67. Ramsey McGrory – DoubleClick to Mediaocean via Right Media
Sep 03, 2024
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.
66. Daniel Jaye – starting it all with Engage
Aug 07, 2024
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.”
65. Adam Singolda – the tabula rasa of Taboola
Jun 27, 2024
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.
64. Greg Smith – Boomerang-ing through DoubleClick, EchoTarget and Aniview
Jun 26, 2024
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.
63. Jason Fairchild – developing GoTo, OpenX and tvScientific
Dec 10, 2023
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.
62. John Nardone – Flashtalking about Modem Media and [x+1]
Dec 10, 2023
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.”
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.
61. Jonah Goodhart – Colonize-ing Right Media and building a Moat
Dec 10, 2023
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.]
60. Katrin Ribant – giving us the data on Datorama
Dec 10, 2023
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.”
59. Andy Atherton – optimizing Yahoo, Brand.net and AppNexus
Dec 10, 2023
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.”
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.
58. Jeff Hirsch – all the -Clicks in SoCal lead to AudienceScience
Dec 10, 2023
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.
57. Mike Yavonditte – optimizing Alta Vista, Quigo and Yieldmo
Dec 10, 2023
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.
56. Tom Chavez – giving us the Rapt on Krux and data
Dec 10, 2023
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?”
55. Ari Paparo – influencing DoubleClick, Beeswax and more
Dec 10, 2023
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.
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?
54. Lee Nadler – marketing DoubleClick in Silicon Alley
Dec 10, 2023
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.”
53. Omar Tawakol – from BlueKai to AI and the all-new Rembrand
Dec 10, 2023
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.
52. Ana Milicevic – managing data from Demdex to Sparrow
Dec 10, 2023
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.
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.
51. Wes Nichols – measuring the impact of MarketShare
Dec 10, 2023
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.
50. Brian Andersen – shining a light on LUMA Partners
Dec 10, 2023
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.
49. David Wamsley – running an AdAuction in the dot-com days
Dec 10, 2023
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.
48. Brian O’Kelley (part 3) – the AppNexus adventure
Dec 10, 2023
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.
47. Larry Braitman – fishing for dot-com dollars with Flycast
Dec 10, 2023
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.
46. Jay Schwedelson – was WebConnect the first ad network?
Dec 10, 2023
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.
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
45. Jim Jorgensen – the amazing dot-com adventure of AllAdvantage
Dec 10, 2023
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.
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.
44. Shawn Riegsecker – getting to the Basis Technologies of Centro
Dec 10, 2023
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.”
43. Matt Spiegel – making a Resolution (Media) for search
Dec 10, 2023
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.
42. Joseph Zito – the logic of Datalogix and Oracle
Dec 10, 2023
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.
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.
41. Lynda Clarizio – making the case for AOL, Nielsen and The 98
Dec 10, 2023
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.
40. Brian O’Kelley (part 2) – the Right Media experience
Dec 10, 2023
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 ….
39. Brian O’Kelley (part 1) – from LA2Nite to Right Media
Dec 10, 2023
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.
38. Brian Lesser – from 24/7 to Xaxis and Xandr
Dec 10, 2023
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.]
37. Blagica Bottigliero – going into Orbitz, social and affiliates
Dec 10, 2023
Blagica (blah’-gee-tsa) is a two-decade deep web pioneer and currently Director of Affiliate Marketing at JEB Commerce.
Her journey began when, inspired by her fictional childhood idol Angela Bower of “Who’s the Boss?” she applied for and won a year-long bivouac in NYC with Ogilvy & Mather after majoring in advertising at Western Michigan University’s Haworth College of Business.
However, fate (in the form of a college friend named Holly) convinced her to redirect herself from Queens to Chicago and a futuristic digital media agency called Giant Step.
Co-founded in 1991 by Eric and Adam Heneghan in an apartment in Iowa City, Iowa, the agency originally focused on the sizzling-hot CD-ROM market. Moving to Chicago in 1994 and acquired by Leo Burnett two years later, Giant Step was a successful web creation shop by the time Blagica joined in the late ’90s. Clients included Motorola, Kellogg’s and Oldsmobile.
Blagica was a self-proclaimed “appliance queen” for two years, managing the transfer of Maytag product detail to a brand website. She recalls a reticent-but-brilliant president, Rishad Tobaccowala, whose thoughtful pronouncements foreshadowed his later career as Publicis’ oracle-in-chief and bestselling author.
Like many of her cohort, Blagica was a victim of the dot-com bomb, getting laid off in 2001. “I was devastated,” she tells Jill and Marty in this candid but up-beat look back. “But I’m proudly part of the dot-com crash.”
Blagica in red shirt at Overture HQ in Pasadena at the time of its $1.8B acquisition by Yahoo in 2003.
A contact at Giant Step tipped her off to a pre-launch startup named Orbitz, founded by five major airlines as an aggregated travel search and booking portal. She joined in 2001 as eMarketing Manager and was there through the company’s IPO two years later.
Orbitz is celebrated and/or reviled in advertising history for its prolific use of pop-under and pop-up ad units that were highly interactive, even addictive. One fan favorite featured a mini-golf game that in some versions yielded nothing but satisfaction for par and in others a $50 fare discount. Acolytes were known to visit ESPN.com simply to play the game, and some spent hours when they could presumably have been improving the world stalking the ads and devising diabolical strategems to win.
In this episode, Blagica describes the thrilling, adventurous and very stressful milieu that was Orbitz at that time, competing with Travelocity and Expedia in the cutthroat race for bookings. Overwork drove Blagica close to burnout, and she left in 2004 to regroup in France, returning on the Queen Mary to embrace more self-determination. One of her projects was the startup Gals’ Guide, a community chronicle of post-collegiate experience.
From 2009-10, Blagica was at Edelman in Chicago as VP Digital Strategy, where she worked with #PaleoAdTech co-host Jill Royce and served clients such as Quaker, Chevy and Kraft. Later she focused on social media and social business channels at Motorola Mobility (Google) and Target.
Returning just last year to the affiliate space at JEB Commerce, Blagica says, she found it “going gangbusters.” Data deprecation and the rising premium on first-party and lower-funnel attribution favor affiliate tactics, where a click leads to an outcome in a way that can be counted without cookies, fingerprinting or indirect techniques.
Blagica and Jill round out the episode by addressing the historic lack of women in ad tech (as reflected in the #PaleoAdTech ‘Episode List‘) and the opportunities to redress this imbalance through mentorship, opening opportunities, and a commitment to reject assumptions. Read more of Blagica’s POV on this important topic here.
Blagica’s proud mom next to one of Orbitz’s iconic images.
36. Ben Barokas – real-timing the supply side at AdMeld and Google
Dec 10, 2023
Ben Barokas is the Co-Founder and CEO at Sourcepoint Technologies, which provides data privacy tools for digital marketers. He launched the company in 2015 after three years as GM of the Global Marketplace Development team at Google, which acquired his previous company, the pioneering supply-side platform (SSP) AdMeld, for a reported $400 million in 2011.
Ben started his analytical journey as an agricultural economist, studying for a time in Hawaii before traveling to Germany and Israel, among other ports, along the way starting an internet cafe in Tel Aviv and a short-lived record label. Through a friend, he landed back near his and his wife’s hometown, in Dulles, Virginia at the post-merger AOL doing QA for ad campaigns and rotating through various roles, ending up heavily involved with video ad products. His AOL ad trafficking bootcamp lasted from 2000 to 2006, when he was Sr. Manager of Ad Products and left to join a couple startups.
One was JumpTV, an early streaming service based in Canada that retransmitted a lot of international sports content, in an era before the infrastructure existed to support an edifying streaming experience. But at JumpTV — as Ben tells Marty and Jill in this fast-moving episode — he was reunited with his technical twin from AOL, Brian Adams (not the singer). The two “sat around brainstorming” how to solve the “truly awful” publisher ad experience they felt first-hand at JumpTV.
The result was AdMeld, perhaps the first supply-side platform, launched in 2007 with a strong venture endorsement from Santo Politi at Spark Capital, and others. Loyal listeners of #PaleoAdTech will recognize 2007 as a major year for ad tech and the dawn of RTB, as Google acquired DoubleClick, Microsoft acquired aQuantive (and AdECN), Yahoo acquired Right Media (the first exchange) … and at least three SSP’s launched: AdMeld, Pubmatic and Rubicon Project.
At first, SSPs primarily helped publishers to manage relationships with ad networks and were not focused on real-time bidding (RTB). Fairly rapidly, as exchanges and DSPs also developed and agency trading desks appeared, they took on more programmatic decisioning responsibilities. And at first, RTB was non-guaranteed and remnant, but AdMeld was more interested in moving to premium, guaranteed and ultimately private marketplace (PMP) deals enabled with Deal ID, which it championed.
Admeld team at the time of the Google acquisition (2011). Ben is the intelligent-looking fellow in the dark jacket, front row.
Google acquired AdMeld in 2011; the two companies had a relationship already and Google wanted to build out its publisher offering beyond its ad server (then called DFP or DART for Publishers). At the time, Ben says, he and Brian Adams had to decide whether to raise $100 million and build their own ad server or go with the acquisition — and ultimately “we made the right choice,” he says.
The deal was scrutinized and ultimately passed by the Justice Department. General sentiment in the industry at the time was that Rubicon and Pubmatic were bigger businesses, but AdMeld had stronger technology.
Happy former AdMelders at a reunion not long ago. CEO Michael Barrett is the tall guy fourth from the right; Ben is in the front row 7th from the right, next to the woman with the soda.
Ben left Google to found Sourcepoint in 2015, sensing opportunity around ensuring customer data privacy for publishers but “frustrated” by Google’s development pace around consent management. He continues to lead the company.
35. Michael Katz – double-clicking on InterCLICK and Yahoo
Dec 10, 2023
Michael Katz is the co-founder and CEO of mParticle, a pioneering customer data platform (CDP) that launched in 2013. Before that he was founder and president of InterCLICK (hereafter due to caps-aversion: Interclick), a data-informed ad network which started business in the Boston metro region in 2005 and was sold to Yahoo in 2011 for a reported $270 million.
Mike spent an eventful (almost) year at Yahoo as VP of Optimization and Analytics in 2012 before founding mParticle with his brother Andrew, Jason Lynn and Dave Myers. He’s based in NYC.
As Mike tells Jill and Marty in this reflective recap, he had no real career vision when he launched out of college near the peak of the dot-com boom, joining an absurdly high-flying consulting firm called ZEFER (trend watch: all-caps) … which grew from nothing in 1996 to $100 million billings three years later … back to nothing by 2001. He then joined Accenture, which failed to excite his loyalty when a friend asked him to join an ad startup with a $25,000 check from his dad (who told him: “You’d better make this work, because I’m not writing you another one”).
The startup’s clever innovation was to sell anti-popup ad software downloads via popup ads, which were then ubiquitous and often alarming, like this one on the Fastclick ad network that looked like a legitimate warning message but wasn’t:
Pop-up ad on Dribbleglass.com via Fastclick ad network (circa 2002)
The team moved from pop-up blockers to arbitraging ads for their own account using ad networks and affiliate networks that were available at the time. They managed to net about $1 million in a year and began to think of themselves as a legitimate venture.
To accommodate a team of refugee Microsoft engineers, Mike and the team moved to Florida for a year and returned home with their own ad serving technology, allowing them to segue off Santa Barbara-based Fastclick’s ad serving tool, called AdServer, which competed with DoubleClick and Atlas.
Too small to interest PE and “laughed off of Sand Hill Road” by the VC’s, as Mike tells it, Interclick engaged in alternate financing of a later-trendy type, pulling off a proto-SPAC. At the time, the company was “about ten guys in an office in Chinatown where we were lucky to have toilet paper and paper towels.” Margins were tight, which served them well during the recession of 2008-09 and set up an uplisting to Nasdaq in 2009.
Interclick goes public in 2009 (Mike Katz is second from left)
At the time of the IPO, it was taken as a sign of life in the supposedly moribund ad network narrative, which was supposed to be sequeled by RTB and exchanges (“… still way too early,” Mike said at the time). The company issued a widely-circulated white paper on its “POV on Demand Side Platforms,” defending the ad networks’ relevance.
Growth was solid in the years 2009-2010. At the end of 2009, Comscore ranked Interclick as the #10 ad network by size, with a monthly audience of about 150 million uniques and a YoY growth rate of 9%. It was just behind 24/7 Real Media and Collective Network, and just ahead of Tribal Fusion and Audience Science (formerly Revenue Science).
If you’re curious – and I know you are – the Top 5 ad networks at the start of 2010 were AOL Advertising (187M), Yahoo! Network (181M), Google Ad Network (178M), ValueClick (171M) and Microsoft Media (165M).
Mike talks to Nicholas Carlson of Business Insider (Carlson later forgot to mention Interclick in his spicy book about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer)
By this point, Interclick’s differentiation from the pack was its focus on infusing data into audience definitions. Through its proprietary Open Segment Manager and Genome, it could overlay data-exchange info from partners such as BlueKai and eXelate to improve its own targeting. So for example, Interclick could synch its own 3P cookie IDs with BlueKai’s pool and add insights (e.g., “this high-value luxury shopper [Interclick] happens to be in the market for a Range Rover right now [BlueKai]”). The challenge was building a taxonomy to reconcile data sets from disparate providers – something Mike says they accomplished.
And then in 2011 after years when “nobody cared,” at least three suitors approached, including Epsilon and Yahoo. At the time, Yahoo’s ad tech was reportedly aging and it was using blunt persona-based targeting techniques. It had its Ad Network and was the target of takeover rumors itself: an era of turmoil.
Yahoo’s acquisition of Interclick wasn’t universally admired, but it made sense as an upgrade. But then commenced a comically-rotated cast of CEOs as Carol Bartz was replaced by Ross Levinsohn and a few others and finally — in 2012 — the ex-Googler Marissa Mayer.
Mike has frankly mixed feelings about his almost-year at Yahoo, and Mayer apparently did not support Levinsohn’s vision for Interclick/Genome as a consolidating principle for Yahoo’s network intelligence … and so it became another of the troubled Yahoo’s incomplete passes.
mParticle launched as an early CDP before the category really existed and has been true to its mission for almost a decade. As Mike concludes: “We felt like we never really got the full opportunity that we felt like we deserved [at Yahoo]. And so we were all motivated to build again. And the things that we’re doing at mParticle to this day are exactly what we set out to do back in 2013.”
34. Andrew Casale – from Casale Media to Index Exchange
Dec 10, 2023
Andrew is the President and CEO of Index Exchange, a supply-side platform based in Toronto. Index itself was born in 2015 out of Casale Media, an ad network that Casale founded as a teenager around the turn of the millennium with some help from his father, an electrical engineer. Andrew was VP of Strategy at Casale Media from 2001-15. (The official date of Casale Media’s founding was 2003.)
As a kid in the ’90s, Andrew became a mini-publisher, building and hosting websites with a particular focus on reality television. As he tells Marty in this wide-ranging look-back, he developed relationships with editors at platforms like Yahoo and got links for breaking stories, which drove traffic to his sites — traffic he was learning how to monetize via early ad networks, such as ValueClick and Advertising.com. Thus did he sort of “fall into” ad tech.
As a publisher — and Andrew admits his “ethos” was always with the sell side, — he felt the buying tools, UX and reporting could be improved, and so he developed a spec for a “real business” in the early ’00s, using seed money from his reality TV-driven mini-publishing-empire that amounted to “believe it or not … the millions of dollars.”
Carving out some space in an office belonging to his father’s other business, consulting for e-commerce sites, Casale Media hired six engineers, built a “primitive ad server” and worked hard on a more publisher-friendly buying platform.
It was a slog from the outset, Andrew admits: “If you build it, they won’t come.” Despite what he felt was a compelling product and a penchant for openness in an increasingly mysterious business, he had to work on a network of indie pubs to take a chance and “add a button on their website” for the Casale Media network.
With the rise of agency trading desks, such as Xaxis and Vivaki’s Audience on Demand, Andrew recognized that ad networks would have to change. Inspired by some blunt feedback from AoD’s Kurt Unkel, he connected with Invite Media and got to work on a proto-OpenRTB spec, building a new Supply-Side Platform (SSP) to serve the sell side only, where he started.
Andrew Casale entertaining the Index Exchange troops
Over a delicate — and “very tricky,” he admits — period of years, Casale Media’s ad network was retired and the Index Exchange SSP was born. Andrew became its majordomo in 2015 and has remained in charge since, during a period of prolific change in the industry.
In recent years, Index Exchange has been instrumental in championing header bidding and post-cookie standards such as UID2.0. It remains a business champion for usability, transparency and the publishers’ yield interests.
“You know what’s funny?” Andrew reflects at the end of the conversation. “We started the company before the cookie was used in advertising, and we will [be in] a future with no cookie involved in our platform. We [will] outlive the cookie.”
Andrew and The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green in 2018, discussing UID
33. Nancy Marzouk – taking a DrivePM through L90 and [x+1]
Dec 10, 2023
Nancy is the CEO and founder of MediaWallah, an identity resolution provider she started in 2013 as a way to “give back” to an industry that has been generous to her.
Nancy has been present at a number of seminal moments in the history of ad tech, including: L90’s acquisition of DoubleClick and the formation of MaxWorldwide; the latter’s acquisition into Excite, AskJeeves, and Barry Diller‘s Interactive Corporation (IAC); the folding into Microsoft’s grand ad ambitions of Seattle-based aQuantive’s DrivePM, perhaps the first agency trading desk and an innovator in retargeting; and the development of [x+1]’s pioneering DSP capability, later echoed by [x+1] founder Joe Zawadzki‘s own MediaMath.
NYC-based Nancy started as an artist and environmentalist and landed at a family-owned ad network called AdVenture Network, an early proponent of open plan office space for sellers. She was introduced to L90 when the network approached them to use their ad serving technology, and Nancy’s joined the hard-driving sales team at L90. It was a public company and resembled DoubleClick, with an ad server called AdMonitor, and both premium and secondary ad networks.
In 2001, DoubleClick acquired the tech assets of L90, including its ad server. (That same year, DoubleClick acquired email marketers MessageMedia and Flonetworks; media-planning tech from Adgile Interactive; and was in ultimately failed talks to acquire Real Media.) Shortly thereafter, L90 finalized the acquisition of DoubleClick’s performance media network, called Sonar, for about $10 million in cash and stock. L90 changed its name to MaxWorldwide.
Nancy lived through a series of changes in the dot-com rebuilding era, as MaxWorldwide was acquired by Excite, AskJeeves and ultimately Interactive Corp (IAC) in 2005.
IAC was “a whole different ball game,” Nancy tells Marty in this wide-ranging episode. “I was in the digital realm … for most of my career at that point, and when I got to IAC, they had a very kind of old-school publishing mentality. They ran their websites like they were publications, not digital websites.”
After leaving IAC, Nancy joined DrivePM, a division of aQuantive, the Seattle digital pioneer that also housed the ad server Atlas and the Avenue A agency. DrivePM was “probably the first trading desk for an agency,” she says, and developed technology, “specifically retargeting,” building a form of premium retargeting that included behavioral profiling to identity higher-value browsers. Reach was possible through geo-based I.P. lookups for demographic clusters. While not as early as DoubleClick’s ‘boomerang’ solution, DrivePM was perhaps more successful.
In a famous debacle, Microsoft acquired aQuantive (including DrivePM and Atlas) for $6 billion and later wrote it down.
Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson (left) with aQuantive co-founder Nick Nanauer and CEO Brian McAndrews in 2007
From 2007-09, Nancy worked at [x+1], where Joe Zawadzki described a vision for a DSP that sounded very much like MediaMath, which he later founded. She then joined IgnitionOne/NetMining and TagMan, acquired by Ensighten in 2012, the year before she founded MediaWallah.
Asked if she’s sanguine about the industry’s future, Nancy says: “I think there’s going to be some kind of … I don’t want to say the bubble’s going to burst, but there’s going to be something that’s going to happen, and the result of that will be a really good thing.”
32. John Ferber – putting the dot-com in Advertising.com
Dec 10, 2023
John was the co-founder with his brother Scott Ferber of the very well-known Baltimore-based ad network eventually called Advertising.com, which began in 1998 and sold to AOL for a reported $435 million (plus about $60 million cash) in the summer of 2004. The brothers stayed at AOL for two years, John working as a Chief of Product. Subsequently, Scott went on to found Videology and John is the Chairman of Bidtellect, a DSP focused on native formats and based in his adopted home state of Florida.
At the time of its acquisition in 2004, Advertising.com had about 300 employees operating in the U.S. and Europe and had grown 80% in revenues to $132 million in 2003. AOL claimed it was the largest ad network globally, with about 110 million uniques per month, equivalent to every household in the U.S.
Its business model was simple, if difficult to execute. Advertising.com paid publishers for their ad inventory on a per-impression (CPM) basis, guaranteeing a certain negotiated (often renegotiated) rate. However, it sold advertising based on performance goals, usually clicks (CPC). The network’s profit came from its ability to pay less for (CPM x 1000) x CTR (we might call this eCPC) than it charged in CPC. This mechanism is known as arbitrage.
John Ferber admits that his hard-working father, a tax attorney in Baltimore, observed early on that John would “probably never be able to work for anybody.” His first venture was a shareware video game that featured hoverboard racing, and his attempts to sell ads in the game led only to a question: A casino owner John pitched told him, “I could give two shits about advertising in your game, but that software you have to track and measure the ads is interesting to me.” They agreed on $50K as a price, and John went on to sell about $1 million worth of this software “and spent it all.”
At a prompt from dad, older brother Scott — who’d majored in systems engineering — quit a promising career-track job at a soon-to-explode Capitol One and joined John in a new venture selling ads on the internet.
Their company was originally called Teknosurf and launched in late 1998. From the beginning, its goal was not to sell ad software but rather buy and sell media, with superior targeting and measurement as its intermediary value. Key competitors were Massachusetts-based Engage and DoubleClick, which signed large publishers up to “exclusive” contracts, John says, leaving them with unsold inventory. By necessity, the brothers focused on the lower 90% of pubs at first.
Ferber brothers John, Scott and Larry riding the waves
As John tells Marty and Jill in this fast-moving episode, the dot-com crash of 2001 hit the renamed Advertising.com very hard, inspiring layoffs and removing 60-80% of revenue as their customers disappeared or (like #1 customer Orbitz) cut back their ad spend after 9/11. John says “the worst day of my professional life” was January 5, 2001, when he woke up to find his pensive face on the cover of the Baltimore Sun Business Section over a grim headine:
Just one year earlier, Advertising.com had been named the fastest-growing ad services company in the U.S. by Dunn and Bradstreet, raised more than $50 million, and seen revenues grow from $11 million in 1999 to $45 million in 2000. Scott was quoted as saying the network served about 1 billion ads per month on 5,000 sites.
But slowly, Advertising.com clawed back, relying more on software than its ad rep facility. Ferber claims to have pioneered the scaled use of retargeting, inspired by an L.L. Bean case study, while admitting DoubleClick’s ‘Boomerang‘ may have popped up first. (DoubleClick’s Kevin O’Connor told Jill and me that ‘Boomerang’ was not a profitable product in his day.) The network’s secret to success was its reach; by the time Ferber left, in 2006, he believes it reached an average 90% of the internet population 20X per day.
Long tail no more — the company started to bounce back after the crash (as shown in this poster, found in Ferber’s parents’ garage no long ago)
AOL already owned some of the company via an investment, and once the Dulles-based behemoth had cleared up its own merger-related tsuris, it sent a team of execs to Baltimore to take a closer look at Advertising.com, which was planning to go public. AOL preempted the IPO, offering cash that came out to almost $500 million, and keeping the Ferbers on board for a couple of years to manage the transition.
John Ferber with some random celebrity who apparently is quite well-known in Germany
John later gained some notice for a philanthropic venture called MicroGiving, which got the attention of ABC producers and led to an appearance on the reality TV program Secret Millionaire, which aired on March 27, 2011. In it, John lived on “welfare-level wages for a week in downtown Los Angeles.”
(There’s a lucid and detailed account of John’s career and the founding of MicroGiving and later Bidtellect in this article by Ron Jackson in DN Journal.)
Asked whether he’d ever work with his brother again, John pauses a moment and then wonders aloud whether he wants to tempt fate: “You hear about how family businesses can actually end horribly.” Having fought only twice during their eight years running Advertising.com, the Ferber brothers remain “best friends.”
31. Steve Latham – taking an Encore at Flashtalking
Dec 10, 2023
Steve was the Global Head of Analytics at Flashtalking, which acquired his advanced ad measurement company Encore Media Metrics in 2016. Then last July 2021, Mediaocean acquired Flashtalking for a reported $500 million, and Steve decided to “pull the pin” on his army-of-one and leave ad tech after a 20-year tour of duty.
Today he devotes himself to DonateStock, a non-profit he founded that helps people donate appreciated equity to worthy causes while reaping some tax advantages. Steve lives and donates in the great state of Texas.
An affable and energetic fixture at ICOM and AdExchanger conferences over the years, Steve has long been a vocal advocate for the non-Google ad stack. Flashtalking itself started as a personalization platform in the U.K., and when John Nardone joined as CEO in 2015 after running the DMP [x+1] (sold to Rocket Fuel), he began to refashion the company as a Google alternative complete with self-contained ad server and dynamic creative products. Steve’s Encore added a key analytical component to the product story.
In this candid chat, Steve tells Marty and Jill that Google and Apple — while both being of course “great companies” — are “a menace to the free ad-supported internet.” And he recounts the progressive moves both players have made over the past 8-10 years to remove identifiers, data sources, search- and display-results data and more from the independent ad measurement industry, thereby advantaging their own businesses.
“What I don’t miss,” admits the newly-retired Latham, “is every time Google made an announcement or Apple made an announcement about ITP or ATT it was like a brush fire — and it’s like, okay, drop everything … put together a POV, try to calm everybody down.”
Steve’s ad-tech journey began in 2002 when he founded a digital media agency in Texas called Spur Interactive. There he learned on the job the skills needed to execute SEO and SEM strategies for clients like FedEx Kinkos, and how to measure the impact of ads. The 2008-09 recession caused Steve to revise his ambitions as Spur’s team shrank from 30 to 6 people, and he ultimately sold the Houston-based agency for an undisclosed sum and began to pitch an idea for a measurement platform.
Relocating to a WeWork space on 28th and Park Avenue in Manhattan, Steve founded Encore Media Metrics, a multi-touch attribution solution with an algorithm based on ensemble (combined) machine-learning models. Encore used a non-Google ad server named TruEffect (now apparently defunct, but once well-known), which had a patent on first-party ad serving.
TruEffect used redirects or installation behind the customer’s firewall to serve ads from the brand’s domain (actually a subdomain like ads.brand.com), enabling a first-party cookie that was more persistent and available than third-party approaches. Encore could then use this impression data and conversion events to build a picture of user-level paths for its attribution models.
MediaOcean’s acquisition of Flashtalking helped build out the former company’s programmatic execution story beyond its core media-buying platform dominance, and it also gave Steve the runway he needed to trot off into the Texan horizon to drive DonateStock. That non-profit company was inspired by a bad experience Steve had about ten years ago trying to — well — donate stock to an alma mater, and its mission is to take some of the painful manual steps out of equity donations, encouraging more people like himself who have made money on appreciating equities to give back, and save on taxes.
“It’s win-win,” he says. You can learn more about DonateStock here.
30. Dave Zinman – on the first ad server, BlueLithium and beyond
Dec 10, 2023
Dave co-founded a company while at Stanford Business School that built the first demand-side ad server, and he later went on to develop products at pioneering powerhouses such as BlueLithium, Yahoo, InfoLinks and Drawbridge.
Since March, 2020, Dave has been Global President of Deputy, a workforce management software company based in the Bay Area he calls home.
From his early encounters with Jerry Yang and David Filo on the Stanford campus, Poppe Tyson and later the Right Media Team and Yahoo’s byzantine cohorts — through helping previous #PaleoAdTech guest Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan navigate the acquisition of Drawbridge into Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Dave has enjoyed a career that quite literally apes the arc of ad tech history.
Marty and Jill realized early in this rollicking ride that we’d only have time to cover a part of this well-placed human’s excellent adventure.
Dave co-founded a company called FocaLink Media Services in 1995 with his Stanford Business School classmate and friend Jason Strober. Based on a business plan written while they were students, the company narrowed in on providing a solution for advertisers to automate their own access to ad inventory. The company’s proto-ad server was intended to serve the demand side, making it different in kind (and ultimately, in success) from DoubleClick, NetGravity and Real Media‘s Open AdStream, which focused on the supply side aka publishers.
FocaLink combined with a publisher-focused platform called ClickOver in 1997 and changed its name to AdKnowledge. The Wikipedia entry on “Ad Serving” does credit FocaLink Media Services with launching the first “central ad server” (presumably: proto-SaaS or non-on premise) on July 17, 1995. This was just months before DoubleClick (also proto-SaaS) and NetGravity (on-prem) launched, so its primacy isn’t dramatic.
Mango, the tropically-named motherboard for FocaLink’s proto-ad server
More important was the company’s early commitment to advertisers, with initial adopters ranging from CondomCountry.com to GM’s Saturn division. The company was acquired by Engage, a CMGI Company, for $193 million in 1999, right before the dot-com bust. CMGI itself was a dot-com sorcerer with a peak market cap of $41 billion and a portfolio of innovative Web 1.0 unicorns including AltaVista, Lycos, GeoCities and YesMail.
The dot-com implosion rewrote the histories of CMGI, Engage and ultimately AdKnowledge, which continues to this day, independently, still focused on demand-side technology.
In 2006, Dave joined the team as SVP/GM at BlueLithium, a high-flying ad network. BlueLithium was founded by a controversial serial entrepreneur and had an impressive growth streak starting in 2003, bringing together multiple publishers to provide efficient, scaled buys for larger advertisers. One of Dave’s contributions was to tilt the network toward retargeting, starting with a pixel on T-Mobile’s site and leading to a first-look deal with MySpace to cherry-pick impressions for retargeting. Only Ad.com was better at this kind of tactic, says Dave.
This successful behavioral pivot inspired Yahoo’s decision to acquire BlueLithium for $300 million in 2007, the same year it appended Right Media. Dave stayed on a Yahoo, a relatively happy recruit (unlike the “big personality” NYC-based Right Media crew), and was GM of Yahoo’s display ad business in North America until 2011.
Subsequent perches included COO of RhythmOne (which acquired RadiumOne), and CEO of InfoLinks, which is a global monetization marketplace for smaller publications, concentrating on contextual solutions.
Before joining Deputy, Dave was COO of Drawbridge from 2018 to 2020, through its acquisition by Microsoft. He credits Drawbridge’s transition from a mobile ad network to a pure-play software company with inspiring his own latest venture outside the ad tech industry.
He says: “Once you start to see the impact that you can have, if you’re a pure software company, it’s pretty compelling.”
29. Bill Urschel – the captain of Ad:ECN, the first exchange
Dec 10, 2023
Bill Urshel was CEO and co-founder of Ad:ECN, an early ad exchange started in 2003 and acquired by Microsoft on the same day it acquired aQuantive, Razorfish and Atlas in 2007. Bill’s partner and third sales hire at Ad:ECN was none other than Jeff Green, then a recruit from the tiny L.A. agency 411 Interactive and now of course CEO of The Trade Desk.
Currently, Bill is President & Captain of Alaska Endeavour, a non-profit research vessel and organization that promotes scientific exploration, research and conservation. He and his wife live full-time on the 75-foot boat, which used to be a prisoner transport for Alcatraz.
As Bill tells Marty and Jill in this dramatic episode, the Ad:ECN story began in a supermarket line in Santa Barbara in 2002. He had been involved in a few software companies and was looking for his next idea when he ran into an acquaintance, a prolific if eccentric engineer named Denny Bollay. Bollay founded a company called ExperTelligence in the 1980s and had three concepts to pitch, one of which was a proto-online auction system he was calling the Advertising Commerce Network.
The following year, 2003, Urschel and Bollay formed ExperClick from the existing and not-quite-working assets of the auction system, with Urschel as CEO and Bollay as CTO. “It was a feverish time in ad tech,” admits Urshel, when start-ups could “smell the money” despite raw memories of the recent dot-com bust. Even in a sunny southern backwater such as Greater Santa Barbara, California, a clique of click-crazy ventures including ExperClick, ValueClick and later Commission Junction really clicked.
ExperClick company photo from 2005 – Bill Urschel is in the back row on the end in the ocean-blue shirt standing next to Denison Bollay; Jeff Green is on the front row in (yes) green.
The original idea was simply to automate the manual process of buying and selling inventory on ad networks. At least, it sounds simple. But from all accounts, Bollay’s original code and his working style were not productive, and he ended up leaving the company on unfriendly and legally-mediated terms.
But joy came in the morning: one of ExperClick’s sales execs recommended a clean-cut young man name named Jeff Green who was buying media at a small L.A.-based agency called 411 Interactive, and Jeff was hired as a technical sales lead. In a development that will surprise none of #PaleoAdTech’s loyal listeners, Green turned out to be a “product driver,” visionary, nexus of mojo and force for good vibrations in the halls of ExperClick, which was renamed Ad:ECN.
The “ECN” stands for Electronic Communication Network, borrowed from financial markets such as Archipelago. It is not the same thing as an “exchange,” but we’ll table that debate for another episode.
The stock market analogy occurred to others at the time, including NYC-based Right Media and a brain trust within Microsoft to the north. (The debate whether Ad:ECN or Right Media built the first true ad exchange hinges on semantics, with Urschel doubting RM’s claim.) More apposite to the Ad:ECN story, an engineer named Brian Burdick and others on Microsoft’s adCenter team wrote a widely-circulated white paper proposing an Open Listings Exchange (OLX), which ran up against Bill Gates’ reluctance to commit the requested 1,000 engineers.
(A very vivid account of Microsoft’s misadventures in digital advertising was written by Eric Picard for AdExchanger in 2015; it touches on Ad:ECN, describing it as a fall-back after a failed bid for DoubleClick, and a product that “didn’t quite meet the technical need we envisioned for OLX” in 2007.)
Urschel and Green found some success with their auction model for ad networks in the U.K., a smaller market, and eventually signed up 39 ad networks as members of its ad network-only exchange, charging a flat fee. It was based in Carpinteria, a lavishly-appointed suburb south of Santa Barbara.
And then the sharknado poised, as Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, Yahoo acquired Right Media … and Microsoft acquired Ad:ECN for a rumored $50-75 million, a deal that was comically overshadowed by Microsoft’s simultaneous acquisition of aQuantive (including the Atlas ad server and Razorfish agency) for over $6 billion. (“We kind of felt like we were a bauble, in a way.”)
As Urschel describes the deal, it unfolded rapidly. He’d pitched Microsoft on joining the exchange in 2006. The following year, he and Green were at an AdTech conference and the aforementioned Eric Picard and Jed Nahum dropped by Ad:ECN’s booth and “asked some kind of interesting questions.” Drinks ensued and “we had a statement of interest within a few days.”
A well-appointed Bill Urschel and Jeff Green manning the AdECN booth at AdTech in 2007 – a fateful day
Urschel moved to Seattle and Green stayed in Southern California. Both posted on staff for two contracted years, but Urschel’s experience at Microsoft was “both disappointing and charming.” As a peewee player in the internal celebrity deathmatch among aQuantive, Microsoft’s byzantine culture and rapidly-refocusing ad tech vision, Ad:ECN never really got a chance to thrive. It was shut down in favor of AppNexus in 2011. A year later, Microsoft wrote down its $6.2 billion aQuantive investment, leaving little to show for its great buying spree of four years before.
<sniff sniff>
After leaving Microsoft, Urschel developed two companies with a similar thesis: to map the “topology of the internet” based on topics and relevance, and to make a quality score (based on search-like inbound links) available to ad networks – and eventually advertisers and publishers – to improve their targeting and bidding intelligence. The first was called A6 and the second Tersai. Both eventually shut down via asset sales, and Captain Bill Urschel decided to devote himself full-time to his lifelong passion for hydrated natural history.
Urschel’s memories of ad tech are definitely mixed. During his A6/Tersai saga, he says, his data scientists’ findings were sobering: fully 92% of the advertising inventory they discovered was “worthless and not worth bidding on,” meaning only 8% had value. Fraud and junk pervaded the space, and the system itself relied on participants’ willful blindness and self-inflicted amnesia. (Echoes of Facebook’s widely-reported observation on shutting down its open web test on Atlas – yes, the same Atlas, acquired from Microsoft in 2013, along with Microsoft’s David Jakubowski – that they were “amazed by the volume of valueless inventory.”) It was and is a business with some existential caveats.
On the other hand, Alaska Endeavour regularly hosts expeditions staffed with non-programmatic worthies such as archeologists, paleontologists, biologists, glaciologists, natural historians and smart civilians, improving the world one fossil and finding at a time. If you’re interested in supporting the vessel and its expeditions, you can subscribe to the Captain’s Log newsletter and become a member here. Ahoy.
28. Bill Wise – accounting for the rise of Right Media and more
Dec 10, 2023
Bill Wise is co-founder and CEO of Mediaocean — and a man who was at ground zero for pretty much the entire arc of ad tech.
His picaresque journey begins in the mid-90’s in NYC when he left accounting to work for three days as an executive recruiter for accountants, succeeding only in placing himself in a job as a financial analyst at a start-up named DoubleClick. (For more on this Brobdingnagian player, check out our interviews with co-founder Kevin O’Connor, his sidekick-successor Kevin Ryan and my own thankfully brief exposition of the original DoubleClick ad serving patent. And for an oral history of the company assembled by Marty on the occasion of Google’s retiring the DoubleClick name in 2018, check this out.)
At DoubleClick, Wise found himself riding the dot-com boom into a world of “work hard, play hard” where “everyone was young … everyone was in ‘reach’ jobs” and crazy parties [censored] were every bit as bacchanalian as we’ve heard. It was also a technically innovative culture. “I’ve often said that every successful business today in internet advertising started as an idea at DoubleClick that failed,” as Wise tells Marty in this epic conversation.
Wise cycled through investor relations (during the 1998 IPO), operations and sales, ending up having his Harvard Business School application “ripped up in my face” by a bemused Kevin Ryan, who attached him to help launch a new performance media division of DoubleClick, called Sonar.
Sonar was consciously competitive with DoubleClick Media, run by Wenda Millard, but the twentysomething staff had no atavistic attachment to mainline media. Wise and his colleague Andy Jacobson negotiated 50-50 terms with performance publishers and liked to hire, not seasoned sellers, but “stockbrokers … and people who sold gym memberships.”
Among the latter class was a young man named Mike “Wally” Walrath whom none other than Katie Couric would later describe as “superhot.” Within a year of joining, Walrath made 40% of the revenue for the new division; he’d figured out a way to promote his non-brand clients by exploiting a flaw/feature in the ad serving algorithm. (For more on this so-called Satisfaction Index, check out this episode.)
Wise recalls: “The funny part is, you know, Walrath works in mysterious ways. People were pulling their hair out. Like, how is this company serving over Proctor and Gamble? Right? He would have a direct marketer, preempting General Motors. It was hysterical.”
Sonar eventually merged with DoubleClick’s other media business, with Wise leading, and he and Walrath pitched a vision for an ambitious ad exchange that has some conceptual sympathy with Jeff Green’s first business, AdECN (sold to Microsoft in 2007). Wise and Walrath were going to call it AdNASDAQ, but it didn’t happen.
Yet. The dot-com bomb dropped, DoubleClick got out of media and turned to subscription software, selling Sonar to a company called L90; the combined entity was renamed MaxWorldwide and Wise was put in charge. Walrath started a version of the AdNASDAQ concept, fixing the feature/flaw he’d exploited in the DoubleClick ad server, and called it Right Media.
L90’s Keith “Kappy” Kaplan, Avenue A’s Maggie Finch (nee Boyer) and Bill Wise at a MaxOnline holiday party in 2003, shortly after L90 acquired DoubleClick’s media business.
Wise meanwhile found himself on some adventures in search — at Did It and Ask — before reuniting with his former dream weavers at Right Media, shortly before it was acquired by Yahoo! for a so-right $850 million, including the value of previous investments.
Unlike some of his colleagues, Wise stayed at Yahoo! for three years, leading its ad tech efforts from NYC. Although not overawed by Yahoo! — which was trying to redefine itself under CEOs Terry Semel and then Carol Bartz, — Wise did manage to coin the term Demand Side Platform (DSP) during his team’s pioneering work with P&G’s notorious multi-year programmatic in-housing ‘Project Hawkeye.’
Around 2010, Wise began to realize that TV was a much bigger opportunity than digital display and found his way to MediaBank, a merger with market-leader Donovan Data Systems, and the de facto agency standard ad buying platform that is Mediaocean.
Eternally boyish and gregarious, Wise speaks candidly to Marty about the reasons he majored in accounting in the wake of the late-80s recession; why he didn’t like cold calling; what the DoubleClick parties were like; why he was reluctant to join Walrath at Right Media in the beginning; and what he considers to be “the best decision I ever made.”
And Happy Holidays to all of you from both of us at Paleo Ad Tech! May your days be merry and bright. xo, Marty & Jill
27. Rex Briggs – the theory of Marketing Evolution
Dec 10, 2023
Rex founded Marketing Evolution in 2000 to build on the cross-channel measurement and audience insight techniques he started to develop as a young researcher at Yankelovich and Wired in the mid-1990s.
You can find a meticulous biography of Rex right here and his outfit Marketing Evolution continues to add value here. These days Rex is a speaker, author, visionary pundit and very entertaining podcast guest, as Marty and Jill discover this week.
He has been working in and around the area of ad effectiveness and impact measurement since the early days of digital. He was Wired’s first chief researcher, starting in 1995, at a time when staffers sat on desks made out of hollow-core doors and filing cabinets in an effort “to seem more start-up-y.”
Wired Offices in San Francisco in Early 1996
Rex applied experiments on the HotWired home page. This version from late 1995 is an example of the type of page benefitting from his neural network-driven optimization approach. (For a fascinating look back at HotWired’s history and design evolution, check out this article. There was apparently “nasty fighting” over the idea of putting ads on the home page; in a magazine paradigm, covers were ad-free.)
Rex became known for pioneering an ad effectiveness testing methodology that used test-and-control design and intercept surveys to determine the impact of particular ad campaigns on self-reported purchase intent. The method used different servers and the substitution of public-service ads (PSAs) in a set-up that later became a standard way to measure the impact of digital ads. It was widely noticed and adopted by industry bodies such as the IAB. (You can find the full study here.)
Rex founded Marketing Evolution in 2000 as an alternative to joining the research team at Amazon — a decision made, he says, mostly for reasons of meteorology (rain) and matrimonial harmony. His vision was to develop a platform that could combine online and offline impression and sales data in a unified framework, to determine the ultimate drivers of ad effectiveness and consumer motivation. It was an ambitious vision that remains active today.
In this reflective conversation, Rex tells Jill and Marty why the dot-com boom “wasn’t as boom-y” for him as for others; why Wired was such a great place to work; what he didn’t foresee about the dangers of clustering algorithms; and what we can all learn from the development of (living) trees.
26. Manu Mathew – raising the Visual IQ of ads
Dec 10, 2023
Manu was the co-founder and CEO of Visual IQ from 2006 to its sale to Nielsen in 2017. Visual IQ was a pioneer and dominant player in the space of multi-touch attribution (MTA), which is the application of rules and complex models to impression-level data to determine which elements of a campaign contributed how much to the desired outcome.
In a typical scenario, a programmatic advertiser would give a platform such as Visual IQ access to its ad server log files, and the platform would ingest data around each impression (publisher, size, version, time) as well as data about the desired goals or KPIs (sale, signup, click). This data was combined at the browser-level using third-party cookies as the unifying ID, and the model would estimate the impact of the different ad placements on the outcome. Ideally, the advertiser could then use this analysis to shift tactics, campaigns, publishers and timing to improve their return on ad spend (ROAS).
Needless to say, cookie deprecation and tools like ad blockers change the value of any MTA platform today, but Visual IQ was undoubtedly an innovator. Founded by Manu and Anto Chittilappilly in Anto’s kitchen in the Greater Boston area, Visual IQ was inspired by Manu’s earlier work at the digital agency Carat, which acquired his database marketing startup Vizium in 2002.
Spurred by a memory of using an Oracle BI tool to slice data from his earlier career as a technology consultant, Manu decided to build a better data visualization tool for marketers — until, he tells Marty and Jill in this high-IQ episode, he realized that “nobody wants to pay for that” … and moved on to providing higher-order computational “insights.”
“Right from the beginning,” he says, “we went for the hard problem.” Namely: Using machine-learning to determine the fractional attribution for different elements of the campaign. And Manu admits he was surprised to learn that “marketers want control over how they interpret their data,” so Visual IQ added some less accurate but easier-to-explain rules-based levers “about five or six years” after launch.
Those of us on the circuit in the mid-2010’s remember what a darling MTA was in its moment, and the frenzy culminated in the one-two acquisitions of competitors Adometry and Convertro (by Google and AOL, respectively) on the exact same day of May 6, 2014. Told about the sale(s) at a conference, Manu admits he thought: “This should make for an interesting board meeting.”
Perennially courted over the years by marketing clouds and others, Visual IQ finally agreed to be acquired by Nielsen in 2017 and Manu left in 2018. Today he heads up Ad-Lib.io, which provides tools for creatives and business teams to collaborate on assets for dynamic campaigns. He still lives and works in Boston.
25. Jeremy Ring – We Were Yahoo!
Dec 10, 2023
Jeremy Ring was the first on-staff salesperson at Yahoo!, joining just before the IPO in 1996. He entered the Yahoo! rocket very early and rode it through its rise and rise until shortly after the dot-com bust of 2001, when he decided “it was time” and disembarked. Subsequently, Ring got into politics in the State of Florida as a State Senator, and he now runs the GTM Group consulting firm.
Jeremy is the second in our (so far) two-part interview series featuring early, early Yahoo! employees and FoJ’s (Friends of co-founder Jerry Yang) who lived to write a book about it. The first was Episode #23’s David Shen, author of Takeover. Jeremy’s own book is called We Were Yahoo!, published in 2018 and spanning the period of Ring’s Yahoo pre-history to a recap of the company’s management steps and missteps since he left.
Starting as a media planner in New York City in the early 1990’s, Jeremy actually replaced our previous guest Steven Comfort at the pioneering agency Messner Vetere and placed some of the first online banner ads for clients such as MCI. He began to work with an agency called Interactive Media Sales, which won the Yahoo! media sales RFP before it had its own sales team.
Eventually, as Jeremy tells Marty in this far-ranging chat [Jill is out this week], Yahoo! decided to hire him as their first sales staffer and his Hoboken apartment became the company’s East Coast HQ around the time of the IPO. Jeremy worked closely with co-founder Jerry Yang – whom he describes as “beloved” and someone who “remembered your name” – and co-founder David Filo, certainly less exuberant externally but “internally … very active.”
The dot-com boom times were fun, of course – “You give a bunch of people in their twenties a lot of money and they’re going to find a way to have fun,” he says – but “we were not ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’ … It was not a sex and drugs and rock and roll kind of place.” Despite the occasional trashed hotel room and high-stakes poker game.
As he describes it, Jeremy saw the dot-com crash coming around the time that many of his customers, preponderantly venture-backed dot-com companies, stopped paying their bills. He sold Yahoo! stock, left after the crash and never looked back.
Yahoo! had opportunities to acquire rising stars like Google and Facebook, at various points, but Jeremy thinks its biggest preventable mistake during his tenure was its elevation of product over sales, minutely respecting an uncontextual reverence for search-as-editorial that made it much too late to see the business opportunity in paid search and CPC ads.
And what are his feelings looking back at his Yahoo! experience during those extraordinary years? “Mixed,” Jeremy admits. “But Yahoo! definitely changed the world.”
24. Tolman Geffs – banking on ad tech and media
Dec 10, 2023
Tolman is a long-time investment banker and advisor to luminaries in the ad tech, media and data-driven enterprise world. He’s the man who sold the mighty AdExchanger to Access Intelligence in 2017, almost 10 years after its founding, and he’s been an observer-participant in the #PaleoAdTech universe for more than twenty years.
As he tells Marty [Jill is off this week] in this wide-ranging and perceptive chat, Tolman has been around long enough to see a number of market cycles, and “we never learn,” he says. “We’re approaching another one now,” he warns, but “sit tight … the universe doesn’t end.” Long-term gains to productivity based on connectivity and data-driven methods are adding meaningful, sustained value into the economy.
Tolman is currently Executive Partner at BrightTower, an investment banking advisory firm, and before that he spent 16 years at the Jordan Edmiston Group (JEGI), also an independent i-bank.
While he was at JEGI — as attendees at IAB and AdExchanger and other conferences will no doubt remember, — Tolman was involved in a number of ad tech, mar-tech and related deals such as Acerno’s sale to Akamai and i-Behavior’s sale to KBM Group.
Starting life as an aspiring physicist, Tolman ended up in NYC at now-defunct Lehman Brothers as an M&A analyst. After a tour of duty through the benighted corridors of McKinsey, he ended up in the media business, eventually as CEO of a company called Internet Broadcasting Systems, which built the biggest network of local TV news sites in the U.S.
At IBS from 1999 to 2004, Tolman experienced the range of boom-to-bust emotions and found himself looking for a transitionary perch by networking with the legendary founding partner of JEGI, Wilma Jordan. Joining the bank in 2004, he saw the rise of programmatic platforms, the twilight of “100% markup, 50% margin” ad networks, and the transformation of the ad tech industry from “a teen dance party” to a “mature, more reliable” set of processes, practitioners and rules.
In this episode, Tolman explains why most ad networks ultimately failed; why the “programmatic gold rush” never quite happened; what’s so special about the Trade Desk and Jeff Green; and why the IAB’s long-time CEO Randall Rothenberg deserves a lot of credit for clarifying the rules of the game.
If you’d like to see Tolman himself in action back in 2010 at an IAB conference, check out this YouTube video:
23. David Shen – inside Yahoo!’s ad revolution
Dec 10, 2023
David Shen was employee #17 at Yahoo!, hired by founders and Stanford classmates Jerry Yang and David Filo to shepherd the user experience — and eventually the ad experience — for the pioneering and absurdly successful directory and portal to the nascent internet.
David is also the author of the best behind-the-scenes look at Yahoo!’s ad evolution, a book called “Takeover: The Inside Story of the Yahoo Ad Revolution” (available here).
A digital ad historian after our own heart, David has also collected and archived a range of important Yahoo! creative executions from the 1990’s and early 2000’s that can be enjoyed on YouTube:
David designed the Yahoo! logo and was there when the first grainy banner-ad image was pushed live in 1995 to the chorus of lead engineer Donald Lobo sighing, “We sold out.”
“I think there was a pervading notion or hatred … of advertising,” David tells Marty and Jill in this reflective episode. “In fact, there were a lot of people who had this dream: Could we build a Yahoo! without any advertising?”
Intriguingly, after a troubled experiment with the ad server NetGravity (later acquired by DoubleClick), Yahoo! chose to develop and use its own in-house technology for ad serving, insertion, scheduling, accounting and measurement. (For a reason David reveals in the interview, these tools were all named after Camelot-Era notables.)
Yahoo! was a bellwether of the dot-com boom, going public on very little revenue in 1996 — only two years after it was founded in a famously messy trailer on the Stanford campus, — and rising up and up to a peak valuation of $128 billion in 2000, more than Ford and Chrysler combined.
That same year, Yahoo! was the most popular website in the world. Soon, things changed.
“You think that something like that’s always doing to last, right?” says David. “Well, you know what? The music stops.”
At its nadir, Yahoo!’s stock was priced at $8 for a valuation of $5 billion, 96% below its peak. It entered a period of rotating CEOs and halting M&A that continues to this day.
After the dot-com bust, Yahoo!’s management became more amenable to ad formats that would have been deemed too intrusive pre-2001. Thus the notorious Yahoo! home-page takeover ad so beloved of upper-funnel advertisers was born, inaugurating an era of D-HTML and Flash-driven creativity that tested (and often broke) the outer limits of home browser connectivity.
Iconic early examples of HPTO’s (as the media agencies invariably acronymized them) were the birdseed-themed Ford Explorer launch, Britney Spears’ beloved Diet Coke spot, and creatives for films such as The Incredible Hulk and Pearl Harbor that were perhaps more exciting than the source material.
David left Yahoo! in 2003 while his friends Jerry and David were still very much in evidence. He’d witnessed the glorious rise and thudding fall of the exclamation mark, and he was ready to turn the (web) page.
Today, David runs David Shen Ventures and enjoys biohacking, coaching and living his best life in Northern California.
And if you’d like to see early footage of the Yahoo! founders looking like the kids they actually were, this Stanford-produced video is 30 minutes of fun:
22. Michael Provenzano – issuing an Invite (Media) to Google
Dec 10, 2023
Michael was one of the co-founders of Invite Media in 2007, with college classmates at the University of Pennsylvania. He and co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg met in an entrepreneur’s club in college, and Nat was inspired by a summer internship at pioneering video ad network VideoEgg to build a dynamic-creative ad platform. This morphed into a semi-baked idea to develop Facebook apps plus an ad server … until a recruiter connected the quixotic grads with ad tech paladin Brian O’Kelley.
In “typical Brian” fashion – recalls Michael in this lively interview – O’Kelley told them they were snorkeling a suboptimal reef and should build a bidder. Fresh from the Right Media acquisition into Yahoo, O’Kelley was launching his next venture called Adnxs (later AppNexus), and he astutely foresaw an ad market bifurcated into buy- and sell-side platforms on either side of a real-time exchange.
So the idea for Invite actually emanated from O’Kelley and was (so he told me in an interview a few years ago) the recipient of technical guidance from the “godfather” of ad tech himself, Dr. Boris Mouszykantskii now of IPONWeb.
Michael vividly recalls Invite’s sketchy early office space and frat-like atmosphere (43 boy-men, 2 women); the sleepless nights caused by payroll-making agita and rival DSP Turn; and the ultimate fear that the lack of real-time inventory – beyond non-real time Right Media and AppNexus itself – presaged the boys being stuck with a solution in search of a problem.
Then around 2008, things changed. Google released its real-time exchange, AdX; the Ventura-based Ad:ECN from pre-Trade Desk visionary Jeff Green appeared; and other DSPs began to pick up speed. Suddenly, there was inventory for the bidder to bid on – and the business started to grow beyond Right Media connectors, serving mainly ad networks “who wanted more control.”
Google called in 2010 and acquired Invite for a reported $81 million, explicitly as an investment in “exchange bidding.” Coming soon after its acquisition of AdMeld (an SSP), Invite formed the basis for its DSP which was renamed DFA and now DV360. Presumably little of the original code remains, but the ROI on the original Invite investment is staggering.
Shortly after the acquisition, Michael took time off to travel to Italy and came back to co-found Vistar Media, a company that began in 2011 to provide programmatic methods – data-driven, measurable – to digital out-of-home, a slow-growing category with little programmatic inventory. Admitting that getting an “old school category moving” has been “harder than I thought,” Michael persevered into building a 145-person, profitable company.
Then COVID hit. Despite an existentially trying year, Vistar is back to record-breaking quarters, Michael told us and AdExchanger Talks recently. Also in this episode: why TripleLift is a company everyone should emulate; why there were “bodies” in the company’s temporary NYC co-working space; and why Michael doesn’t really think they sold Invite too early.
21. Mark Zagorski – eXelate, Telaria & DoubleVerify
Dec 10, 2023
Mark Zagorski is a tenured ad tech CEO, having led eXelate (acquired by Nielsen), Telaria (later Magnite) and currently DoubleVerify. But more than that, he’s a true ad tech O.G., joining pioneering agency Modem Media/Poppe Tyson as an A.E. in the mid-’90s right as digital ads were getting started. (For more on Poppe Tyson, check out this episode.)
As Mark tells Marty and Jill in this career-spanning saga, he started life in NYC wanting to work for Spin magazine, going so far as to sneak into their offices to drop a resume. Spin looked elsewhere, so he joined some brands after business school as a manager. At Honeywell, his boss asked him to help build a website for this new thing called the Internet, and he enrolled in a class at the Learning Annex.
Visiting Honeywell’s agency one day, he heard that an upstairs neighbor was hiring — this was the legendary Poppe Tyson, which merged with Modem Media to bolster its media buying capabilities. At PT/MM, Mark saw the explosion of the scale and scope of the web — and got an idea.
His next chapter (which he jokingly called “The Dark Era”) was an attempt to bring digital advertising to the websites of local linear media. At WorldNow (1999-04) and later MediaSpan (2005-08), he tried to convince local media owners that their businesses were threatened by the web and to rev-share ad spots on their websites. He admits he may have been a bit early, in an era of narrow-band and early broadband.
Getting stations onlineMark Zagorski at WorldNow
After an arm-waving meeting in a Manhattan coffee shop, Mark made the leap to join an early-stage startup called eXelate in 2009 as CRO. eXelate was similar to BlueKai and TACODA as a data-oriented behavioral targeting company and later DMP. He became CEO in 2010 and helped steward eXelate through an acquisition by Nielsen in 2015. He was head of Nielsen Marketing Cloud until 2017.
20. Ari Lewine – going native with TripleLift
Dec 10, 2023
Ari is the co-founder, along with Eric Berry and Shaun Zacharia, of TripleLift, a programmatic ad platform that helps advertisers and publishers to do native advertising. And native of course is a space that was identified in 2011 in an OMMA keynote by investor Fred Wilson, inspired by in-stream social ad formats (particularly on mobile) that blend in with the surrounding publisher context.
Ari and his co-founders met at then-white-hot-DSP AppNexus (now Xandr), where Ari was a young account exec with a specialty in handling Israeli ad networks. He left AppNexus with his co-founders (aka friends) in 2011 without a clear idea of what kind of company they were going to found, joining an accelerator in Times Square with little heat and light-deprived due to a New York Times billboard on the window units. An early idea to automate Pinterest marketing fizzled when Pinterest “didn’t return our calls and emails,” as Ari recalls.
By 2012, the team had identified the native opportunity — originally calling it ‘organic’ and ‘sponsored images’ — and set about trying to sign up publishers. Their first success was with a blogger who ran a site called FoodGawker, which led to a vertical-focused strategy starting in food. The team assembled enough publisher scale to enlist its first ad customer, Chobani, and from there expanded into fashion and other industries.
TripleLift co-founders Ari Lewine, Eric Berry and Shaun Zacharia
In contrast to many of our other episodes, TripleLift’s is a story of great timing, rising markets and ultimately happy outcomes. In March of 2021, private equity player Vista Equity acquired a majority stake in the company for a reported $1.4 billion, more than either YouTube or PayPal enjoyed. Native ads perform well, are adapted to mobile and other platforms, and TripleLift’s tech seems poised to succeed in CTV as well.
In this entertaining and eventful discussion, Ari tells Marty [Jill is out this week] why his childhood dreams of being a brain surgeon derailed; how his parents encouraged entrepreneurialism; how a brother-in-law in the printing business may have jump-started his ad tech career; why 2012 was such a great time to be an ex-AppNexus startup; the secret to building momentum when you’re a tiny team outnumbered by rivals; and how to get gorillas like Google’s DV360 to pay attention and integrate (hint: get their customers to request it).
19. Scott McCorkle – hitting the ExactTarget at MetaCX
Dec 10, 2023
Scott McCorkle was a long-time leader and visionary at ExactTarget, a pioneering ESP and mar-tech hub that was acquired by the mighty Salesforce in 2012. He’s currently the CEO and co-founder at MetaCX, an outcome-based collaboration tool for software buyers and suppliers.
As Scott tells his former employee (full disclosure), Jill, and his former tough-minded Gartner analyst assessor, Marty, in this charming episode — the first mar-tech episode in this thus far ad tech-focused podcast, — he originally nurtured dreams of playing professional baseball, abandoned them rapidly for computer science at Ball State University and an MBA at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
He joined firms such as Eli Lilly in product roles and ended up at IBM in 1997 when they acquired an artfully-named firm called Software Artistry, where he was V.P. of Engineering. A subsequent startup called Mezzia rode the dot-com boom up and then had a somewhat lackluster exit but still lives on in a facilities planning suite, an exhibit of stamina of which Scott remains justifiably proud.
Having met for a number of years with the co-founders of another Indianapolis-based startup called ExactTarget — Scott Dorsey and Chris Baggott, — Scott segued to a role as as President of Technology and Strategy in 2005. He was part of the team that brought ExactTarget public in 2012 and sold the company to Salesforce in 2013 for a reported $2.5 billion. He was CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud until 2016, when he left to build his new journey (get it? BUILD his JOURNEY? heh heh ? … heh? … is this thing on?).
In this episode, the Indiana-based McCorkle tells Jill and Marty how he grew up in a rural area with “modest means” but loved to play around with his Apple 2e; why he never actually moved his home away from Indianapolis (and why that wasn’t actually a problem); why Salesforce made its move in 2016; and what’s so special about the time period of 2007-2008.
That latter point is one we’re going to explore in future episodes, not all of which will be about email. Enjoy!
18. Kevin Ryan – up and down and up with DoubleClick
Dec 10, 2023
Kevin Ryan was part of the trio that led DoubleClick from its inception in the mid-1990s through its traumatic post-crash chapter and back toward health and the sale to private equity in 2005 — the critical years where it established its product and market dominance and was ready to be spruced up (by others) for its ultimate exit into Google and ad tech legend. Ryan was CFO for a few months and then President, taking over leadership from co-founder Kevin O’Connor [check out our amazing episode #12 with Kevin O] during the tense moments of the early ’00s, when the industry faced an existential crisis.
He left in 2005 and went on to found and co-found a litany of companies including MongoDB with DoubleClick co-founder Dwight Merriman, Business Insider with Henry Blodget and Gilt, among others.
Officially, he is the CEO and founder of AlleyCorp, which is an investment firm based in Ryan’s long-time home town of NYC.
As Ryan tells Marty in this fast-paced reflection [Jill is out this week], after leaving investment banking he was exposed to the nascent internet and the promise of digital marketing and commerce when he worked managing operations at EW Scripps, which gave us Dilbert. Exploring ways to scale ad-selling on the popular Dilbert website, Ryan met with “the five companies” who did web ad sales at the time, including DoubleClick, where he became employee #12ish.
As CFO and then President, Ryan complemented the other Kevin (O’Connor) by focusing on running the business, managing global expansion and rapid growth, while O’Connor and Merriman excelled in product innovation and strategic nuance. One of the first NYC-based startups in the sector, DoubleClick grew to 2,000 employees and a market cap approaching $15 billion within 4-5 years after launch.
It was known for its incredible parties — one of which Ryan tells us cost $200,000 — and indelible branding, as “DoubleClick Welcomes You to Silicon Alley!” imprinted a decade of Manhattan’s jealous youth. They also had an HQ in a former ice rink with a basketball court. Here’s the lobby:
DoubleClick welcomes you to DoubleClick
Ryan shares his take on government investigations in the early ’00s, why he likes Burning Man, why early-stage VCs should probably be close to their portfolio companies, why Hellman & Friedman was “the right winner” in the DoubleClick acquisition stakes, and why he doesn’t get up in the morning thinking “advertising is so great!”
17. Steven Comfort – HotWired into the first online ads
Dec 10, 2023
Steven Comfort started life — as so many ad tech pioneers did — as a media planner and buyer in NYC for agencies such as DMB&B and Messner Vetere. Inspired by his grandfather, who founded his own successful agency via the G.I. Bill after World War II, Comfort abandoned dreams of playing professional baseball and embraced traditional media, little knowing that a confluence of time and place was about to insert him into the epicenter of the first ads on an entirely new medium, the internet.
As Comfort tells Marty & Jill in this reflective episode, he was tasked by Vetere management to compile a “cheat sheet” to new media testing opportunities (primarily in nascent cable systems such as Time Warner in Orlando). During his researches, he heard about Wired magazine’s plans to launch a website and cold-called them for more info. Shortly thereafter, he had a “mind-blowing experience” (his words) as Wired co-founder Jane Metcalfe showed him QuickTime and the imagery-plus-sound-plus interactivity possible on the new browser-based media.
(For a compelling oral history of the birth of Wired check this out.)
Wired issue from Oct 1994 announcing HotWired
Settling the rumors, Comfort admits the first online ad was sold “by Jane.” And it wasn’t – as widely believed – just an ATT ad but rather a “twelve-way tie” among the first advertisers on HotWired.com, Wired’s new online venture, all of whom went live simultaneously.
Comfort then joined Wired and moved to San Francisco, a move he doesn’t seem to regret, and rode the dot-com boom to its peak and down again. What was that like? “It felt like college,” he recalls, but he believed in Wired’s mission – and also their office building neighbor Organic’s – and it’s persisted.
After Wired, Comfort joined a startup that was acquired by Yahoo, and then a number of high-flying (and less high-flying) media and content companies such as Monster, NexTag, YuMe and Radius. Currently, he provides go-to-market consulting services for tech companies and is based in the Bay Area.
(For more on the layout and approach of the original HotWired site, check out this cool site.)
16. David Carlick – untold story of Poppe Tyson and DoubleClick
Dec 10, 2023
David Carlick was a key player in the early years of DoubleClick and lead the Silicon Valley office of the legendary B2B agency Poppe Tyson, which did so much to bring ads to the nascent internet via clients such as Netscape and Silicon Graphics. (Poppe Tyson, a division of Bozell Worldwide, later merged with Modem Media and its name was retired; Modem merged with Digitas and both joined the Publicis Groupe.)
Starting life as a dropout in the Vietnam Era, Carlick kicked off his entrepreneurial life in the waterbed business in a thriving California market. After earning a CPA and working for a bit as an accountant in the Valley, he succumbed to the lure of advertising and started his own business, working with clients such as Intel and Osborne, the first successful PC, honing his high-tech storytelling and sales skills.
Carlick’s work for a once-rocking, now kaput, PC company.
As Carlick tells Marty and Jill in this groovy episode, Poppe Tyson was run by a legendary New York-based raconteur and ad man named Fergus O’Daly – a habitue of steak houses, firecracker for liberal causes, and beloved personality of the old style. O’Daly was the man who came up with the name “DoubleClick” as a label for the gestating digital efforts of his team in New Jersey, then focused on CD-ROMs.
Fergus O’Daly (left) and David Carlick discussing ad strategy
At some point in 1994, Carlick visited Kevin O’Connor in Alpharetta Georgia in the labyrinthian basement office he used to found his company, then called Internet Advertising Network/Systems. Both Poppe Tyson and O’Connor’s company were building an ad server to support a network of pubs; both agree O’Connor’s (built with Dwight Merriman) was “further along.” They joined forces and the mighty DoubleClick, as it was called, was born as part of the Bozell family.
As recounted in our recent #PaleoAdTech episode with Kevin O’Connor, DoubleClick spun out from the agency and went public. Shortly after the IPO, Carlick ran askew of the company’s management due to what he describes as a complicated miscommunication, and he left and began to focus on investment, board and advisory roles.
Those roles took him on many adventures in adland – some of which he shares with us. He takes us behind the scenes at AskJeeves, a highly-valued natural-language search engine represented by Mike Ovitz, and MySpace, which Carlick describes as something of a “cobbled-together product” that ultimately lost to Facebook due to its inability to scale.
These days, Carlick is an independent director working with companies in fintech, sponsorship and digital media among others.
15. Dave Moore – the epic of 24/7
Dec 10, 2023
David Moore is the CEO of Britepool, an advertising identity management and resolution company developing an alternative ID for publishers. An affable Midwestern dealmaker, he moved east to join a TV ad sales rep company and then CNN at the dawn of the cable TV revolution. He recalls going on sales calls with an exuberant Ted Turner, who sometimes helped and “sometimes … hurt.”
Dave worked at Petry Media and Lifetime Television before founding 24/7 Media somewhere between 1995 and 1998 (it was a complicated process). The company was an ad network that aggregated about 1,200 publishers at peak and sold to advertisers seeking national scale. As Dave tells Jill and Marty in this nail-biter of an interview, “What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that … ninety per cent of our revenues were coming from dot-com companies.”
That meant of course that when Alan Greenspan proved prophetic and “irrational exuberance” did indeed lead to “prolonged contraction” (as Greenspan predicted), 24/7 was almost wiped out overnight — going from a market cap of $1.8 billion and a stock price of $68 to a market cap of $15 million and a price of $0.15.
How did Moore keep his company afloat?
“It was tough,” he admits. “My favorite quote was from Winston Churchill, ‘Never give up.’ A short quote.” Facing an executive coterie begging to declare bankruptcy and auditors dubious of its solvency, Moore’s 24/7 cut its staff 40%, closed global offices and — in a twisty episode also described in our Dave Morgan episode — acquired Real Media for 19.9% of the company’s stock (the maximum allowed without board approval), after DoubleClick lost a bid by offending the investors.
What followed was a spectacular turn-around, year by year, as the stock rose and Moore managed the company, now named 24/7 Real Media, back to profitability and a $200 million run rate … and ultimately a $650 million acquisition by Martin Sorrell’s WPP holding company.
That turnaround is one of the “underappreciated” feats of the dot-com postscript, Morgan told us.
Moore stayed on at WPP for 12 years as Chairman and later President of WPP Digital until leaving in 2019 to found Britepool.
In this look back on a highly eventful career, Dave displays the humor and candor that have won him the enduring affection of former employees and colleagues. He’s a testament to the power of endurance and the value of that overlooked American salesman’s trait: true optimism.
14. Lou Montulli – building browsers, cookies and more
Dec 10, 2023
We’re honored to be joined by the legendary Lou Montulli this week. Some of you hard-bitten ad tech types may not be as familiar with Lou’s legacy as you are with some others’ – but we’d argue he’s more important than most.
Why?
He was there at the beginning, working on standards and browsers that established much of the working procedure we take for granted — and some of which we’re trying to change — today. Lou was there in the early 1990s in the minute community that cared about the proto-web, engaging with now legendary characters such as Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) and Jim Clark of SGI and Netscape.
While still a University of Kansas Comp. Sci. major working part-time on the computer center’s help desk, Lou combined two open source projects (Gopher for networking and HyperRez for hypertext) into the Lynx browser. Through that project, he got involved with the early web engineers and the NCSA team building the Mosaic browser.
After a disappointing finish at a national racquetball tournament, Lou returned home to find a message on his answering machine from Jim Clark, inviting him to Illinois for what turned out to be the birth of Netscape. “He was very persuasive,” Lou tells Marty in this candid and captivating interview. “Especially in those days.”
Moving to Mountain View to build Netscape, Lou recalls non-stop work at a pace that came to be known as “Netscape time,” 12 Mountain Dews a day, disagreements over code that almost got physical, parties in the shadow of a giant Wonder Woman doll, and a futon room with no windows … a glorious time when a handful of kids really believed they were changing the world for good with their browser.
In that initial development phase before launch, Lou and his team came up with many features we still use today: HTTPS, server push and client pull, various tags, the famous fish-cam (a live web-cam pointed at Lou’s fish tank), animated GIFs … and the browser cookie.
(Lou also described the development of the cookie in another interview Marty did with him a few years ago.)
As he recalls, the cookie was an afterthought at Netscape, a way to maintain state for single domains so that things like shopping carts would remember items from page-to-page and sites could remember you next time you appeared. Ad tech as we know it was not part of the picture — and indeed, Lou is clear (and right) in his assertion that none of it would work unless cookies were combined with JavaScript, headers and a cooperative network (aka a “conspiracy”) of partner websites.
You can read more about the team’s original thinking behind making third-party cookies active by default in Lou’s own words. In sum: they’re a more transparent and user-controllable option than fingerprinting.
AOL acquired Netscape in 1998 at a time when Microsoft was well into a system-wide effort to dominate the browser market, perceiving a threat to its application development business. As Lou says, that threat was real and Microsoft won; he took a leave of absence from the company that same year and never went back.
“It was a blessing,” says the optimistic engineer. Without that prod, he might not have gone on to found other companies such as Memory Matrix (acquired by Shutterfly, where he was CTO for a bit); and Zetta, which does storage and disaster recovery for SMBs. He’s currently co-founder of JetInsight, a management system for chartered airline fleets.
13. Dave Morgan – keeping it Real(Media), TACODA and Simulmedia
Dec 10, 2023
Dave Morgan is the CEO and founder of Simulmedia, which provides a scaled ad targeting platform for TV and video games. He’s from the great state of Pennsylvania and is the first former lawyer we’ve had on the show. In the mid-1990s, he founded Real Media — one of the first ad-serving and -networking companies. It merged with the legendary 24/7 agency in 2001 to form 24/7 Real Media (later acquired by WPP and morphed into Xaxis).
Dave also founded TACODA, an early behavioral-targeting platform for digital ads acquired by AOL in 2007. Simulmedia was founded in 2009.
In his charming style, Dave chats with Jill and Marty about his early days in a semi-rural town that had more deer than people; his short career as a big-city Philadelphia lawyer; and his gig as General Counsel at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association in the early 1990’s, a move that exposed him to media and the theme of his career: aggregating local media to support scaled national ad buys. (That’s kind of what Simulmedia does for TV, now that we think about it.)
He tells the story of a legendary elevator pitch to Brad Burnham, later of Union Square Ventures, and how that pitch got him to New York City. Real Media’s first real offices were in a rug merchant’s building two blocks from his current space at 28th Street and Park Avenue South.
Real Media was an ad server that competed with NetGravity (acquired by the mighty DoubleClick), and it was an intrepid survivor of the crash of 2001, picked up by 24/7 (after a rejected bid by DoubleClick) for a reported $2 million. TACODA started as a behavioral targeting platform but took off after becoming a tech-powered ad network.
In a delightful aside, Dave talks about his brief and wonderous tenure at AOL, where he re-read Machiavelli’s The Prince on a tip to understand his internal political situation, recommended strongly against acquiring the Bebo social network, and left when his advice was ignored. He was vindicated when the network, which cost AOL $850 million, was sold a few years later for around $20 million.
And he reveals the little-known fact that Elon Musk actually started in ad tech, founding a classified ad-serving company called Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, long before he launched himself into space. A future guest? We’ll see.
12. Kevin O’Connor – on co-founding DoubleClick and more
Dec 10, 2023
Kevin O’Connor is the co-founder with Dwight Merriman of DoubleClick in 1995 and was its CEO until he resigned in 2001, moved to California and focused on family life and venture capital. He’s currently chairman of a VC fund for early-stage startups primarily outside the Silicon Valley orbit called ScOp (rhymes with “top”), which stands for “Scalable Opportunities.” Kevin’s start-up Graphiq, a research and infographic engine that started life as FindtheBest, was acquired by Amazon in 2017.
Growing up in Michigan — as Kevin tells Jill & Marty in this poignant episode — he always knew he wanted to be an inventor and followed that passion the U of M, where he founded his first company, I.C.C. A tool for linking PCs to mainframes, I.C.C. was acquired by the Atlanta-based D.C.A. in 1992, and O’Connor moved to the Atlanta area. In 1995, he co-founded what was originally called Internet Advertising Network with Dwight Merriman, having identified the idea in part through a structured brainstorming technique outlined in his 2003 book The Map of Innovation: Creating Something Out of Nothing.
Flipping from a subscription aggregator to a publisher aggregator, sparked by Merriman’s observation that media is worth more than subs, DoubleClick eventually merged with a sales team from the pioneering B2B agency Poppe Tyson led by David Carlick — and the reps-and-tech model of the early DoubleClick was born, along with its name. Eventually buying its way out from under its agency umbrella, the company chose to sell its tech directly to publishers after a pointed request from the Wall Street Journal, which wanted the ad server but not the feet-on-the-street.
Kevin walks Jill & Marty through the spectacular growth of the late 1990’s, when the company added 2-3 new people every day, going public on the NASDAQ in 1998. Legendary parties included one with a “Willy Wonka” theme and another with high-walkers on stilts; most are lost in the mists of the go-go era. Acquisitions of on-premise ad server competitor NetGravity and offline data co-op Abacus followed, the latter of which came under fire from privacy advocates in an early preview of the public scrutiny greeting providers today.
A stream of scrutiny and the toll of a couple of decades of “hundred-hour weeks” gave Kevin an acute desire to get out of the line of sight and find somewhere “where the weather matched my clothes.” He left DoubleClick in 2001 after the dot-com crash and moved to California. He lives in Santa Barbara and Telluride and — as this episode shows — continues to look back with wry fondness on his years at the original ad-tech unicorn: DoubleClick.
11. Auren Hoffman – building a LiveRamp to the info highway
Dec 10, 2023
Auren Hoffman (@auren) grew up in Westchester County, New York [coincidentally, home of #PaleoAdTech co-host @martykihn] and is currently CEO of SafeGraph, a location data provider. He’s well-known as an investor, author, Quora pundit, fellow podcast host — the recently-launched “World of DaaS” on the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) sector — drawer of charming two-dimensional graphs, networker and company founder.
Entrepreneurship started early for Auren, who launched his first venture as a student at University of California, Berkeley, where he got his degree in Engineering, having paid for his education via a high-school lawn service and an exit for a consulting firm he started junior year. For some time, he organized salons on deep topics, such as the Meaning of Life, for his mentor Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and noted Facebook investor.
His first real venture in the ad-tech and mar-tech space was Rapleaf, which he co-founded in 2005. Rapleaf was a people-data company that had a number of incarnations, starting as a seller “reputation service” similar to eBay’s and a social network-membership search based on emails, and other forms of people data.
But as Auren tells Marty and Jill in this probing episode, inside the company the team had become “more passionate” about the idea that became LiveRamp — a vision of middleware that could connect an ever-growing constellation of ad-tech and mar-tech applications. Rapleaf was sold to TowerData in 2012, and Auren and team focused on building LiveRamp into a data integration, identity and onboarding powerhouse.
In 2015, its owners sold LiveRamp to Acxiom for a reported $310 million in what Auren now says was “the single biggest mistake I’ve ever made in business.” As he says on the show, the acquisition slowed LiveRamp’s progress, and he believes it would be up to 10X bigger today if it had “remained independent.”
On this thoughtful episode, Auren shares why he thinks networking is “overrated,” why he decided to focus his new venture on location and not people data, and his secret to finding talent in the hyper-competitive Silicon Valley hiring pool.
10. Chris O’Hara – getting to the Krux of DMPs and ad data
Dec 10, 2023
Chris O’Hara is V.P. of Global Product Marketing at Salesforce, focusing on the data and identity suite of products including Audience Studio (a DMP) and the Salesforce CDP. A well-known speaker, pundit and author, Chris has written eight titles including six on culinary pursuits (listen to the episode for more on this fascinating jaunt in his personal journey), “Data Driven” with Krux co-founders Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya and “Customer Data Platforms: Use People Data to Transform the Future of Marketing Engagement,” co-written with Paleo Ad Tech co-host Martin Kihn. The latter is the #1 book on the hottest category in marketing technology today. It’s also one of the only books on the category, but let’s not quibble.
After a smoke-filled start as cigar review editor at Smoke magazine, Chris held various sales roles at publishers including MediaBistro, at the time a thriving content and job search site for media mavens, before finding his way to ad tech via start-ups such as Traffiq and nPario. The latter was an early DMP/CDP that provided the data spine for WPP agencies and Xaxis. It was launched by ex-Yahoo and SAS execs in 2010.
An encounter with Krux co-founder Tom Chavez while writing a position paper on DMPs for eConsultancy led to a position as head of DMP marketer sales for that pioneering platform. Meanwhile, Chris was a prolific writer for industry publications such as AdExchanger and his own blog, The Devil’s Work, a reference to “idle hands” (we think). Krux was acquired by Salesforce in 2016, bringing Chris to his current bivouac.
In this frolicsome episode, Marty and Jill follow Chris up the dot-com boom and back down again, as his family grows and he’s out there “hustling” for ad sales, perfecting his writing and pitching voice, and earning his ad tech pedigree. He shares what it’s like to work in a decommissioned building, how long it takes an ex-Russian Army officer to eat to a large steak, and why it’s time to break up with the third-party cookie. Don’t miss it.
Krux team at Dreamforce in San Francisco shortly after being acquired by Salesforce
Beth Wallace was introduced to the listeners of Paleo Ad Tech during our Joe Zawadzki episode where the founder of MediaMath mentioned his experience in the early 2000’s with his graciously demanding client at AOL – a client who, in the grand tradition, pushed Joe and his tyro team at Poindexter to innovate faster. That client was Beth Wallace. Now CEO of Big Lens, a digital media agency based in Reston Virginia, Beth is a long-time consumer and direct marketing and media practitioner who joined Meredith in Des Moines, Iowa after getting her MBA at Northwestern. Part of a management training program, she rapidly found an affinity with direct mail methods of customer acquisition, which – as she tells Marty and Jill in this episode – were very similar to today’s digital marketing mojo, but more exact.
Joining AOL in 2001 (the same year AOL acquired Time Warner in what was then the biggest merger in U.S. history), our ad tech pioneer set out to apply the rigor of DM to digital acquisition, frustrated that ads were bought online they way they were on TV. Working with Poindexter (later [x+1]) and DoubleClick, among others, she was the savvy, deep-pocketed client for a range of ad tech pioneers such as Joe Z., Mike Walrath and Ramsey McGrory of Right Media, and Mike Rubenstein of DoubleClick and then Google.
In this episode, Beth shares her hopes and dreams for AOL customer acquisition, how ad targeting and measurement was done in the early ’00s, and how she tried to improve efficiency and effectiveness for her campaigns at AOL. Along the way, she provides some fascinating color about the AOL culture and working methods and apercus of ad tech’s finest in the years when they were “just kids.”
Michael Rubenstein, Beth Wallace, Ted Shergalis and Joe Zawadzki with (live) ad-tech admirer in the early 2000’s
8. Ratko Vidakovic – the SiteScout becomes an AdProf
Dec 10, 2023
Ratko Vidakovic grew up in Toronto dreaming of running big Internet servers — i.e., being in I.T., on a grand scale. As a teenager in the ’90s his dream came true, and he found himself doing tech support and eventually working as a sys-admin at companies like VMWare and Pepsi. His intro to ad tech came “by accident” — a common theme — as he and a friend ran a website on the side called ToyotaNation.com. It was (as you might guess) aimed at Toyota enthusiasts, of which Ratko and his friend were two. Loving their finely-machined Camrys and wanting to connect with the similar-minded around the world, they published a site that taught them the pleasures and perils of publishing and ads. They sold the site because Google changed its algorithm and they learned first-hand the dangers of being an unwitting dependent.
Inspired by the ease of Facebook’s and Google’s self-serve platforms, Ratko and some friends founded SiteScout to be an SMB-friendly and lower-cost ad server. Discovering Rubicon’s API, it then became a DSP and grew to about $20 million in run-rate before being acquired by Centro in 2013. Ratko helped adapt SiteScout to Centro’s model and culture before going out on his own again to co-found AdProfs, a programmatic consultancy and content machine. He’s known as the author of a 13,000-subscriber newsletter called “This Week In Ad Tech.” You can find out more about AdProfs here.
In this conversation, Ratko tells Marty and Jill about his favorite Canadian artists and ad tech luminaries, the stray housecat at SiteScout’s first two-family house/office, and why he thought SiteScout could compete against entrenched players such as DoubleClick, ATLAS, Turn and MediaMath. He also explains why you haven’t seen “This Week In Ad Tech” recently – and why it’s coming back.
7. Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan – raising the Drawbridge
Dec 10, 2023
Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan is on the product team at Microsoft’s LinkedIn, which acquired her company Drawbridge in 2019. She founded Drawbridge in 2011 and was its well-known CEO for eight years, making the case — largely successfully — for the validity of probabilistic methods of determining identity in marketing and advertising, where 100% accuracy is not only not requisite but almost never possible. Drawbridge was for some years the ad industry’s leading solution for determining and managing cross-device identity — i.e., determining that different devices belong the same person, household of account using some complicated math.
Before founding Drawbridge, Siviramakrishnan was Lead Scientist at AdMob, a mobile ad platform that served mobile app developers (starting in the WAP era of m.dot apps); it was acquired by Google in 2009. She has a Ph.D. from Stanford in Information Theory and Algorithms, making her the first “doctor” we’ve had on the show. She was born and raised in India in the former Bombay (now Mumbai) and is the first female Ph.D. in her family.
In this rapid-fire chat, Kamakshi shares about her childhood and her ambition to be a mathematician, her academic dreams and how they were sidelined by a successful courtship by AdMob, which started her journey in ad tech. Along the way, she shares what it’s like to shop for real estate in S.F. and how she managed to sell her company to Microsoft and give birth to her child at the same time.
6. Cory Treffiletti – agency guy to BlueKai, Oracle and beyond
Dec 10, 2023
Cory Treffiletti was an ad major at Syracuse and one of the “lucky ones” — as he says — who know what they want to be early on. Moving to NYC, he joined an agency and was given digital planning responsibilities for major brands such as BMW and CVS just because he’d “been on the Internet.” It was 1995. He later pioneered media planning and testing techniques at agencies such as i-Traffic, Freestyle Interactive and Carat Fusion, in the days when home-page takeovers and roadblocks on Yahoo were the norm for big campaigns. Moving to the West Coast, he lived through the dot-com boom and bust — “It was really fun!” — and eventually founded a startup advisory/capital firm called Catalyst S+F, where he played short-term CMO roles for startups such as Kenshoo, Turn, MediaMath and RedAril. He joined BlueKai as CMO in 2012 and helped define the DMP space, later becoming CMO of Oracle Data Cloud after Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014. Cory is currently SVP of Marketing at fintech platform FIS. A longtime columnist for MediaPost, he’s also author of the 2012 book Internet Ad Pioneers, a collection of in-depth interview with notable women and men from the first 20 years of digital media.
In this wide-ranging interview, Cory takes Jill and Marty through his journey starting in 1995 as a tyro at the dawn of the Internet, through the dot-com boom and bust, his time on-stage with Primus … to CMO-dom and Oracle Data Cloud … meanwhile providing a lucid explanation of exactly what a Data Management Platform (DMP) is, anyway, and a pointer to one of the all-time great pieces of content marketing.
5. Paul Bannister – gamer turned prophet for the publisher
Dec 10, 2023
Paul Bannister started life as an intrepid video gamer who turned his passion for Nintendo into an online publication that — in the early pre-history of 1995 — was one of the first to sell an ad on the internet. It cost $400 for an arbitrary-sized (but small) highly pixelated ad unit with a lot of text. His career as a publisher was launched. Years later, he joined Andrew Shue (Melrose Place, soccer star) and others in co-founding CafeMom, an early and successful example of a social network-content site. CafeMom was ad-supported from the beginning, and from his perch at the ever-growing network Bannister saw the development of ad servers, ad networks, SSPs, DSPs and header bidding. Today he is Chief Strategy Officer for CafeMedia, a company based largely on the acquisition of AdThrive in 2018. CafeMedia basically outsources publishers’ back offices and revenue ops so they can focus on creating content and is particularly strong in travel, hospitality and leisure. In this wide-ranging episode, Bannister trains his widely-admired prophetic abilities on the history of publishing tech, the future of the cookie, and why there may be some reasons for optimism looking toward 2022.
4. Joanna O’Connell – evangelist of the trading desk
Dec 10, 2023
Joanna O’Connell is a well-known industry pundit and V.P. Principal Analyst at Forrester, where she covers advertising technology, a field she has graced for more than twenty years. Starting as a celebrity-loving production assistant at CNN, she joined Avenue A as a media planner in the late 1990’s in New York City, left to join a fraught Miramax for three years after a twenty-something crisis of meaning, and returned to Avenue A as it transformed into Razorfish and took the mathematical road to media optimization. A chance meeting in an East Village nightclub around 2007 started her on a continuing role as programmatic evangelist and led her to co-found ATOM Systems, the first big agency trading desk (build on MediaMath, then Invite Media). Pro-programmatic evangelism defined her work at Forrester and later AdExchanger, where she was chief of research until joining MediaMath itself as CMO for two years (2015-17). In this interview, Joanna talks to Jill and Marty about her career path, her love of “nerdy” media buying, and her mad-scientist father who turned a horse barn in Upstate New York into an inventor’s lair.
3. Joe Zawadzki – the original (Media)math man
Dec 10, 2023
Joe Zawadzki is CEO of MediaMath, ad tech pioneer and noted investor, mentor and visionary. A floppy-haired, Tesla-driving, intensely affable Harvard grad, he came to NYC in the late ’90s and joined a real estate firm as an analyst. Rapidly, his interest turned to e-commerce and personalized shopping apps using ASP. (In this episode, he reminds us that in the pre-SaaS stone age, start-ups had to buy their own servers and security systems.) Through the time of the dot-com boom and bust, he bravely founded Poindexter, a Silicon Alley firm that provided technology to agencies. Poindexter was originally focused on website personalization and optimization, and customers such as AOL and American Express asked them to deliver better prospects in the first place (aka, ad tech). Zawadzki adapted optimization to ad targeting and serving, was involved in the ideation of Right Media — his own ‘origin story’ and cautionary board-handling tale is dramatically told here — and saw Poindexter rebranded to [x+1]. In 2007, he founded MediaMath, a leading DSP, which continues to rock and roll today. He’s also a co-founder of MathCapital, an investment fund.
2. Zach Rodgers – the voice of AdExchanger talks
Dec 10, 2023
Zach Rodgers is the editorial director of the mighty AdExchanger, founded by John Ebbert 12 years ago and still representing the pinnacle of ad tech journalism. In fact, we’re lucky as an industry to have such a voice. He joined the editorial team more than nine years ago and has been a key influence on its integrity, quality and growth – as a writer, recognizer of talent (often quite young talent), event shepherd, manager, editor, source wrangler, MC and raconteur. In the latter role, he’s hosted the 226 episode-strong and counting AdExchanger Talks podcast, which has seen just about every ad tech influencer shuffle behind its mike. A part-time vegan and all-around mensch, Zach started at ClickZ and other trade pubs before entering ad tech history & legend. In this episode, he talks about his childhood dreams (many), his initial opinion of advertising (not so hot), how he met John Ebbert, AdExchanger’s legendary first event at the New York Historical Society, his pursuit of Brian O’Kelley, gender bias at ad tech events, and the future of his storied pub. (Also check out Zach’s side hustle, a podcast called Beaconites about his beloved hometown of Beacon, NY aka ‘the New Brooklyn‘.)
1. Eric Franchi – the many overtones of Undertone
Dec 10, 2023
Eric Franchi is tri-state native and son of public school teachers. He made his way to About.com as a hard-charging sales rep during the late-90’s dot com boom, selling digital ads to brands who were about to feel the pressure of a reeling post-2001 economy. With a buddy from About.com, he went on to found a company that was eventually called Undertone. He and David Cassidy started as a two-man shop with a fax machine in a Silicon Alley warehouse, buying ads for Orbitz and Netflix in the days when they were soliciting subscribers for their mail-order DVD business. And then he discovered pop-unders — a short-lived but high-impact ad unit that was richly interactive and (in time) richly overused. Then came browser pop-blockers and the refashioning of Undertone into a premium ad network with about 300 employees when it was sold to Perion in 2015. Franchi is currently co-founder and principal at MathCapital, an early-stage venture fund that focuses on ad tech visionaries.
Paleo Pellet: How DoubleClick worked
Nov 06, 2023
In this brief (10:42) episode, Marty explains how the original DoubleClick ad server technology worked, based on a reading of the original patent, filed in 1996 and granted in 2000.
If you’d like to enjoy the patent yourself, you can do so here. It was US patent number 5,948,061 and was assigned to Dwight Merriman and Kevin O’Connor, the co-founders of DoubleClick. Its title: “Method of Delivery, Targeting, and Measuring Advertising Over Networks.”
If you’d like to learn more about the mighty DoubleClick, you can enjoy our podcast interviews with former CEO Kevin Ryan and co-founder Kevin O’Connor in the archives.
Paleo Pellet: The History of Advertising Before DoubleClick in 15 Minutes
Nov 06, 2023
Welcome to the second of what we’re calling Paleo Pellets: some occasional, shorter episodes explaining a particular topic. Our first one was on the DoubleClick ad server, and we thought we’d start this new year off with a look at what happened before DoubleClick.
That is the entire history of advertising up until about 1995. And I want to do this in 15 minutes or less.
So advertising, as we know it today, didn’t really exist until the late 19th century. I mean it existed, but it didn’t. It’s really striking – if you look at ads on posters or newspapers into the early 20th century – they are a lot more like a sign that says “Here I Am!” or “LOOK AT ME” rather than an ad.
The standard spot was five lines of text in a newspaper and advertisers and a single column and advertise. It just kept repeating their name over and over to fill up the space for their store or product. This style has a name: it’s called iteration advertising.
Patent Medicines Do It All, My Friends
In terms of categories, creative advertising really started with awareness for quack remedies. These so-called patent medicines were very, very popular, pretty much totally unregulated, contained God knows what, but they made incredible claims. My favorite that I’ve seen is an ad for a pill called Hygiest that claimed that if you took it, “All would be well,” which would be amazing if it were true; it makes you wonder what was in it. But that is exactly by the way, what the 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich claimed about Christianity.
P T Barnum
Another big early influencer was of course PT Barnum, who lived into the 1890s, and he innovated a lot of things to promote his museum in New York and his circus acts (and then also on the road). He started what we could call the cross-channel takeover campaign, where he would basically carpet bomb Manhattan on the same day.
So the flight started: he has his idea of a campaign with posters, handbills, flags, banners, marching bands, all announcing some act. And he had actually this very creative technique where he’d have a person, he would post a person somewhere on a street, looking at either his museum or one of his posters and then human nature being what it is, you know, people would pass this guy and say, ‘What are you looking at?’ So they would start looking too. And pretty soon there’d be a crowd looking, looking at his museum.
Barnum continued the patent medicine practice also making really false claims. Like one of his first exhibits he claimed was George Washington’s nurse and was 160 years old and so on when she was 80. And then when they did the autopsy, he actually promoted that as well and said, oh, she’s 80.
Barnum was a genius, of course. But I think in the long run, he probably hurt the image of marketing.
The dominant channels were out of home posters in cities and on some roads – and then of course print, so magazines and newspapers. And one problem that might sound familiar is how to aggregate a lot of local supply. So all the local players into audiences that could attract big buyers and bigger budgets, just make ad buying more efficient.
The first supply side brokers started to appear in the late nineties. They signed up a bunch of local publishers. They resold the inventory and added an unknown, what we would today call a black box markup. Now people back then didn’t like this markup, this unknown markup any more than they like it now. So a guy named Francis Ayer decided to compete on what he actually called transparency.
Francis Ayer
Believe it or not, he took a flat 15% markup on the media and that 15%, by the way, remained standard. That’s the standard take rate until very recently. He started doing it back in the 1870s.
There were other non-media related developments that helped the industry.
One was the growth of department stores. There was Stewart’s in New York, which doesn’t exist anymore. Macy’s and then in Philadelphia Wanamaker’s. And they had a lot of stuff to sell, so more categories and they had, these categories-makers who were prolific advertisers of mass market products. They had to convince people that they needed them first, and then they needed to differentiate from the competitors.
And these were things like sewing machines and household products and typewriters, bicycles, off the rack clothing, even. And they had to create demand for these.
Another development that affected everything was the railroad, of course, which created more cities. And more local media in the cities, as well as it created the ground for the mail order catalog, which was definitely the Amazon of its day.
At its peak I think the Sears catalog and Montgomery Ward’s were about five or 600 pages and they had, you know, thousands of different products and these products all needed to distinguish themselves and gain awareness, through local and national newspaper magazine ads. And the Sears catalog itself actually became a major advertiser for itself.
Now the idea of a brand, which we got from the cattle industry, was a way to differentiate products that were commodities. It started with patent medicines, of course, which were pretty much all branded and tobacco. So we’ll say things that are not good for you. Convincing you to use things that are not good for you.
And then by the 1910s, we start to see fictional characters like Mr. Peanut say, or the Morton salt girl who are a humanization of what are basically the most generic commodities you can imagine: peanuts and salt.
And the ad industry grew very fast. According to Ad Age magazine, it went from about 500 million total spending to 3 billion in the first two decades of the 20th century.
Academics started to take an interest in this new field. Theories of persuasion were written. Psychology was brought into the picture. Agency people started to appear acting like they knew what they were talking about, and they knew how to tell, convince people to buy whatever it was.
And then what we would call the grammar of modern ads was figured out. There were two theories. One was that ads are assessed rationally and have to present an argument to buy. So this is the so-called “reason why” ads, understandably. An example, which was championed by Claude Hopkins, who was a proponent of this approach, was an ad for Pepsodent – which is a toothpaste – presented the “single selling point,” which in the case of Pepsodent – it was whiter teeth.
Want Whiter Teeth? Who Doesn’t?
Another popular theory was the so-called “soft sell,” which focused on how the product would make the buyer feel.
So what is the impact on them and on their lifestyle and on their family? This was championed by one of the first ad actual ad psychologists, a guy named Walter Dill Scott. An example would be early ads for Cadillac, for “Wherever the noble and the admirable congregate,” which is interesting. And they also talked about creating a “Cadillac Home.”
Starting in the thirties and forties, we get into more modern media like radio. but before we go there I’d like to mention a couple of things that surprised me about this earlier period, when I was researching it.
The first is that business people – the ad buyers – did not really seem to naturally want to advertise. It’s a learned behavior; publications and brokers had to talk them into it. In fact, the natural inclination in the early decades was to see advertising as low class and kind of desperate as an admission of defeat.
Ironically, by the way – because today, most of us know him for the maybe apocryphal quote, you know, half my, I don’t know which half of my ad spending is wasted that quote – John Wanamaker of the Philadelphia department store fame and a copywriter that he found a guy named John Powers: those two guys did more than anyone to prove to their competitors and other potential advertisers that advertising really worked.
They were the gold standard.
Second thing that surprised me was that consumer’s attitudes toward advertising have always been pretty darn mixed. There is a quote I like from a trade man called Printers’ Ink from a hundred years ago. It goes: “The family circle is not a public place. And advertising has no business intruding there unless it is invited.”
So when radio gets popular in the thirties is another familiar problem: Who’s going to pay for the content? Nobody seemed to know in the beginning. The first commercial programs were what we would call now wall-to-wall infomercials. So totally brand sponsored content, and it was repeated over and over.
The first station in New York, which was owned by AT&T, ran and reran and reran a program created by and sponsored by a real estate company. This got dull for everyone pretty fast. So the model that eventually worked was developed by ad agencies, these growing agencies, they would create shows around entertainers that were solely sponsored by one of the agencies’ bigger brands.
Jack Benny loves Jell-O
So for example, we have the Y&R agency, they had a client Jell-O, they went to Jack Benny, proposed the show, developed the Jack Benny radio program that was sponsored by and heavily featuring Jell-O.
This sole sponsor model works really well. It really does from a listener’s perspective, from everyone’s perspective. If you don’t believe me, listen to radio programs from the golden age in the 1940s, like the Lux Radio Theater.
You hear a big stars like Clark Gable say in Product placements throughout the show here and there, you know, that are, that are recognizable and then little fictional scenes, occasional cutaway to a fictional scene about where someone will talk about moisturizing with a Lux.
Lux was a soap, Lux flakes. They’ve definitely raised awareness for the product, these flakes. And it’s not, it’s not annoying actually, because it’s totally transparent. And I think this method would work really well in the metaverse and I’m not actually kidding.
The sole sponsor agency led model persisted into the sixties until basically until TV and especially color made the cost of content creation so incredibly high that no single sponsor could pay for a program. They just didn’t want to. And that in turn helped make agencies less powerful. And that led to the modern model that we have now, where networks pay for content and distribution, advertisers and agencies just buy little pieces of attention.
And meanwhile, the impact of regulators on the ad business did not start with GDPR, CCPA. Even pre TV – so back in the forties, this is be the, you know, post FDR era – the FCC decided it didn’t like concentrated media ownership. So studios and networks were actually broken up. Aggressively. So for example, part of NBC radio network was sold to the LifeSavers mogul, Edward Noble, and he turned around and created ABC.
Then the 1950s, there was cold war paranoia about motivation research and even subliminal advertising. There was this sort of fear of subliminal ads. And there was a very popular book called the Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard, which claimed advertisers were trying to manipulate us without our knowledge, by putting little messages in the ads.
Vance Packard’s best-seller
In fact I really don’t think they were.
But it was the development for the first time in the 1960s of relatively immersive, full color, sometimes even real-time medium, like broadcast or linear television; sight-sound-and-motion along with really attractive, full color magazines, slightly more inclusive society with definitely rising standard of living for many, not all – all this led to the golden age of better media planning, more creative style, a confident advertising professional, more open-minded clients (sometimes) …
This was the era of David Ogilvy and the Marlboro man. And in terms of the look and feel of it, moving into the sixties, there’s a shift to kind of image or lifestyle that the product promises on average with a lot of exceptions.
Then in the seventies, there’s actually a push for more of the so-called positioning spots. So we saw Coke versus Pepsi or the UnCola, a category defined by what it’s not. And the creation of Lite versions of things, which are also defined by what they don’t have, what they’re missing. And all of this seems to be a function of too many brands. Let’s face it, it’s turning a so-called bug into a feature, but also very creative and clever.
The UnCola
And then in the eighties, the big story was probably the explosion of cable channels, which is a preview of the infinite media options we’ve got today. And on the agency side, massive roll-up of agencies into bigger and bigger holding companies, global holding companies that live mainly I think, to fight with media sources about pricing.
And then out of absolutely nowhere in 1989 a British guy named Tim Berners Lee invents the worldwide web on top of a very obscure academic military network called the internet, which nobody had heard of. And a couple of kids at the University of Illinois, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, along with some of their friends, invent the Mosaic browser and then go west and create Netscape and so on.
And pretty soon we’re in the real world of paleo ad tech.
So thanks for joining me. I’d like to end on a slightly positive. Advertising executives were cited as the least trusted profession, according to a Gallup poll released back in 1976. But just last year, a similar poll found that ad workers are no longer the least trusted profession. We have finally been out mistrusted by politicians.
Happy New Year!
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Nov 04, 2023
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