Paleo Ad Tech

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**Paleo Ad Tech**

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

Latest Episodes:

**37. Blagica Bottigliero – going into Orbitz, social and affiliates** Dec 10, 2023
Show notes

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
Show notes

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.

**34. Andrew Casale – from Casale Media to Index Exchange** Dec 10, 2023
Show notes

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
Show notes

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
Show notes

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

Show notes

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.