challenge of inventory curation, including matching inventory to creative and optimizing to the advertisers’ KPIs.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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56. Tom Chavez – giving us the Rapt on Krux and data 28:11

vor 2 years28:11

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Tom co-founded the Data Management Platform (DMP) Krux in 2010, and it was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 and became part of its Marketing Cloud. Before Krux, Tom co-founded a company called Rapt in the late 1990s, a yield-management optimization platform that sold into supply chain providers before making a hard pivot into advertising, managing publisher inventory by applying the same mathematical principles used for supply chains. Rapt was acquired by Microsoft as part of its impressive ad tech acquisition binge in 2007-08, when it also swept up aQuantive, Ad:ECN , and more. Currently, Tom is co-founder of Super{set} , a startup studio with multiple products in its portfolio, all focused in one way or another on challenges around data management. Marquee brands under the Super{set} umbrella are clean-room tech solution Habu and privacy-management tech Ketch . As Tom tells Marty and Jill in this intriguing episode, he grew up in Albuquerque, NM as the middle child in a house “with a lot of love” and a strong bias toward academic achievement. Although Tom’s Mexican-American mom didn’t go to college, she vowed early on that she’d send all five of her kids to Harvard — and she did. Tom enjoyed a double major in computer science and philosophy, at the intersection machines and people, and like a surprising number of comp-sci types pursued an avocation for music (which persists). He ended up at Rockwell and then Sun Microsystems as a systems architect in the late 1990s, joining just after the exit of Sun’s legendary founder Jim Clark. Clark of course co-founded Netscape, the first commercial browser , in 1994. At Sun, Tom developed supply-chain optimization software, and its success at Sun and then Cisco led him to co-found Rapt in 1999. At first, Rapt focused exclusively on the same supply-chain challenges, building software to optimize — for example — configurations for hardware; there was not a pixelated banner ad in sight. But around 2003, he made contact with Yahoo at a time when Yahoo was looking for a yield management solution. “This is funny,” Tom admits, “but I had no idea what CPM stood for. Literally … So we just learned, right? That’s the game, just learn fast. We started to wrap our heads around advertising and discovered that all of the math that we had developed for the pricing of high-tech components like microprocessors could be pointed directly — and much more productively — [at advertising].” Then came a hard pivot into ad tech and a slide away from supply-chain. Yahoo became a major customer of the newly ad-tech-ified Rapt, as did AOL and Microsoft. In 2008, Microsoft lost DoubleClick to Google, failed to acquire Yahoo, and acquired Aquantive for $6 billion, along with the much smaller AdECN and Rapt . Tom worked at Microsoft for a few years on its publisher solutions, alongside the legendary Jeff Green and under Scott Howe. (For more on Microsoft’s peregrinations in the ad space, check out Marty’s oral history here.) In 2010, Tom and Vivek Vaidya co-founded Krux. (Vivek had been the first person hired at Rapt, as an engineer.) The vision was to focus on the ad world’s data layer, rather than its endpoints (publishers, content). There wasn’t yet a DMP category. Demdex was founded in 2008 and BlueKai even earlier, in 2007, but the latter didn’t add DMP functionality until a few years before its acquisition by Oracle in 2014. Krux’s go-to-market focused on data sovereignty. “We used to have stickers,” says Tom, “we put them on our laptops … and the slogan was, ‘Krux — it’s your data.'” Data belonged to the principal, not third parties or partners or others who “coast behind you and take your data.” It also emphasized segmentation on useful attributes, building out audiences at vast scale, using some early and innovative AWS techniques. Salesforce acquired Krux in 2016 for a reported $700 million, after a period of partnership. After the acquisition, Tom says, “I was sitting on my couch saying, ‘My goodness, this company building stuff sure is fun. Please, God, could there be more than one? … Can we parallelize company building? “Can we take lessons learned from the prior 20 plus years? Can we capture those lessons and bring them to bear so that when we are working with new teams, as I like to say, why make old mistakes? There are all of these new mistakes just crying out for attention?”…

Paleo Ad Tech

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55. Ari Paparo – influencing DoubleClick, Beeswax and more 34:05

vor 2 years34:05

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Ari Paparo is a well-known ad tech influencer, blogger, fellow podcast host, serial entrepreneur, raconteur and man-about-town in his longtime home of Manhattan. He worked in product management at DoubleClick, AppNexus and Nielsen – and was the CEO and co-founder of Beeswax, which was acquired by Comcast’s Freewheel division in 2020 for an undisclosed amount at a time when it had raised $28 million. Ari co-founded Marketecture.tv in 2022 with our friend Zach Rodgers , Eric Seufert and Mike Shields , and he recently launched yet another company, called LaunchScience , focused on product launch workflow and content. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurship runs in Ari’s family. His father Michael was a prolific dreamer with an insatiable portfolio of new business ideas. (We recommend reading Ari’s moving profile of his dramatic dad on the occasion of his passing.) The elder Paparo holds a patent for the lubriciously-titled “Binding a previously prepared grain-based product to a support member” (Ari’s paraphrase: “French toast on a stick”) … and another one for “Golf shoe insoles for improving the golf swing” (each insole is different, of course). The younger Paparo’s NYC childhood was “not chaotic,” he insists, “but there were fat times and there were lean times.” Intriguingly, Paparo’s friend and longtime Manhattan-based ad tech co-conspirator Joe Zawadzki , founder of MediaMath, told #PaleoAdTech that he had a similarly quixotic, idea-machine dad. After enjoying a Georgetown liberal arts and marketing education, with a minor in oil painting, Ari worked at a couple of pre-internet startups before landing at Blink.com, an online bookmarking service. While bookmarking enjoyed a brief vogue in the ‘90s and Blink.com managed to raise at least $10 million during the dot-com days, it ultimately liquidated itself to the Vendare Group in 2002. Ari later re-acquired part of it as a profitable side-hustle. Then Ari landed at DoubleClick, which was enduring some difficult turn-around years. (For more on this, we recommend two ‘oral histories’ of DoubleClick, one in print and another actually oral: Marty’s 2018 piece for AdExchanger , which quotes Ari; and Ari’s own recent podcast for Marketecture.tv , which accesses usually inaccessible sources within the Googleplex, and more.) But when Ari joined, in 2004, co-founder Kevin O’Connor had left and the company was “at its nadir.” What followed was “a masterful management job,” led by new CEO David Rosenblatt , who pared down a “sprawling” product portfolio, divesting non-ad related businesses like email and search; reorganized the engineering team along agile lines; and energized a spiritually depleted post-crash culture. Ari focused on rich media product management, and he continued on at Google after the search monolith acquired DoubleClick in 2008. At Google, Ari admits, he was a non-engineer in a cult of engineers. Fit was suboptimal. Yet there began another stage of Ari’s career – this time, as an influencer – when Business Insider, then pathologically obsessed with Google, ran a story called “ Who’s Who at Google New York ,” by Nicholas Carlson (who later wrote a very good book about Marissa Mayer and Yahoo ). The BI story provided oddly detailed resumes of random Googlers, including a squib about Ari alongside this picture: The Gossip: Liked, but ‘lower level,’ Ari is one of many DoubleClick executives who others say don’t get enough respect from Mountain View. Business Insider The phrase “lower level” did not sit well with our hero. (He was Group Product Manager, a fairly senior role at Google, and had been a VP at DoubleClick.) So he marched down to Starbucks, where BI was camped out live-blogging, and confronted the scribes. BI promptly became pathologically obsessed with Ari Paparo, elevating him to the ranks of Top Follows on Twitter, and Ari’s career as a prolific, clever, widely-followed tweeter began. The real @aripap is currently at almost 24K followers on Twitter. Ari was adept at writing popular columns for the industry’s preferred trade publication, AdExchanger. As an insider with an outsiders’ skeptical gaze, Ari was quick to identify in plain-spoken, deft prose what we did and didn’t really know about hot topics, including the “ Programmatic Waterfall Mystery ” (featuring header bidding when nobody knew what that was) … and, famously, the “death” of the cookie, channeling Charlton Heston (“ Google, You Finally Really Did It! ”). The latter was written so fast that some of us suspected supernatural intervention. However, Ari explains that he “writes a greater amount of content, at scale, than just about anyone I’ve ever met.” A production machine. That industrious streak thrived during lockdown, when he YouTubed things like a poolside chat on the future of advertising and hosted a number of Beeswax webinars that were actually informative. Our personal favorite was “ Les cas d’utilisation de la Log Data ,” en francaise avec une phrase en anglais. (Ari n’apparait pas dans celui-ci.) From 2014-2020, Ari ran the buy-side platform Beeswax, which he founded. The idea for the company came to Ari when he worked at AppNexus, co-founded by esteemed #PaleoAdTech friend Brian O’Kelley . Ari says he was “a big supporter” of AppNexus’ vision of being a customizable platform for ad tech, but he felt the product could be more flexible – and cheaper. So he launched Beeswax as a bidder-as-a-service(tm), providing separate, highly customizable SaaS software for a subscription price starting around $10K per month. The highly flexible Beeswax team – Ari is standing, second from right. The product did well among ad networks, who preferred it to the more established IPONWeb, run by the Godfather of Ad Tech, aka Dr. Boris , discovered in his Right Media days by O’Kelley. Selling Beeswax to brands direct proved more difficult, as they favored plug-and-play over micro-tuning and didn’t have the elite athletic requirements of the networks. Comcast’s Freewheel video-focused division acquired Beeswax in 2020. Although Beeswax didn’t set out to be a video DSP, a growing portion of its traffic took that form, and many of its ad network customers dealt in video. Also – as Ari explains to Marty (Jill is off this week) in this fascinating ride – Freewheel historically avoided programmatic technology because its TV customers didn’t want or need it (yet). After a year at Comcast, Ari finally combined his content-creation and company-founding impulses into Marketecture.tv . The purpose of the venture is to produce video, audio and written content, including interviews with CEOs and founders, focused on particular (mostly ad- and mar-) tech products “to help buyers evaluate tech vendors minus the B.S.” It’s a freemium subscription product. At the same time, the indefatigable amateur baker recently unleashed the private beta of LaunchScience. The product helps product management teams organize their workflows and launches and is based on Ari’s workplace experience with Google’s so-called “readiness” launch process. If you’d like to be in the beta, you can get on the list . What’s next for our guest? Perhaps a better question is: What isn’t?…

Paleo Ad Tech

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54. Lee Nadler – marketing DoubleClick in Silicon Alley 33:49

vor 2 years33:49

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Lee was the first head of marketing at DoubleClick, hired by co-founder Kevin O’Connor in 1996 as employee #17 with a mandate to help the other 16 people meet Kevin’s vision-quest to “dominate internet advertising.” The startup had been clicked-off barely two years earlier in the basement of O’Connor’s home in suburban Alpharetta, Georgia. These days, Lee is a fractional CMO, executive guide and founder of the Sherpa Marketing agency, based in New York. He’s also an ad industry influencer, entwined with the Advertising Club for years, inducted into the AAF Hall of Achievement and named by Ad Age as one of 21 people to watch in the 21st century. Lee started his career on the account side of New York ad shops, beginning at a small agency in New Jersey that handled the Prodigy account. A joint venture between IBM and Sears, Prodigy was a proto-walled garden and ISP that was able to do some basic banner ad targeting for subscribers. Next stop was KBS&P, where Lee worked on the legendary Snapple account. “That showed me the power of building a movement,” he tells Jill and Marty in this thoughtful episode. Lee’s entree into DoubleClick was via a connection at the Ad Club, where he was then a “young pro.” At the time, highly-respected print publishing exec Wenda Harris Millard was a member of the board and was hired by Kevin O’Connor to help legitimize DoubleClick’s proposition to publishers and media buyers in NYC. Millard was DoubleClick employee #16 and she recommended Lee as the start-up’s first professional marketing lead. Lee recalls the extreme skepticism, even disrespect, that greeted his move into digital, particularly among some high-caste agency creatives. “You can’t always get validation,” he recalls. “Sometimes you have to kind of put yourself out there … for what you believe.” When he joined, Lee met a furiously-growing ad network and server with a charismatic co-founder and a lot of new ideas — but no real marketing discipline. Quickly, Lee got to work on a positioning statement, a brand identity, and a flurry of brilliant guerilla-style tactics that were rapidly noticeable even to New Yorkers who didn’t work in media. Early logos and treatments took full advantage of the click-click DoubleClick gimmick: The best-known click-click placement was a sign Lee put up by the Flatiron Building at 22nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan that read: “DOUBLECLICK WELCOMES YOU TO SILICON ALLEY.” Despite some gentle skepticism — this time, from his bosses, “the Kevins” O’Connor and Ryan — the sign showed immediate impact and stayed up for five years. (The spot is now taken by Apple.) Other tactics included providing umbrellas outside agencies during rainy days; dragging banners behind planes over the Hamptons with a sign saying Turn over, DoubleClick is watching your ad campaign ; rewarding people at industry events who remembered to click-click their glasses in a particular way … and so on. As the company grew from 20 to over 1,000 employees in a few years, Lee tried to clarify and preserve the culture. He printed up a mission statement on the back of everyone’s business card: Building one-to-one relationships millions at a time DoubleClick business card And he put together a booklet that summed up the culture of the “Clicker,” or DoubleClick employee. Here are some excerpts: Most notable was a crisp set of definitions to guide new recruits and those in need of recalibration. Herein — for those who wonder — are the tenets of those who are “Clickers” and those other types: “We weren’t just a bunch of lunatics kind of running around,” Lee says. “There was a purpose, which was, have fun, work hard and also create a movement.” In 1998, Lee himself moved from marketing to NYC marketers to helping to build out the international expansion of the company, starting in Japan. He recalls being in Australia when the IPO occurred, and he “took a pause … and went to Nepal for the first time.” So began another phase of the ad-man’s career, as he’s exposed to the Tibetan Sherpa people and “very taken by the whole culture.” Impressed by the native resilience and grounded optimism of the Sherpas, Lee had a jarring return to dot-com reality at the Biltmore in Arizona for the DoubleClick salesforce conference and IPO celebration. Early DoubleClickers convening at the Biltmore in Arizona circa 1998 “In Nepal, in the villages, the kids were saying, ‘Namaste, do you have a pencil?’ And I came back to the Biltmore and the internet sales guys were pounding their fists on the table … saying, ‘Why is the fucking internet so slow?!’ And I was, like, wow, this is the same planet.” Lee left DoubleClick in 1999, but he didn’t go far. Co-founding an agency called Digital Pulp (which still exists, sans the original founders), he continued to market for DoubleClick and help some of its customers build plans and digital assets. He went on to manage marketing, new product launches and a start-up accelerator for MINI/BMW Group. And he stays in touch with the Sherpas, after whom he named his agency Sherpa Marketing and his blog called the TheSherpa Path . Looking back on his time at DoubleClick — when it arguably reinvented advertising for the digital age — Lee remains positive: “For me, DoubleClick allowed me to be at my best. I think it pushed a lot of other people to be at their best at a pretty early age in their career. … There was an ability to try new things without fear. And we were there, creating something very special. And we knew it.”…

Paleo Ad Tech

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53. Omar Tawakol – from BlueKai to AI and the all-new Rembrand 39:09

vor 2 years39:09

39:09

Omar Tawakol launches his new venture today – it’s called Rembrand (“without the T”), an AI (of course)-driven platform for virtual video product placement. Think of it as a native format for video to replace overtly interruptive last-gen experiences, particularly for creator and short-form video. Jill and Marty were honored to be included among a handful of high-powered media outlets to announce the launch of Rembrand, which emerges from stealth mode today with about $8 million Series A in the hat and a team of ten, including seven AI-optimizing engineers. Omar was the co-founder of a couple of previous success stories, most notably BlueKai, the data provider and early data management platform (DMP) acquired by Oracle in 2014 for over $400 million, a 10x net revenue multiple. After Oracle, he co-founded Voicea , an AI voice recognition platform that provided bulleted action summaries of meetings and calls. The latter was acquired by Cisco in 2019. Omar’s journey began in Cairo and then upstate New York, giving him what he sees in retrospect as an appreciation for perspective. And like most – all? — #PaleoAdTech guests, he “was entrepreneurial from the beginning,” starting with a proto-tchotchke company selling to neighbors when he was five. He shifted his focus from engineering to comp. sci. at Stanford in the mid-1990s, where he worked on a class project that included mapping the extant internet onto a wall. After graduation, he worked briefly at a Netscape spin-off called Navio before launching his first venture, a recommendation engine company called CoRelation. CoRelation was technically successful early on and employed then-blazing ensemble methods to provide product recommendations for early e-tailers including Barnes & Noble (who didn’t want to use Amazon, for obvious reasons), Nordstrom, etc. CoRelation was acquired by another startup, later called Audience Science, in 2002. Omar’s team of ten joined a cadre ten times larger, and he himself became CMO. Starting as a web analytics company larger than Omniture at the time, Audience Science shifted into behavioral targeting and was a direct competitor of Dave Morgan’s Tacoda, acquired by AOL in 2007. After a year at the mobile analytics startup Medio, acquired by Nokia, Omar “got the itch” that would become BlueKai. BlueKai had its first all-hands meeting the first week of January, 2008. Its founders were Omar, Grant Ries, Mike Bigby and Alexander “Hoosh” Hooshmand, a veteran of Right Media. By July of that year, they convinced five major players to join their data exchange: Kayak, Expedia, Cars.com, eBay and Datalogix. The founding insight for BlueKai came in part from Kayak , which was a data company that sold its search capabilities, unbundled from the overhead of selling and servicing tickets (like its larger rival Expedia). Omar and his team looked at the ad business and realized that targeting data could be more valuable than media, so they founded BlueKai with a mission: We do not sell ads. The original BlueKai was a data exchange. Its media agnosticism allowed it to partner with behavioral and other ad networks, including Datalogix, which bundled media with its data product. BlueKai built a real-time bidded auction system for data, with buyers paying to be included in the order of pixels fired on the partners’ sites. The data itself was behavioral and linked to intent. Early on, its most valuable segments were auto and travel intenders, browsers who had looked at certain car, truck or holiday info on Kayak or Cars.com, for example, and could be targeted elsewhere on the web. Naturally, this data works better than vaguely accurate demo data, and at first BlueKai had only a single direct competitor, eXelate. The company faced challenges from DSPs and agencies, but its most formidable hurdle was mobile. Without cookies in apps, identifying users wasn’t easy; and ultimately, BlueKai adopted a probabilistic model incorporating IP address, location, OS and other signals, which was not as accurate as its browser product. Within a few years, driven by customers, BlueKai built and launched a product that would later be called a DMP. (Most likely, the first explicitly-named DMP was Demdex, later Adobe Audience Manager.) In addition to buying data, customers like Expedia and eBay were using BlueKai to manage data. Launching a separate SKU for the DMP was a big shift for BlueKai, driven by a recognition that customers would always value first-party data more highly than third-party data, no matter how useful. And that buyers (as opposed to pubs and providers) could use a DMP to gain additional insight into the audiences visiting their sites. Adobe acquired Demdex in 2011. In 2013, BlueKai was sitting in a cone of silence, trying to acquire a then-independent LiveRamp. Omar’s pitch to the board was that cookies were going away – a prescient call, maybe – and BlueKai would need a way to tie pseudonymous cookie IDs to more stable IDs such as LiveRamp’s. The cost was high (eventually, Acxiom got LiveRamp). And suddenly – “out of the blue,” he says – three public companies appeared, wanting to acquire BlueKai. Oracle won the bid. Omar sat down with Larry Ellison, whom he describes as a hyper-focused data processor with a need to know what’s real; and Ellison told him he would be boot up a data business and give him resources to acquire the components he needed to build out his graph: which in turn lead to the Oracle Data Cloud, led by Omar, and the major acquisitions of AddThis, Crosswise, Datalogix and Moat. Somewhat pensively, Omar describes the fate of the BlueKai DMP, split off from the Data Cloud, embedded in the Marketing Cloud, diffused functionally throughout the larger Oracle org, and entrusted to enterprise mar-tech sellers who were not ideally suited to run an ad tech operation. It might have done better alone. The day after he left Oracle, in 2018, Omar spoke to AI sage Ahmad Abdulkader and began to think about applying voice AI to the workplace. He tells Jill and Marty – in this wide-roaming episode – that an inspiration came from an earlier meeting with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who provided a precise itemized recap and action-item minutes after a meeting. Voicea was created – in the words of a Cisco marketer – “to make the best of us like the rest of us.” The company prototyped in 2017, launched in 2018, and was acquired within two whizzing years. Like Voicea, Rembrand inhabits AI space. An inspiration came from Google, which started its search ad business (as did Yahoo) with visual banners, then moved into native pay-per-click ads, a new approach that actually works. Consumers gliding into short-form video avoid interruptive ads whenever possible. Product placement is a big, largely manual, long-lead-time business. Combining this alchemy, Rembrand aims to automate the creation, distribution, targeting and measurement of in-video product placement. It requires videogame-like AI approaches that obey the laws of physics. Rembrand’s test cases are creators with relatively stable visual milieus, where product images fit and suit their own brands. Eventually, the vision is to turn the two-sided marketplace into an API-driven engine allowing user-level targeting and flexibility. And a new form of programmatic advertising is born, cookie-free, visual and natively integrated into the scene. We here at #PaleoAdTech love the idea, for what its worth, and look forward to the AI-driven retinal rewards to come.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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52. Ana Milicevic – managing data from Demdex to Sparrow 30:27

vor 2 years30:27

30:27

Ana Milicevic was a seasoned product manager in New York City in 2009 when she joined a wily data management startup called Demdex , which was then swirling around a programmatic audience-building space soon labeled Data Management Platform (DMP). Within two years, Adobe acquired Demdex and folded it into its emerging ad tech and data suite as Adobe Audience Manager, which persists to this day. Currently, Ana is principal and co-founder of Sparrow Advisors , a consultancy focused on data management. She founded it in 2015 with her sister, Maja, an ad tech vet (AppNexus, Sovern). At the time of its sale to Adobe , Demdex was still relatively small, having raised about $8.5 million and enjoying a team of 30-35 based on the far, far west side of Manhattan, in pre-WeWork space shared with Invite Media, among others. Adobe paid a reported $109 million for the company. Demdex was co-founded in late 2008 by Randy Nicolau, who had been president of Playboy Enterprises and a direct marketer. The relatively rapid exit happened after a flurry of activity at Adobe, which acquired Omniture in 2009, tried to acquire Invite Media , consulted with LUMA Partners and others … and more, in a dramatic aside that can be relished in our recent Brian Andersen episode. As Ana tells Jill and Marty in this trenchant retelling, she shifted early in her career from coding to product management, an emerging discipline, because she liked to engage with “actual business humans.” A prolific linguist, she worked for a time for the United Nations in NYC and made her way to city permanently, exploring the then-modest East Coast startup milieu. After postings in video streaming and “putting radio on the internet” — yes, she’s aware of the Silicon Valley resonance , but she was there first, — she was lured by Randy (a board member at the video startup) to join Demdex as one of a small handful of employees. The initial vision for the company was to help e-commerce sites to build profiles of customers based on their purchases and behaviors on owned and operated sites. It was a first-party data foray, which proved to be more interesting to publishers than e-tailers. An early description of the company: The firm creates a ‘behavioral data bank’ of audience profiles with anonymous data captured from clients’ web sites, purchased from third-party data sellers or exchanges, and generated from ad campaigns. This data can then be used for content management, multivariate testing and analytics. source: https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news12983.htm Like most DMPs, Demdex also built a SaaS tag manager, primarily to ensure its marketing customers could implement the DMP tags sooner than “six to nine months,” a typical IT queue. A differentiator for Demdex compared to other early DMPs — especially BlueKai, but also eXelate and Lotame — was its emphasis on first-party data, and later probabilistic profiles based on ‘traitweights.’ It used both a first-party and a third-party cookie, collecting 1P, 2P and 3P data, which it assembled into audiences either for sale (from a publisher) or purchase (by ad buyers) — or for analytics, testing, etc. This emphasis on first-party data meshed well with Omniture’s (aka Adobe Analytics’) use of first-party pseudonymous data for site analytics: Omniture already had a vast network of enterprise customers. Within two years of its joining the Adobe suite, analytics accounted for 10% of the company’s revenue. Expanding into audience-building for media made sense. Although BlueKai (later acquired to Oracle) was the best-known DMP, it initially dealt only in third-party profiles tied to 3P cookie IDs, based on browsing behavior across websites, or so-called ‘cookie pools.’ Demdex’s differentiation was — as Ana says — “first-party data.” A purchase for a retailer could be mapped to a taxonomy that indicated demographic traits such as interests, family size, gender, location, spending power, etc. A publisher could tag an ID based on content consumption (e.g., sports fan, luxury automotive enthusiast) of interest to certain ad buyers. Ana describes the evolution of Demdex’s signature ‘traitweight’ — a poetic neologism no longer much used, like ‘hepcat’ and ‘ totes magotes ‘ — which was an algo that scored people against some 40 behavioral and demographic variables. Using scores instead of a binary in/out method obviously expanded the size of the segments by lowering average accuracy. At the time of the acquisition, Demdex was working on a further refinement of traitweights using ‘signals’, including more detail than before, as well as a major brand refresh with a new logo. Which might have been a good idea: Ana left shortly after the deal to join SAS under Bill Stratton (now at Snowflake), to support a newly-launched entertainment and media vertical; and then Signal, a retooled DMP (formerly BrightTag ) popular with retailers and a large company in Japan; and then entrepreneurship. Sparrow combines Ana’s data product expertise with her sister’s ad tech perspective: We’ve productized a lot of how consulting should go to market, and we can be very prescriptive and proactive with our clients. Ana Milicevic Contact Ana via the Sparrow site here and sign up for their probing and salient newsletter here .…

Paleo Ad Tech

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51. Wes Nichols – measuring the impact of MarketShare

vor 2 years

—

Wes was the co-founder with Jon Vein of the marketing and media analytics platform MarketShare, founded in 2006 and sold to Neustar in 2015 for a reported $450 million . At the time, its annual revenues were about $60 million and customers included MasterCard, Intel and Twitter. Wes is currently a Partner at March Capital, based in L.A., and is a Board Director for data insights company Disqo, healthcare AI firm Suki, ActionIQ, AI semantics software Persado and data infrastructure company Adverity. MarketShare was a complex (and not inexpensive) offering, combining marketing science and services, that used both top-down (marketing mix) and bottom-up (attribution) methods to tell its big ad-buying enterprise clients (1) what their real return on ad spend (ROAS) was, and (2) how shifting the mix could improve results. It emerged from Wes’ adventures in direct marketing and media agencies. Running a DM-focused portfolio within Omnicom in the early 2000’s – as he tells Marty in this rousing ride, — he remembers vividly one unsettled ad buyer asking him: “If people can search for what they want [i.e., use Google] why do I need to invest in my brand anymore?” The question sat with Wes and echoed other pleas to help determine the real response to ad dollars, on both performance-direct and upper-funnel (brand) values, in an increasingly digital ad-sphere. At the same time, Wes had run across the work of some credentialed academics – particularly Dominique (Mike) Hanssens of UCLA and David Reibstein of Wharton – who were working on the media measurement knot. Existing solutions included marketing and media-mix models, which could be complex and multidimensional, but were both backward-looking and inexpressive. Also slow: many brands refreshed these models annually, or at best quarterly. On the other hand, a class of digital multi-touch attribution (MTA) providers were gaining adherents. Tools such as Visual IQ , ClearSaleing (sold to eBay), and then Adometry, Convertro, and Abakus (all acquired), provided improvements on last-click measurement by looking at the user path. MTA’s benefits were intriguing but generally digital-only (not including TV, radio, OOH, etc.) and of primary use in assessing the trade-off between paid search and digital display. So MarketShare is one of those handful of startups that began life in the academy. (Others were Abakus, the CDP Amperity and the analytics tool Custora.) Wes and his co-founder Jon Vein, whom he met through mutual friends, spent a couple years bootstrapping the solution and adapting Hanssens and others’ work into a commercial solution. That took about two years and yielded some patents . “I knew we had to get the math right,” Wes tells Marty. Wes Nichols (in pink) and Jon Vein, co-founders, frollicking at Cannes in 2015. How did MarketShare work? MarketShare distinguished its approach from last-click, first-click and so-called “matched pairs” methods. The latter was apparently used by MTA providers, who would acquire voluminous path data for anonymous consumers (via cookie log files, generally), sift and compare similar paths. Ideally, there were enough paths to find sufficient examples with (and without) particular exposure types. Guided by Hanssens and others, MarketShare took a more holistic approach that included experimental design and targeting based on persuadability. So-called ‘uplift models’ recognize that different portions of a given audience have different levels of persuadability: some will buy anyway (‘sure things’), some will never buy (‘lost causes’), others hate ads and some portion can be influenced. Who are they? In addition to recognizing uplift, MarketShare’s models adjusted bottom-up attribution with top-down econometric methods. In this way, it could recognize offline and non-marketing effects, such as TV and radio, weather, seasonality, trade promotions, alien invasions, etc. Algorithmic models at the user-level could be linked with these top-down methods. Data was onboarded via email systems, direct mail databases, cookie log files, media plans, point-of-sale data, etc. Additional data was linked for geographies (e.g., weather, store promotions) and time series. Wes admits that data collection and transformation, in the early years, was “difficult.” Services were required. Methods used by the team included logit choice models for individual consumers, transformed to deal with multiple touches, frequency, etc.; systems of regression model equations for marketing mix, considering intermediate outcomes using hierarchical Bayesian priors; and discrete choice models for attribution. Ultimately, MarketShare built a market-level model, translating each market-level effect into a currency (like sales). Various granular time series components were incorporated into a decomposition model to build new composite variables, with factors or ‘conduit variables.’ These accounted for effects such as offline media, pricing changes, seasonality, competitors, etc. The Neustar deal came “out of the blue,” says Wes, based on a meeting with a board member during a pre-IPO corridor. Shortly after acquiring MarketShare, Neustar was taken private and ultimately restructured. Some of its data assets were sold to Matt Spiegel and a team at TransUnion last year. Stay to the end to hear about Wes’ interesting sideline activity – a first for Paleo Ad Tech – as an LAPD Reserve Officer. Yes, he went through the entire Police Academy and has a speedy draw, friends. Perps beware.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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50. Brian Andersen – shining a light on LUMA Partners 32:26

vor 2 years32:26

32:26

Brian Andersen is the Co-Founder — with Terry Kawaja — and the Head of Digital Marketing Investment Banking at LUMA Partners , a small but mighty I-bank that is the premiere boutique operating at the luminescent nexus of digital media and marketing technology. Founded in 2010, LUMA is the best-known bespoke advisory service in ad- and mar-tech, running the most alpha-rich congregations — the Digital Marketing Summit, or LUMA DMS; the highly liquid Cannes Blanc party; various discreetly furbished dinners that, if you haven’t heard of them, you may not belong, — and genuinely inspired content marketing, from parody videos to that ubiquitous logo-rific series of LUMAScapes (created by Terry). And then there are the deals, starting with Dapper->Yahoo within a few months of LUMA’s founding in the fall of 2010, rapidly tailed by Demdex->Adobe, Admeld ->Google, Interclick ->Yahoo … and many others. As Brian tells Marty in this special holiday-season episode, our 50th (!), he first met Kawaja in the course of circling Invite Media as a potential acquisition by his then-employer, Omniture. In fact, Omniture had agreed to acquire the then-minuscule Invite as a DSP “workflow tool” to complement Omniture’s web analytics suite, when Brian was Vice President of Corporate Development. Adobe’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Omniture in 2009 paused the transaction, and when Adobe returned later, Google had moved in, advised in part by Terry Kawaja. In the deal debrief, Brian recalls, Terry told the Adobe team: “You just didn’t move fast enough.” Not long after, Brian and Terry ran into one another at a BlueKai conference and mutually announced intentions to leave their bivouacs — Brian at Adobe, and Terry at GCA, where he was Co-Head of Digital Media, after a career in M&A at big banks such as Citigroup and Credit Suisse First Boston. Initially reluctant, due to an early mismatch with investment banking at Robertson Stephens, Brian decided to sign up as the Silicon Valley half of LUMA. Terry Kawaja (left) and Brian Andersen, co-captains of the S.S. LUMA, somewhere in France. LUMA-naries at the 2014 DMC – Brian is at left; Terry is be-logoed. Tall and athletic, Brian was a formidable defensive end at UC Davis, where he majored in engineering and was two-time All Conference. Ironically disliking I-banking, he moved into business development roles at Interwoven and then Omniture, founded by Josh James in a dorm room Utah in 1996. Within a few years, LUMA added partners Dick Filippini (2nd from left) and Mark Greenbaum (right). From the beginning, Brian says, LUMA’s approach had two pillars: (1) deep industry expertise; and (2) strategic thinking. Neither is as common as you might assume, particularly in the ad- and mar-tech space, which until the last decade was considered unpredictable and suspiciously specialized. As advisors, LUMA doesn’t do traditional pitch cycles but rather functions as a kind of digital yenta, detecting chemistry and suggesting matches drawn from its capacious network of disrupters and acquirers. Brian admits it hasn’t always been easy. There are ups and down in business cycles, of course, and while 2021 was a record year — with 15-16 deals for the LUMA team — 2022 was a different story. But at a recent DMS in Menlo Park, Brian gave a presentation pointing out that the valuations of public companies in the space are simply reverting to normal levels after a feverish period of froth and FOMO. So perhaps we’re all more normal now … ? Brian remains optimistic. Google’s Neal Mohan was indirectly responsible for bringing Brian and Terry together, around the Invite Media deal, in 2010.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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49. David Wamsley – running an AdAuction in the dot-com days 34:10

vor 2 years34:10

34:10

David Wamsley was the co-founder and CEO of an innovative platform called AdAuction.com, which procured remnant inventory from a group of publishers including Match.com and eBay and sold it in an eBay-like declining-price auction. The company launched in the fall of 1997, was folded into a B2B company called OneMediaPlace by a group of investors including the holding company CMGI … and ultimately fell victim to the dot-com meltdown. At its peak in 1999, the company had raised $88 million, sold space for over 100 publishers including Netscape and BizTravel, and hosted at least 675 buyers in its multi-weekly auction events , based in San Francisco. Before winding down, Wamsley was expanding AdAuction’s auctions to other remnant media, including print, DRTV and radio. Wamsley launched an incubator called Campsix , raised some $20 million, and lost that venture as well in the wake of the dot-com dream jackhammer known as the year 2000. After some quiet time in Thailand, Wamsley followed the lead of Jim Clark into Florida real estate, suffered boldly through the reversals of 2008; then launched a PR agency, also based in Florida. He is currently Founder & CEO at Rosebud Communications . As David tells Marty in this festive episode, he never quite liked working for others. After graduating from FSU, he moved to Atlanta and became enraptured by the web while recovering from a weight-lifting injury in Las Vegas. Making his way to Silicon Valley, he joined companies such as Sega and Big Book in marketing and sales roles, before coming across an online auction platform developed by Moai Technologies , launched in 1996. Using Moai’s auction tech and $300,000 from friends and family, David launched AdAuction in 1997 with his friend Chris Redlitz , now an investor and philanthropist. There was a cautionary precedent. A company called Adbot , based in Chicago, held its first “live” online ad auction in April, 1997. Building its own ad server, Adbot seems to have used an auction system based on phone calls and whiteboards, like Sotheby’s. It didn’t even survive 1997, however, due to an SEC investigation. AdAuction.com benefitted from the Adbot flameout, picking up customers, and the company proved adept at Wamsley’s later profession: PR. It was covered in outlets such as Wired , the Industry Standard, the Wall Street Journal , CNET and AdAge. It later hired the Ingalls Moranville agency to build out some rather frisky campaigns with winky taglines : “Opportunity Clicks” “It’s like Vegas, only everyone wins and there’s no buffet” An AdAge story from May, 1998 , admired the company’s confidence and cited 45 web publishers registered at an early auction (including Elon Musk’s city-guide startup Zip2), and 150 media buyers including Modem Media. Dave is quoted as saying AdAuction could make $7 million in 1998 and sometimes realized CPMs over $10. The auction mechanism was — of course — not programmatic in the post-Millennial sense. Publishers offered six-figure batches of impressions and set a starting price in the platform. Every two minutes, the price dropped until there was a bidder. Auctions were not continuous but rather “events,” as Dave says, starting on the third Thursday of each month and increasing in frequency to multiple daily sessions. Selling 300,000 impressions was a good day for a publisher. Total proceeds to AdAuction from an auction could be around $200,000. Recall that in 1997, the entire online ad business was only $550 million, per Forrester, doubling in 1998 to $1 billion. As Dave admits, AdAuction was not an engineering-driven venture. It used Moai’s auction tech; AdForce and then DoubleClick as its ad server; and the SF-based agency Organic to build its UI. Yet it was sailing steadily until everything capsized in 2000. In April, CMGI put $25 million into the company (part of a final round of $67 million), shuffled management, and AdAuction was renamed OneMediaPlace . AdAuction team (Wamsley at left) appeared in Forbes in 2000 By this time, the founding team had moved on. Today, Dave lives in Florida and runs his PR agency. His most recent venture is a solution called ByLineBuddy , which programmatizes the creation and distribution of original thought content for clients.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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48. Brian O’Kelley (part 3) – the AppNexus adventure 44:38

vor 2 years44:38

44:38

We welcome Brian back for the third (and – for now – final) episode on his revelatory career, from his days as a high-school entrepreneur and javelin-tosser in Eugene, Oregon to his college career as a comp-sci major at Princeton and then co-founder of a dot-com Ticketmaster-manque called LA2Nite.com (in episode one ); through his key role in building out the technology at epochal Right Media, which pioneered both supply-side technology and a form of ad exchange, before being acquired by previous investor Yahoo for a sweet $680 million in 2007 (in episode two ). This episode opens with Brian being fired by Right Media’s management the day before the Yahoo deal closes, reducing his payout, and – as he tells Marty in this riveting ride – pretty much writing him out of the Right Media story. Although known in the inner rings of the NYC ad tech super-circle, Brian didn’t feature in post-deal recaps and found himself meditatively running around the island of Manhattan, contemplating his life. He didn’t contemplate for long, co-founding AppNexus in 2007 with Mike Nolet , a young product manager at Right Media. The company started as a proto-PaaS, building scaled hosting infrastructure for ad tech companies in an era when the newly-launched AWS wasn’t fast enough to handle real-time bidding. Raising money in the boom year of 2007 proved to be as easy as pitching his hero Marc Andreessen and Vinod Khosla . Then came the crash. Cash-constrained, after his non-compete with Yahoo expired, Brian decided to focus on building applications and services for real-time bidding in the cloud. Gradually, he began to compete with SSPs like AdMeld, creating conflicts (check out our Ben Barokas episode for more); and then with DSPs like Invite Media, which he’d closely advised. (We did an episode on Invite here .) But the real competitor was always Google, an adversary so formidable that it inspired Microsoft to join an alliance with AOL and invest in AppNexus – providing exclusive access to inventory on MSN.com and Outlook, etc. – simply to temper Google’s march to domination of search, supply (acquiring AdMeld ), demand (acquiring Invite ) and the exchange in between (acquiring DoubleClick and building AdX). Ultimately, as Brian admits, Google proved to be too strong: “They won,” he says. Approached by AT&T in 2018, Brian agreed to sell AppNexus for a bit under $2 billion. At the time, AT&T was combining a data and identity infrastructure with a media business and wanted to combine AppNexus with DirecTV. It’s a strategy they ultimately unwound, selling AppNexus (as part of Xandr) to Microsoft at the end of last year. (Our chat with Brian Lesser gives some flavor here; and for more on Microsoft and AppNexus see Marty’s ‘oral history’ of Microsoft’s ad business in AdExchanger here .) So AppNexus landed where Brian O’Kelley wanted it to land, although not by his preferred flight plan. Not a Hollywood ending, perhaps; more like a Menlo Park ending. These days, Brian is very visible as the founder of Scope3 , which is engaged in the admirable mission of trying to reduce the carbon footprint (and other evil exhaust) of media, advertising and beyond.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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47. Larry Braitman – fishing for dot-com dollars with Flycast 30:00

vor 2 years30:00

30:00

Larry Braitman was co-founder of Flycast, a dot-com-era digital ad network known for its direct-response focus, lower entry costs for advertisers and publishers, relative ease of use and optimization, and explicit embrace of what the Wall Street Journal called remnant (or unsold) inventory. Larry founded Flycast — named for his co-founder Richard Thompson’s precision piscine pasttime — in the summer of 1996 in San Francisco, where he’d relocated from his hometown of Philadelphia. Flycast IPO’d in 1999 and sold to the roll-up holding machine CMGI in January, 2000. This proved to be excellent timing, of course, just months before AOL-Time Warner and the end of days, and CMGI’s all-stock deal, priced at a reported $559 million , rose at the peak of the dot-com bubble to a staggering $2.2 billion. (CMGI’s own IPO was put on hold in 2000 and it was out of the internet ad business by 2003.) At the time, Flycast had revenues of about $25 million, up from less than $5 million in 1998, and was running at a loss. In total, it raised $20 million and had about 800 publications in its ad network, 75 employees and 300 advertisers, according to public filings . Larry started his professional life as a corporate attorney and tax partner in Philadelphia. Seeking a second act, he met Rick Thompson through a VC who’d rejected an earlier newsletter startup he’d pitched. At the time, Thompson was a student at Wharton Business School. As Larry tells Marty in this reflective episode, Flycast emerged from multiple brainstorming sessions as the last in a string of previously-discovered ideas. From the beginning, it stressed self-serve automation and practical tools for ad buyers and publishers, a down-market DoubleClick for the DIY domain. Candid photos (shot on film!) of the early Flycast team hard at work in their SoMa offices in SF (mid-1990s) Components of its solution included: AdAgent — desktop tool for ad buyers to schedule up-front and “opportunistic spot buys” Media Templates — automation tools for common requirements like A/B tests, day/time buys AdReporter — measurement tool In the pre-programmatic era, Flycast offered the ability to prepopulate prices within an ad server to meet reach targets. The “Blind Buy” was a lower-cost option, familiar to ad network users even today: you don’t know where your ad’s running, but it’s cheap. Tactics such as the “Tonnage Buy” and the “Media Blitz” reveal the company’s unpretentious tone and tilt toward usability, giving buyers an option to set a high CPM and get a virtual “ton” of impressions. Pricing was a percent of media with a limited freemium/try-before-you-buy model. Larry says Flycast started its fees at 15% of media spend, and its website ultimately broadcast a list price of 30% (presumably negotiable). Not long after CMGI acquired Flycast, it shut it down. CMGI itself was a victim of the dot-com meltdown. In all, it had rolled up (and then down) some 50 companies, including Engage, AdSmart, AdForce, AdKnowledge and Flycast. Its last bold venture was acquiring the search-engine AltaVisa in 2002 and selling it a year later at a 94% discount . In 2005, Larry was back at it, co-founding Adify Corporation. Adify was a white-label solution to build vertical ad networks, going to market based on an anchor-tenant and long-tail model. Ultimately, it helped power 100 networks, including Martha Stewart’s lifestyle sachet and Forbes’ business-financial mesh, and was acquired by Cox in 2008 for a reported $300 million . These days, Larry is an early-stage investor who likes to work with companies across a range of industries, advising on practical matters such as strategy and helping to line up initial funding rounds. None of these companies is in ad tech.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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46. Jay Schwedelson – was WebConnect the first ad network? 29:19

vor 2 years29:19

29:19

Jay was the founder of a very early ad network called WebConnect, in the second half of 1995, that was notable for taking a then-unusual but prescient stance against the use of third-party cookies for “tracking” — a business decision that Jay admits “was wrong,” ultimately forcing WebConnect to transform into an email-focused services shop. Today Jay is still living in WebConnect’s home-ground of Boca Raton, Florida, running an agency called Outcome Media — as well as hosting the upcoming Guru Conference for email marketers, at which I’m happy to be contributing some mind-bending insights. In the interim he founded WorldData and SubjectLine.com and is a direct marketing thought leader . Jay grew up in the database marketing business, starting in his parent’s garage in Jericho, Long Island, where the Schwedelsons bootstrapped a startup that collected and collated terrestrial address lists for consumer magazines such as Sports Illustrated. As a college student in Southern Florida in the ’90s, Jay immediately saw the Internet as an opportunity to build a similar operation for websites. The WebConnect model was simple: Jay and some friends called webmasters on the phone and asked if they could “exclusively” represent them to advertisers. Text ads were then sold to buyers at a flat rate of $50-100 a month, consisting of text links out to the advertisers’ website. Through the cold-call brute-force method, the startup signed on about 1,000 publishers into its network and began to aggregate themes: e.g., a few dozens golf-themed websites could be packaged as a “Golf Channel” and ads sold through the network to brands who thought golfers were a good fit for their product. In fervid, microscopic early web — around 1995 and 1996 — Jay found a greenfield, with “zero ads” and no real competition, but that changed. DoubleClick entered as a competing ad network that first year, followed by 24/7 and Real Media and Flycast , and others. WebConnect built a “rudimentary” ad server that powered reporting, as well as a portal for publishers to sign up and join its network. An early goal (as we see from the early website screen shot above) was to get the entire Internet into the mesh, but it became unrealistic. Notably, as DoubleClick embraced cookie-based profiles of web surfers, Jay found the idea of cross-domain tracking personally distasteful: I was like, wait a minute. So you’re telling me we’re gonna drop something on somebody’s computer, and then we’re gonna follow them around the internet and we’re gonna see what they’re doing? And then we’re gonna target based on that? — that’s horrible! This is a terrible idea. They’re gonna get into a lot of trouble … but there was no trouble to get into. Jay Schwedelson Cookie-based profiles became a competitive differentiator for DoubleClick and other networks, and then an industry standard, and so WebConnect with left with a portfolio of contextually-targeted sites that did not perform as well as others networks’ audience-based offerings. It ended up losing publishers and advertisers and started to focus on email. Around the turn of the millennium, many ad networks acquired or built email services. DoubleClick had DART Mail, 24/7 had 24/7 Mail, FlyCast acquired an email provider. These businesses were largely divested later, as lower-growth, leaving Jay to forge a second act under different corporate names — WorldData, Outcome Media — very close to his origin story, collecting personally-identifiable IDs with permission from consumers to be stored in data-bases and used for direct marketing. Which ultimately may be a more durable — certainly more transparent — approach than web cookies. Another early website, post-WebConnect but still focused on lists…

Paleo Ad Tech

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45. Jim Jorgensen – the amazing dot-com adventure of AllAdvantage 40:04

vor 2 years40:04

40:04

Jim Jorgensen is a prolific serial entrepreneur and co-founder of a well-known dot-com advertising startup called AllAdvantage . The company paid people to surf the web as part of a multi-level marketing program. Launched in April, 1999, without a product, it ultimately raised $175 million from blue-chip VCs and was on track to go public in March 2000 – one short year after its launch – at a unicorn valuation of $1.4 billion. Then the market crashed. Two years after its founding, the company was a chapter in ad tech history, cited by chroniclers such as Roger Lowenstein in his Origins of the Crash as an object lesson in collective confusion. As Jorgensen reveals to Marty in this rollicking episode, AllAdvantage is more fairly seen as an experimental business model with a viral component that was more a symptom than a cause of its distorted dot-com economics. Jorgensen himself is a tall, gregarious personality with a fund of stories and a varied career. Trained as an accountant, he’s a born entrepreneur. On a tip from a professor at Stanford, in the 1970’s, he hooked up with the tennis pro Billie Jean King and became her business manager for a couple of decades, meanwhile launching sports-related ventures such as WomenSports Magazine, Women’s Professional Softball League, and the still-thriving World Team Tennis league. Moving to L.A., he was a Hollywood business manager for a while; clients included Sharon Stone, Lily Tomlin and the (brilliant) writer John Hughes. But by 1999, Jorgensen was back in San Francisco, teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford Business School, and living in a seven-bedroom faculty palace with a swimming pool, tennis court and hexagonal “shed” formerly inhabited by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz , who continued to drop by. AllAdvantage happened quickly. Already in his early 50s, Jorgensen originally wanted to launch a travel website but became intrigued by an idea pitched to him by a Stanford student named Johannes Pohle for a product that would pay people in exchange for requiring them to watch ads while they surfed. Jorgensen added the component of multi-level marketing, where a customer gets paid a commission for referrals. Two other graduating twentysomething Stanford students – Carl Anderson and Oliver Brock, a friend of Pohle’s from Germany – joined the founding quartet, and AllAdvantage was launched in April, 1999, one month after its conception. At first, it was simply a website that collected names and a promise of product launch “in six to eight months.” By the second day, the website had collected 24,000 names, and VC’s were baited. Raising $2 million was not difficult. The next $173 million took less than a year. By March 2000, the company had over 1,000 employees, a couple dozen sales offices, and the services of notorious dot-com i-banker Frank Quattrone , at CSFB. As launched in August, 1999, AllAdvantage hosted a one inch-high applet that sat on the top or bottom of the screen. It could be turned on or off; when on, it tracked the user’s surfing behavior and served ads. There were two ads, one in the middle and a smaller one off to the side, and they rotated every 20 seconds or so. This is what the viewbar looked like: And this is what the website looked like (retrieved from the Internet Archives, missing some images): Targeted behavioral ads would seem to be a benefit, but the company itself admitted in a filing that “During 1999 and the first quarter of 2000, substantially all of the advertisements we sold were not highly-targeted.” The market demand wasn’t there yet, although DoubleClick was a major partner and reseller. AllAdvantage’s soon-ubiquitous slogan “Get Paid to Surf the Web” was an afterthought, but it caught on. At first, users were promised 50 cents an hour for up to 40 hours a month of surfing; 10 cents per hour for their first referral; and 5 cents for up to four more referrals. Doing the math, payouts could get into the $15,000 per month range – but that was (presumably) very rare. These rates were lowered significantly within a few months , and a sweepstakes was later added, but costs always exceeded revenue. Total membership grew from about 5 million in late 2000 to 8 million in May, when growth slowed dramatically. From a rate of almost 900,000 new members snagged in January 2001, new signups fell to 200,000 in August. And the company never quite figured out a working business model. Revenue per active user peaked at just over $2.00 in March, 2000, when its cost per user was $10.00. That math doesn’t work. The company’s burn rate was legendary, even for the time. In July 2000, it earned $14 million from advertisers and paid out almost $50 million. In total, the company is estimated to have lost over $100 million of the VC’s money. It must be said that most of this debacle was not AllAdvantage’s fault. To interpret the company as some kind of pyramid scheme or “fraud” (as Lowenstein characterizes it, unfairly) is to ignore the context; had the market continued on its current trajectory, Jorgensen’s company might have found a path to profitability. Yet there is evidence the whole “Get Paid to Surf the Web” thing lacked long-term appeal. Plenty of people tried it, but few stuck around. Only about 20% of members were “active,” on average, meaning 80% of people tried it and left. (These numbers were self-reported and published in a Stanford Business School case study.) AllAdvantage was also particularly susceptible to fraud . Jorgensen tells Marty that some users were posting pictures of their pay-out checks on the web, and others were printing out the pictures and trying to cash them as checks. Free programs like FakeSurf and MyAdvantage appeared that faked web surfing, so a user could be paid while not surfing – or even set up robotic PCs to receive checks. As Jorgensen points out, AllAdvantage was well aware of these schemes and took steps to combat them. They appointed a Chief Privacy Officer and had a fraud department, staffed with PhDs, who sat on a windowless room and were aided by anonymous white hat crusaders, some of whom (rumor has it) may have been behind the original hack-apps. But as #PaleoAdTech listeners know all too well, the year 2000 was cruel to everybody in the advertising business. When the floor fell away from dot-com funding starting around March, 2000, as IPOs and other exits grew unrealistic, the dot-coms pulled their ad spend and the publishers and intermediaries suffered. Here’s a chart of online advertising (indexed to 10/99 = 100) showing the massive spike as AllAdvantage prepped for its IPO and the vertiginous cliff-walk after AOL acquired Time Warner in March. The usual layoffs and shuffling happened throughout 2000, but the company closed its virtual doors in February 2021 , almost exactly two years after its conception. Interestingly, the get-paid-to-watch-ads paradigm remains, and it was not original to AllAdvantage. Jorgensen mentions the precedent of NetZero , launched a year before AllAdvantage, which provided free ISP service in exchange for enduring a 3.5-inch viewbar with ads. There was also PowerAgent, briefly headed by Paleo Ad Tech guest David Carlick , which was formed in 1994; it originally focused on email ads and managed to raise almost $20 million from power players such as Ross Perot’s EDS. It couldn’t seem to release a product out of beta. Others in the space included Juno, Freei, Spinway and BlueLight Internet (owned by Kmart) … and more. These days, Jorgensen remains in the Bay Area and has a number of start-up ventures running. None is in ad tech.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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44. Shawn Riegsecker – getting to the Basis Technologies of Centro 27:28

vor 2 years27:28

27:28

Shawn is the Founder and CEO of Basis Technologies , aka Centro, and a well-known figure on the ad tech circuit for two decades. He started the company back in 2001 with the vision of being a comprehensive, automated and intelligent software platform for digital media, focused on mid-market agencies and brands. In his spare time he’s an activist for all the right causes and an angel investor. Shawn is also the -two in our recent one-two punch of influential Chicago-based ad tech startups. Like his fellow hometown hero Matt Spiegel , who co-founded Resolution Media in 2003, Shawn proves that not all good digital media ideas come from the coasts or the Middle East. The Midwest has its deep thinkers as well. Adopted into a pious Mennonite family, Shawn originally aspired to follow in the footsteps of the savior and become a pastor, attending a small Christian college and transferring to Bowling Green State University. Luckily for ad tech history — as Shawn tells Jill and Marty in this riveting recital, — although “there was not a lot of competition” at BGSU, the school was home to a very well-known professor named Martha Rogers , founding partner of the Peppers & Rogers Group and co-author of the best-selling The One to One Future (1993) about what used to be called “database marketing.” Inspired by Dr. Rogers, Shawn began his career getting newspapers like the Akron Beacon-Journal and the Cleveland Plain Dealer onto the internet. It was a feverish time, Shawn recalls: “There were no rules, nobody understood what they were doing. But we knew we had to get moving in that [digital] direction.” Eventually he joined #PaleoAdTech favorite Dave Morgan at Real Media in the 1990s, helping to aggregate local media for larger national advertisers. When Real Media’s DoubleClick acquisition fell through at the last minute, Shawn spoke up to execs to face “serious operational and scale issues … relative to the ad sales network side [of the business]” — and the idea for Basis was born. What was the Basis vision? “It was workflow automation,” explains Shawn. “[It] was the concept of just stringing together and creating databases and creating workflow, connected workflow across all the different publishers.” Bootstrapping through the lean early ’00s, Shawn slowly built a business with the help of consultants Joe Kelly and Ken Wallace. Things changed in about 2011-12, when ad tech adapted to the advent of programmatic and real-time bidding; that caused a moment of reexamination, and a platform retooling, as Basis/Centro incorporated a DSP into its workflow automation suite. (By the way, #PaleoAdTech regulars will remember our episode with Ratko Vidakovic , co-founder of SiteScout, a DSP acquired by Centro in 2013.) Offering a mix of software and services, Shawn says his team now consists of about 1,000 people spread around 20 offices in the U.S. and Canada, still headquartered in Chicago. They have “close to 500 agencies up and running on the platform.” He’s still focused on automating workflows and acquired QuanticMind last year to incorporate more SEM into the mix. “So eventually,” Shawn says, “we believe that all media should be able to flow through a singular platform based upon the audience that I want to pay for and reach.”…

Paleo Ad Tech

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43. Matt Spiegel – making a Resolution (Media) for search 29:34

vor 2 years29:34

29:34

Matt worked at the LA-based ad network L90 and then in DRTV before co-founding the pioneering search agency Resolution Media in Chicago in 2003. Resolution was acquired by Omnicom in 2005, and Matt went on to become CEO at Omnicom Media Group Digital, ultimately helping to launch and lead Omnicom’s Accuen programmatic trading desk. Leaving Omnicom in 2011, he joined gaming ad tech startup Tap.Me as CEO for a brief stint before guiding its 11 employees over to MediaMath and #PaleoAdTech’s old friend Joe Zawadzki . Interviewed at the time , Joe extolled the ancillary skills of Tap.Me: “They thought their commercial go-to-market was around the mobile gaming opportunity. In pursuit of that they built an underlying mobile and video ad server ….” Matt joined Joe for a bit running business development and client teams at MediaMath before hooking up with the influential consulting-cum-connections business with a similar name, MediaLink . Since 2018, Matt has led a team at TransUnion , where he is currently EVP Media & Entertainment Vertical. (TransUnion acquired Neustar for a reported $3.1 billion last year in a bold identity-driven union.) In this panoramic episode, the loyal Chicagoan tells Marty that his entry into digital came via a landline call in a frat house he was visiting, and he feels fortunate to have spent some time in DRTV — which led him to see the opportunity in search before most holding companies did. He recalls: “This was essentially a new form of response-driven advertising. I became an instant believer, and what was interesting is at that time … the big agencies were not believers.” Matt worked at the Marina del Rey-based ad network L90 for none other than fellow Chicagoan Frank Addante , who later founded Rubicon Project and is now CEO of Magnite. Shortly after Matt left L90, it acquired DoubleClick’s media assets and changed its name to MaxWorldWide. (For more on this exciting saga check out our episodes with Bill Wise and Nancy Marzouk .) Starting Resolution Media with three friends in an office space next to an adult-film production company, Matt credits early success to a focus on regional e-commerce “catalogue companies” (e.g., TireRack ) and work for OMD and Starcom in Chicago. The agency licensed technology, focusing on campaign execution, and it made money by arbitraging clicks — that is, charging clients a (reasonable, undisclosed) percent on top of what the campaign cost. Matt believes this experience in search outfit him well to help found Omnicom’s Accuen trading desk. “What I saw,” he says, “was this [programmatic] was search all over. I mean, this literally was the search business just now applied to a display unit instead of a text unit and with an auction that functioned a little bit differently. But at the core, the auction-based inventory was not committed up front, where you needed to use technology to optimize the spend and you can do it on the fly.” Following the Resolution playbook, Accuen licensed the tech and focused on executing campaigns. Like other trading desks, it charged clients a markup on media that was undisclosed, but considered lower than prevailing ad network rates. Today at TransUnion, Matt is trying to “ride the identity wave.” He’s doing that by working to provide “access to good identity … targeting attributes and segmentation strategies.” His assumption that “we’re not going back to a context-only era” is one that many #PaleoAdTech listeners have good reason to believe.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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42. Joseph Zito – the logic of Datalogix and Oracle 31:25

vor 2 years31:25

31:25

Joseph started in mar-tech at Experian before joining Datalogix in 2012. Working for Eric Roza and based in New York, he was with DLX — as it is known in the industry — through many ups and downs on its way to a reported $1.1 billion acquisition by Oracle in 2014. Post acquisition, Joseph worked with the Oracle Data Cloud team until 2019, when he left to join customer analytics startup Custora, itself acquired by Amperity later that year. Today, Joseph runs his own startup, {X}Form Coaching & Consulting , based in NYC. As Joseph tells Marty in this colorful episode, Datalogix began life in 2002 as a direct mail cooperative called NextAction. Direct mail coops typically consist of retailers who pool their CRM files, based on catalogue and other data collected from customers; they then make that data available to non-competing marketers on a cost-per-lead (or CPM) basis. For example, a home decor retailer might contribute files of households with particular geo-demo-purchase characteristics; a shoe retailer could do the same; and so on. Contributors often gain insights into their audiences based on ID matches (e.g., name-address) and can get net new leads who match either their own audiences (‘lookalike’ targeting) or defined features (e.g., ‘luxury shoppers in Denver’). All of this should sound very familiar by analogy to digital marketers, who often aren’t aware of the sophistication of direct marketing in real life. The actual targeting and mailing is done by a third-party without the coop data user learning the actual names/addresses, unless they respond to the mailing. And any unique IDs are usually suppressed, so coop members aren’t giving up proprietary data. Coops differ in their members, modeling methods and transparency. (Regular listeners will remember our discussion with DoubleClick’s co-founder about the acquisition — and later sale — of Abacus , another direct-mail coop.) In fact, Datalogix was spawned from a merger of a company called Data Logix , founded in Boston by a venture capitalist, and NextAction, which was actually founded by the former President and CFO of Abacus and a staff of ex-Abacusites, in 2002. Major competitors were Experian, i-Behavior and Abacus, which eventually ended up owned by Epsilon. Roza joined NextAction in 2007 at a time when it required a reported personal infusion of funds. He proceeded to build a culture in Westminster, Colorado, that was loose on structure and tight on wellness. (A well-known Crossfitter and box owner, he would later become CEO of the fitness franchise.) Zito joined the company’s NYC office as a committed advocate of the DLX experience. Joseph points out that there were a number of “existential moments” in the startup’s path. As it moved from offline to online solutions, Datalogix required a number of data partners to function. One set of partners provided a link between logins (e.g., emails) and third-party cookies — think large publishers. These partners powered an onboarding product, similar to and perhaps even predating LiveRamp’s . Another set of partners provided retail purchase data tied to personal identifiers (e.g., emails), often via loyalty programs. This latter set of data allowed Datalogix to offer its ‘killer app’ and ‘transformative product,’ an ability to offer both CRM-based online audiences and a closed-loop measurement facility. Partners dropping in and out unexpectedly furnished some of these fraught moments. In 2012, Datalogix gained a valuable partnership with Facebook to track the offline impact of online ads and later expanded the model to Twitter and other large pubs. The arrangement was scrutinized at the time and later suspended by Facebook in 2018, as the company continued to sift through the fallout from Cambridge Analytica. Nonetheless, Datalogix’s ‘ROI product’ proved successful and at one point DLX claimed 80% of the top US advertisers and 7 of 8 of the top publishers as clients. In 2014, inspired by BlueKai’s co-founder Omar Tawakol , Oracle acquired the company , making it a keystone of the company’s Oracle Data Cloud . At the time of acquisition, the company’s revenues were about $125 million. Joseph explains that the company moved into Oracle’s offices in Colorado, but not before Oracle agreed to build a Crossfit gym on premises. Red tape expanded but the culture endured. Joseph moved from managing the Lumascape to the DMP migration from the Oracle Marketing Cloud to the ODC — a political and strategic struggle. Eventually, both Tawakol and Roza left, and Joseph moved back to his roots in mar-tech at Custora. Datalogix continues to function as Oracle Advertising , part of the Oracle Advertising and CX suite.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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41. Lynda Clarizio – making the case for AOL, Nielsen and The 98 35:49

vor 2 years35:49

35:49

Lynda Clarizio is an attorney-turned-ad tech exec who was a leader at AOL for a decade, running its consumer web sites, ad sales and operations, and its Platform-A rollup. She later ran Invision and Nielsen’s US media business. She’s co-founder of The 98, an early stage venture fund advising and investing in tech businesses founded by women. Growing up in an intensely Italian-American milieu in New Jersey, Lynda was early interested in international relations and studied it at Princeton and Harvard Law School. After a bivouac at the State Department, she joined Arnold & Porter in Washington D.C. and became one of its first woman partners. Her connection with AOL began at Arnold & Porter, where she was outside counsel. Twice refusing offers to join AOL as an attorney, she eventually took a role as SVP Strategic & Financial Planning in 1999, at the height of AOL-frenzy. Although she was working on a different deal at the time (eBay), she was present during the lead-up and consummation of the ill-fated merger with Time Warner, which marked the peak of the dot-com boom in March, 2000. As Lynda tells Jill and Marty in this behind-the-scenes episode, there was compelling rationale behind the merger, driven by AOL’s need for access to distribution pipes and its imperative to diversify beyond the Internet. It was ultimately doomed by the economic downturn and severe cultural constraints. She rode out the aftermath, ultimately rising to EVP of AOL’s Audience Business. Nurturing a longstanding “obsession” with Google, Lynda says she felt an outsourcing agreement with the search engine in its pre-revenue days — while lucrative for AOL and catalytic for Google — was a strategic misstep, preventing AOL from building its own search capability. She was determined AOL avoid a similar fluff in display, so she found Advertising.com, a successful Baltimore-based ad network co-founded by our previous guest John Ferber and his brother Scott. She shepherded the acquisition of Advertising.com by AOL in 2004 and became its president two years later, as revenue doubled and accounted for 25% of the portal’s total. AOL later acquired behavioral ad platform Tacoda (founded by our previous guest Dave Morgan ) and contextual targeting company Quigo, both in 2007. As the Wall Street Journal said in a story from 2008: “Her reward: She gets to try to clean up one of the Internet company’s messiest divisions.” The article referred to her appointment as President of Platform-A, a mash-up of the Ad.com network, Tacoda, Quigo and other elements that were intended to accelerate AOL’s transition from an ISP to a proto-programmatic ad business. It was a difficult time to assume this responsibility. As an eMarketer chart from 2008 shows, all the ad players were struggling amidst another economic downturn: And Lynda tells us she “did my best” but “was fired on the front page of the Wall Street Journal” in early 2009. Somebody had to take the fall. As an interesting omen, New York Times columnist Saul Hansell wrote a piece when her promotion was announced that began: “Here’s a warning to Lynda Clarizio: There may be a curse on your job.” He pointed out that since 2001, seven people had been head of AOL’s ad sales group. She joined Invision as CEO and then briefly linked up with our previous guest Brian O’Kelley at AppNexus in 2013 before signing on to Nielsen as President of the US Media business, leading the Watch measurement product. At Nielsen, she tried to expand Watch from its core TV and Cable roots into digital and streaming channels — which would require “considerable investment,” — and she left in 2018. (Invision was acquired in 2016 by MediaOcean.) A pioneering woman throughout her career — her Princeton class was only its eighth co-ed cohort, — Lynda focuses today on advising measurement companies and on helping women in business. She co-founded Brilliant Friends in 2018 as an advisory and investment club, and more recently turned it into The 98 , an early-stage venture fund for women. The name “The 98” refers to a sobering statistic: only 2% of venture dollars today go to start-ups founded by women.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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40. Brian O’Kelley (part 2) – the Right Media experience 30:58

vor 2 years30:58

30:58

Part 2 of an ongoing conversation with Brian O’Kelley , one of the most influential people in the last two decades of ad tech. He led the technology team at Right Media that launched the first real exchange for ad networks. After Right Media was sold to Yahoo in the eventful year of 2007, Brian co-founded AppNexus , a pioneer in programmatic advertising and real-time bidding . The company grew over 11 years to 1,000 employees and was sold to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018. AppNexus was folded into Xandr and is now pending a sale to Microsoft , a long-time AppNexus partner. Today, Brian is the founder and leader of Scope3 , which helps companies monitor and reduce emissions in their supply chain. In this entertaining episode, Brian focuses on his experience at Right Media, which extended from 2004 through its sale to Yahoo in 2007, the year he co-founded AppNexus. Brian heard about the start-up from a posting on the Princeton alumni network; Right Media co-founder Matt Phillips was a Princeton alum, although the two men didn’t know one another. Betraying a charming naivete, Brian showed up for his interview in a suit. At the time, Right Media was incubating in the offices of Poindexter, an innovative digital media agency and tech shop started by Joe Zawadzki, an early supporter. He gave the founders office space and tried unsuccessfully to get his board to fund the start-up (which is a story deftly related in our action-fevered Zawadzki episode here ). Brian was vastly overqualified to build the Right Media website, so he was handed over to Joe, who employed him as a contracting engineer. Over the next year, Brian developed a relationship with Phillips and began to believe he could deliver a performance-based ad server that was un-gamable, as DoubleClick Media Networks’ had been so spectacularly in the deft hands of RM co-founder Mike Walrath. (Brian details how in the episode, and Bill Wise sketches a similar story in our special holiday episode .) In 2004, Brian joined the RM team as an engineer. What followed was a flurry of innovation that left a lasting legacy on the industry. It included a predictive ad server that optimized based on effective CPM (eCPM), equivalent to CTR x CPA, requiring the clever use of a Bayesian algorithm to predict response rates to ads. (The story of this 18th century cleric and his theorem so beloved of modern data scientists is related here .) Brian also built an early SSP — perhaps the actual first, predating AdMeld — not as a product but rather to help direct traffic toward Right Media’s actual business, which was its ad network. And then of course the ad exchange itself, which as Brian describes it began as a “stupid feature” in his multi-tenant SSP to allow ad networks in Europe to bid on overflow inventory from other networks and vice versa. So speculative was this bid-on-overflow feature that initially Mike Walrath wouldn’t plug Right Media into it, and Brian turned to partners. Surprisingly to some, Brian’s RM career involved a heavy component of business development. This included Yahoo, whose Andy Atherton and Ryan Christensen (a future AppNexus leader) pivoted from skeptics to investors in Brian’s network exchange and in Right Media. Ultimately, of course, Yahoo would acquire Right Media and appoint Mike Walrath for a time as a leader in its programmatic ventures. Brian didn’t join Yahoo — but did co-found the even more successful AppNexus, which he is scheduled to tell us about soon as his adventure continues ….…

Paleo Ad Tech

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39. Brian O’Kelley (part 1) – from LA2Nite to Right Media 26:37

vor 2 years26:37

26:37

Part 1 of a multi-part conversation with Brian O’Kelley , one of the most influential people in the last two decades of ad tech. He led the technology team at Right Media that launched the first real exchange for ad networks. After Right Media was sold to Yahoo in the eventful year of 2007, Brian co-founded AppNexus , a pioneer in real-time bidding . The company grew over 11 years to 1,000 employees and was sold to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018. AppNexus was folded into Xandr and is now pending a sale to Microsoft , a long-time AppNexus partner. Today, Brian is the founder and leader of Scope3 , which helps companies monitor and reduce emissions in their supply chain. In this engaging episode, Brian takes Marty back to his high school days in Eugene, Oregon, where he was almost expelled for launching a project to share academic work on what we would today call the open web. Brian also relates the saga of how relentless entrepreneurial instincts and a litigious customer got him into trouble with the authorities at Princeton, where he majored in computer science. After college, Brian co-founded a company called LA2nite.com that had the entirely sensible idea of taking ticket sales to the web, beating TicketMaster as first mover. Unfortunately, internal friction and the phyrric perils of playing against a “massive monopolist” doomed the young Tigers, and LA2nite.com is yet another stencil in the dot-com boneyard. Moving back east, Brian did a few things before landing an interview for which he was overqualified at Right Media. Routed down the hall, he contracted for Joe Zawadazki at Poindexter before joining Mike Walrath and Matt Phillips’ team at Right Media full-time. In next week’s episode, Brian takes us through the day-to-day grind at Right Media to launch an exchange for ad networks — and the nail-biting sale to Yahoo.…

Paleo Ad Tech

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38. Brian Lesser – from 24/7 to Xaxis and Xandr 38:23

vor 2 years38:23

38:23

Brian Lesser was a long-time leader at WPP entities such as the Media Innovation Group (MIG), Xaxis and GroupM. He left GroupM in 2017 to join AT&T, ultimately guiding the newly-formed Xandr ad platform, which included AppNexus. Since 2020, Brian has been CEO of InfoSum , a distributed data collaboration platform. His exposure to the ad business began early and at a lofty level, when as a pre-teen he trailed his dad into the offices of Ogilvy & Mather on 8th Avenue in NYC, where Mike Lesser was CEO. The well-appointed office, “nice suits and … funny friends” intrigued the young Brian. Nonetheless, in short-lived rebellion, he studied political science at the University of Pennsylvania in preparation for a legal-political career: a few months in the district office of the long-time, late NJ Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg redirected him back to the ad business. Brian joined DMB&B and then Procter & Gamble, learning brand management on a series of ultra-glamorous accounts with an alimentary theme: Pampers, Charmin and Baby Wipes. Later, he worked at a high-flying dot-com web-building shop called iXL , which like so many high-flying dot-com web-building shops imploded dramatically in 2001. (Years later, iXL emerged from bankruptcy and was folded into Razorfish.) Meanwhile, a suddenly unemployed Brian Lesser did what #PaleoAdTech co-host Martin Kihn did a few years earlier and got an MBA from Columbia Business School. In 2006, Brian found himself inside David Moore’s innovative 24/7 Media as head of product marketing. At the time, as Brian tells Marty in this panoramic episode, 24/7 had three business lines: an ad server (Open Adstream), ad network and search ads business. It had recently acquired a search marketing firm called Decide Interactive . Brian made his way to VP of product management and was at 24/7 when in one of the most dramatic turnaround stories of the dot-com era, it was acquired by WPP for a healthy $650 million in mid-2007. (You can hear the Battle of Britain-esque saga from 24/7 founder David Moore himself on a previous episode here .) Thus, Brian was acquired into WPP and launched on a decade of stellar career wins as he helped invent the modern programmatic agency. His first stop was the Media Innovation Group, a kind of engineering skunkworks within WPP that built technology for the use of its agencies. MIG built a platform that has been called by some the first DMP — at least, for agencies — and the first agency trading desk, before those terms were current. Funded by a $6 million investment approved by Sir Martin Sorrell, who ran WPP, MIG bought a Netezza database and built what Brian calls a “performance database” for ads, pixeling ad units and tying them to people via cookies; by linking these browser-level journeys to outcomes across a heterogenous campaign, the platform could measure and ultimately optimize performance. Open Adstream was wired in as well, and the value to clients was an ability to see across ad networks, and later real-time impressions. It was called Zeus (or ZAP for Zeus Advertising Platform ) and was not sold separately. [Trivia: Zeus was later used by the Washington Post as the name of its premium ad network in 2021.] After a combustive scene orchestrated by Sir Martin, components of WPP including MIG, MEC Audience Buying and Planning Team and targ.ad, which pre-combustive scene were somewhat in competition, were combined into a single node. What emerged was Xaxis, announced in 2011 and led by Brian Lesser. Xaxis was “the central audience-buying company for GroupM,” and it rolled out in North America, Europe and Australia; its pitch was campaign optimization. In the beginning, Brian says, value-based pricing prevailed, and Xaxis’ clients were okay with fees based on “a percent of media.” After Rocket Fuel went public admitting to take rates that approached half of media spend, advertisers took notice, and Brian admits this event “definitely had an impact,” which peaked in 2015-16 and then “settled down.” Xaxis’ success propelled Brian into WPP orbit, and he was named CEO of GroupM in 2015 at a time when the WPP Group commanded $106 billion of media spending and was the largest media-buying company on earth. He oversaw over a dozen holding company entities including Wavemaker, Mindshare, MAXUS and MediaCom, and of course Xaxis. It was — as he freely admits — a “promotion” (in air quotes), putting him on top of a complex, matrixed organization vigorously spinning wheels within wheels. At the time, his appointment was welcomed by programmatic pundits but worried traditionalists, who feared a harbinger of a robot invasion. They were right and wrong, as Brian told a reporter for Campaign at the time: “The role of the machine should be to make the agencies more efficient so that they can focus on the brilliant ideas that our clients expect from them.” But his appointment is still a symbolic moment in the dash of data-driven advertising, as machines gained a seat in the wood-paneled board rooms offline. A meeting with AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson in Dallas, the same day Amazon bought Whole Foods, convinced an initially reluctant Brian that AT&T could succeed where others (aka Verizon, which eventually sold its media dreams to PE) had struggled. He joined in 2018 amidst a flurry of generally favorable media coverage, including this Superman-ish Ad Age cover: Sept. 10, 2018 issue of Ad Age, announcing Brian Lesser’s move to AT&T AT&T’s vision seemed logical and was later summarized by AppNexus’ Brian O’Kelley as “data plus media plus connectivity equals more money.” However, issues emerged immediately: the Trump-fired Department of Justice sued to block AT&T’s planned merger with CNN-owning Time Warner. If the suit succeeded, the grand vision wasn’t so grand; and most of Brian’s first year on the job turned out to be diverted into legal channels. Plans were delayed for a critical year. Stephenson told Brian to “hit the ground running” in mid-2018, once the merger was approved. Around then, Ad Age’s Jeanine Poggi described Brian as “a popular man at Cannes this week” and quoted him as saying: “The future state of the ad business is a platform business” He explicitly cited Google and Facebook as models, although not precise analogies because their content was worse. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Brian and his team had been scouring M&A targets large and small, eventually landing on O’Kelley’s AppNexus, which it acquired for a reported $1.6 billion in 2018 . (Working the deal was none other than David Moore’s right-hand man John Hsu, whom Brian befriended at 24/7, and who was now AppNexus’ CFO.) Shortly thereafter, AppNexus was combined with AT&T’s ad businesses including DirecTV and a big data team to form Xandr (based on Alexander, as in Graham Bell), with Brian leading. Xandr’s mission was to build a cross-channel ad buying platform with inventory from multiple sources including other MVPDs (e.g., Altice USA and Frontier Communications), including TV, video, display and other formats, on phones, TVs and computers. Brian Lesser and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson at the launch of Xandr Xandr was unleashed during a three-day event at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara, hosting Derek Jeter and Issa Rae. SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 16: attends the Relevance Conference at The Ritz-Carlton Bacara, Santa Barbara on September 16, 2019 in Santa Barbara, California. (Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for Xandr) O’Kelley left before the year was out and later admitted confusion over AT&T’s strategic direction. TimeWarner was renamed WarnerMedia. Ultimately, Brian himself left the company in 2020 after Stephenson was replaced by John Stankey, whom Brian respected but whose ad tech vision perhaps varied from the original plan. Ultimately, AT&T sold Xandr to Microsoft, spun off WarnerMedia to Discovery, and “walked back” the platform idea, much like Verizon before them. A colorful postmortem in Variety neatly summed up the likely culprits in its headline: “… Culture Clashes, Massive Debt and Donald Trump” Although content for the moment at home “hanging out with my kids,” Brian helped InfoSum raise its Series A and joined as CEO in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. He’d been a customer at AT&T and was impressed by the company’s privacy-safe data collaboration technology, which spins up clean rooms and co-ops among parties without co-mingling data. Would he ever go back to running an agency or holding group? “I’d never say never,” Brian admits, “but I like running a tech company.” [In a final piece of ad tech trivia: Brian Lesser was actually the very first guest on our friend Zach Rodgers ‘ long-running AdExchanger Talks podcast, back on Sept. 23, 2016.]…

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