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As Ad Tech And Mar Tech Converge, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki Prefers Partnerships Over Acquisitions

November 3, 2015 — by MediaMath    

This interview appears today in full on AdExchanger. 

It seems every time there’s a partnership between a marketing tech company and an ad tech vendor, MediaMath is involved. Its most recent hookups: Oracle and IBM.

When working through the technical and logistical intricacies of these integrations, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki takes a back seat, seeing himself as “champion and cheerleader.”

“My role is at the strategy level,” he told AdExchanger. “How is this convergence of ad tech and marketing tech going to play out?”

Since it was founded in 2007, MediaMath has built a long supply chain of addressable media, mostly through more anonymous channels of online display, video, mobile and native inventory.

But advertiser demands are changing.

“The industry wants to treat customers and prospects consistently across all touch points and stages of the customer journey,” Zawadzki said.

This change happened in increments. Early adopters experimented by applying first-party data to online advertising, using information about known customers to reach them in environments where they typically think of themselves as anonymous. That resulted in practices like retargeting or CRM matching.

Those connections are only deepening, hence the recent collision between ad tech and marketing tech. But what’s the next stage? The ad tech world is notoriously unstable, and marketing tech firms like IBM and Oracle aren’t shy about acquiring.

Zawadzki spoke with AdExchanger.

Read the rest of the interview here.