17. Steven Comfort – HotWired into the first online ads
Dec 10, 2023
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
9. Beth Wallace – you’ve got AOL’s ad-tech advocate
Dec 10, 2023
Show notes
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
Show notes
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.
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