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People Trends

Meet The New Chief Growth Officer

July 12, 2017 — by MediaMath

This article originally appears on CMO.com.

The advent of technologies that enable marketing to demonstrate its impact on the top line are clearly a benefit to both the function and the larger organization. But the ability to connect the dots between marketing efforts and revenue generation has shone a spotlight on CMOs and their teams. There is an increasing expectation that marketing will serve as the growth engine for companies.

“We clearly have technologies that allow CMOs to take a level of revenue responsibility they have never had before,” said Debbie Qaqish, partner with The Pedowitz Group and author of “The Revenue Marketer,” in an interview with CMO.com.

Arun Pattabhiraman, CMO of mobile advertising startup InMobi, one of India’s first so-called unicorns, has experienced that shift from marketing being the “make-it-pretty” cost center of a company to its primary driver of growth. A few years ago, marketing was “purely a brand enabler—a creative function that was responsible for shaping the company’s perception globally through traditional marketing tactics,” Pattabhiraman said in an interview with CMO.com. “While that responsibility has only grown, marketing is increasingly collaborating with sales and product organizations to figure out meaningful ways to impact revenues directly.”

At analytics software maker Looker, marketing delivers 90% of overall revenue targets with the qualified leads it delivers to sales, and the appetite for revenue-generating insight is insatiable. “CEOs expect that CMOs can easily analyze exactly how marketing is contributing to the bottom line,” said Looker CMO Jen Grant, in an interview with CMO.com. “When CMOs have access to data, everything changes.”

But while corporate leaders are looking to the CMO for growth opportunities, the marketing function certainly does not own all of the organization’s growth drivers. As many as five C-level executives are responsible for driving new revenues, according to a recent Accenture Strategy report. However, CEOs are most likely to hold their CMOs accountable for missed growth targets.

“The CMO as chief growth officer is a tough expectation to live up to because CMOs have to do it with one arm tied behind their backs,” said Robert Wollan, Accenture Strategy’s senior managing director, in an interview with CMO.com. “It’s a tough job.”

Taking responsibility for revenue generation is a big risk for CMOs, but one with equally outsized rewards for those who can figure out how to navigate this new terrain. CMO.com talked to marketing leaders for their thoughts on how to meet the new growth imperative.

1. Launch An Internal Revenue Marketing Campaign

CMOs need buy-in from the entire organization if they hope to influence those revenue drivers they don’t control. “Marketers can make this shift,” Qaqish said. “But they have to change others’ perspectives about what marketing can be.”

Communication is key to getting stakeholders to cooperate on the growth agenda. CMOs already have the skills required in creating personas and messages that resonate. The head of sales wants to know how marketing can help him meet quotas, shorten sales cycles, or increase deal sizes. The CFO wants to know marketing will demonstrate returns on investment.

“New technology alone won’t do it,” said Qaqish, who has worked with Microsoft to make this transition over three years. “It’s an educational campaign.”

Even at MediaMath, a marketing tech company built on the idea of marketing as revenue-generator, CMO Joanna O’Connell has had to update assumptions about marketing’s role. “You may find that some have very traditional notions of marketing and others have no idea at all how to make sense of marketing,” O’Connell told CMO.com, adding that she has developed a closer relationship with her CFO. “Rather than assuming, show them. Turn skeptics into allies and advocates using data and storytelling.”

2. Break Down Barriers
The more siloed a company’s functions are, the harder it will be for marketers to “put their arms around all the pieces” to spur growth, Wollan said.

“To activate the key combination of creativity and data produced by your business, CMOs must partner with the sales, finance, and IT departments in deeper, more meaningful ways,” said David Gee, CMO of subscription billing company Zuora, in an interview with CMO.com.

The marketing-sales relationship can be tricky. “Building out a framework where marketing begins to impact the bottom line can make other functions feel uncomfortable or threatened,” Pattabhiraman said. “But the more marketers talk openly and objectively and evangelize the vision behind the transition, the more sales teams begin to perceive them as a valuable partner.”

O’Connell said she works closely with commercial and product leaders. “If we understand each other’s business goals, challenges, structure, resources, and assets,” she said, “we can work together toward shared goals.”

For more, read the full article here.

Intelligence Media People

Why MediaMath, Why Now

June 21, 2017 — by MediaMath

We’re living in challenging times. Publishers are fighting to win back media spend that has largely fled to a small handful of players. Buyers are fighting to make sure that they don’t run against unsafe — or untrue — content. And ad enablement platforms are fighting to justify the share of media dollars that they take out of the ecosystem. The result is an overcomplicated, often irrational framework that sits between marketers and consumers.

We would all agree that there’s got to be a better way.

In my view, buyers aren’t shunting the lion’s share of budgets to those few players because they necessarily want to king-make an oligopoly — rather, buying on those properties is easy to do, and carries an ostensible halo of brand safety. If you believe that premise to be true, then it naturally follows that if another entity were to offer equivalent levels of ease, brand safety, addressability and scale, it would create a compelling alternative for media buyers to consider.

Historically the task of curating inventory has fallen to individual exchanges and publishers. What that effort offers buyers is incomplete at best — it checks the safety box but doesn’t necessarily address ease and scale. Seeing this behavior across the industry, MediaMath is radically innovating around media curation and addressability.

In my conversations with members of the MediaMath leadership team, I was immediately struck by how much respect the organization has for the supply side. The company makes its money by selling to advertisers, of course, but is keenly aware of the critically important role that high-quality inventory plays in its ongoing success. Having run supply businesses at display, video and mobile platforms, I saw an acute connection between the passion I have for empowering publishers and making digital advertising simpler, and MediaMath’s core values.

Most would agree that programmatic in its current form needs improvement. MediaMath’s first major step was to introduce the Curated Market product — easily accessible premium, audience-informed, hand-picked inventory with a brand safety guarantee. Next comes addressing operational inefficiencies inherent to OpenRTB — bidding against yourself, dynamic floors, low win rates and unnecessarily high eCPMs. Taking these steps will permit the company to meet buyers’ needs while helping restore budgets to a diverse array of premium publishers.

We’re here to make programmatic a cleaner, safer, simpler, more cost-effective experience for buyers, and to help publishers take back control over their futures. I couldn’t be more honored to be a part of this team, and to work with so many of you as partners.

Media People

Q&A with Rahul Vasudev of MediaMath

June 19, 2017 — by MediaMath

This article originally appeared on Campaign Asia.

MediaMath’s APAC MD spoke to us about the company’s value proposition, its approach to ensuring a healthy ecosystem and where the industry is heading.

Last week, MediaMath announced that it had secured a new US$175 million senior credit facility, led by Goldman Sachs, in partnership with Santander Bank. The new line of credit will support MediaMath’s growing scale of the business, including the refinancing of existing debt facilities and to fund its ongoing growth objectives. Campaign talked to Rahul Vasudev, the company’s APAC managing director about how the independent programmatic company differentiates its approach in an ecosystem where DSP services are becoming increasingly commoditized.

Last week, MediaMath was named as a market leader by Forrester. In your view, what are the attributes that led to that recognition?

Being named in the latest report really gives us a lot of pleasure and excitement because the state of the industry today, a DSP platform is expected to have a minimum US$100 million coverage in order to be considered for the Forrester Research report, says plenty about how the ecosystem has evolved since MediaMath started. And within that report, the kind of things they are looking for — such as ‘do you have a strong identity graph?’, ‘do you have a strong ecosystem play?’, ‘are you able to bring more tools to your clients who want to solve so many problems?’ — there are so many things that marketers need to worry about. And so the report by Forrester speaks of the need that a platform be able to handle all these different things, to make programmatic marketing genuinely good as a response mechanism for the clients. The fact that there are only 11 significant or noteworthy players in the ecosystem is good, and within that, MediaMath has a good reputation in the market. People have heard of us. So being one of the largest ones and being mentioned in the report is great. Forrester to their credit actually conducted thorough diligence, going in and taking presentations from every vendor. This was to understand the capabilities, the future product vision, what releases are forthcoming, what clients say. And it was great to see that we like our clients as much as the clients like us back.

What is unique about the approach MediaMath takes in order to serve its clients?

So, a large part of our business comes from agencies. And MediaMath was one of the first ones to introduce The Triumvirate Advantage whereby the advertiser, the advertiser’s agency, and the technology vendor as a whole play the greatest role in making anything happen. Because not every client or brand has the capability in-house to make it happen. And on the brand side, the focus is on creating products and striving to create better products for the end customer — as opposed to getting involved in the media space and the learning investment it requires. I come from a media agency myself and people there are constantly in learning mode with regards to what Facebook is doing, Google is doing. There is so much to learn and it’s unfair to expect that someone sitting in a silo somewhere will stay up to speed with the industry. So the brand, the agency, and the technology together — we consider it to be the ecosystem for us.

With so many players in the DSP ecosystem offering services that are not exclusive to any intellectual property laws or patents, how does MediaMath differentiate itself from the commoditised remaining players?

A few things set us apart. Obviously, our internal company culture, our beliefs, our philosophy. What makes us come to work every day. The original intent was as John Wanamaker famously said, “50 percent of marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which 50 percent.” Our CEO Joe Zawadzki remarks that this is a terrible tagline for an industry to have. So that drives us every single day to help make sense of what is and what isn’t working. We come to work thinking, ‘what can we provide now as a set of tools, capabilities, ecosystem integrations, as a set of identifying who your customers are, who your best customers are. The best customers are those you should be willing and able to pay more for and knowing who you should be willing to pay less for. Knowing who gives you what kind of return on marketing. Some will give you a $1 return and some will give a $100 return. Your sweet spot lies somewhere in between, where there is the largest gain for the largest return. And…people are just not able to do it. So that’s kind of like the driving philosophy behind why MediaMath was formed, why we come into work, what problems we are trying to solve. Obviously, we are trying to solve these with lots of small problems like, there is a lot of inventory that is being bought and targeted at bots, fraudulent traffic and bad players in the ecosystem. How can we prevent that? So that’s one way in which we solve that to remove 2 percent of that 50 percent that’s not working. So I think that is something critical in driving us. Our clients [advertisers and agencies] care about giving a great customer experience. They want to know that you, the customer, are viewing communication at the time you are most receptive to it. And that the viewer is only seeing content, ads, and offers that is relevant to them. If we step back a few years ago, companies had to deal with a plethora of mobile companies, video companies, and social networks. And the aggregators just added to the noise. Marketers with time came to grips with it, accepting a reality wherein they would deal with 17 vendors to reach one customer. But if you are the customer, they are having a terrible experience because three mobile companies are not talking to each other and they are each showing one person a brand ad 20 times when on the client side the frequency is capped at five impressions per unique viewer. So marketers want a tool that is sophisticated enough to allow their brand message to reach the customer as an individual, as a person who has genuine tastes, and be able to serve them the right content at the right time, and at the right price. Because if I represent a shampoo company and you represent a luxury car company and both of you are trying to reach Priya, you are probably willing to pay S$100 for her and I am willing to pay S$0.50 for her. We should be able to distinguish the two, else it’s an unfair right. So, as MediaMath, how do I become intelligent enough as a platform to enable our advertiser to understand ‘at what user, at what price?’ is relevant.

And you’re able to go that deep with every single campaign, every single vertical, and category?

Exactly, so that’s where we have arrived. We’ve been in tools and our focus on machine learning is I think is one of the things that sets us apart. So the first one was like omnichannel, like truly omnichannel—reach the customer across all channels irrespective of walled gardens, siloes, individual strongholds that might have been built.

Read the full article here via Campaign Asia.

People Trends

Cannes 2017: Programmatic Takes Center Stage

June 14, 2017 — by MediaMath

Think back to 2007. George W. Bush was president. The iPhone just hit the market. The Cannes Grand Prix award went to a series of magazine ads for Tide Ultra laundry detergent.

I wasn’t at that show, but I would guess that programmatic wasn’t a huge topic of discussion.

But in 2007 MediaMath was actively thinking about a reinvention of marketing — with math and technology at the core.

And here we are, ten years later, in a very different marketing reality. And I think it’s amazing.

At this year’s show, I predict I’ll hear a lot about programmatic since today, two-thirds of U.S. display ad spending is being bought and sold programmatically. It is meaningfully infiltrating otherwise “traditional” media including audio and, critically, television and programmatic advertising technologies are increasingly connecting with marketing technologies to deliver seamless experiences across paid, earned and owned channels.

But I also look forward to discussions about the trends that will shape the next ten years. For my part, I’d love to hear and talk about: predictive analytics, new frontiers of addressability and a new definition of creativity that is built as much around distribution and targeting as what we typically think of as “creative.”

Predictive analytics

Machine learning is already making its presence known in our everyday lives: think customer-facing bots, robo advisors and Google searches. Now imagine a personal assistant that knows you so well it can curate your email, schedule your meetings and recommend you pack an umbrella when you leave home as rain’s on the horizon.

We’re just at the dawn of the near limitless applications of such machine-driven intelligence and marketers are just starting to realize its possibilities. As I’ve said before, integrated data coupled with omnichannel execution can expose patterns of behavior that marketers can use to predict what customers want and when, but the applications of this capability are still in their infancy. This can and will be game-changing for advertising, which has been built on the idea of mass exposure and communication instead of micro-targeting and personalized conversations, but is no longer bound by those traditional bonds.

Addressability

Predictive analytics are the fuel for addressability at scale, that is, the process of honing the right message to reach a consumer at a specific point in the purchase cycle on a channel, format or device that can both receive and give data. That’s a fancy way of saying, two way conversations are possible between brands and their prospects and customers. Now is the time to start preparing for a future full of entirely new addressable channels: TV is the obvious example, but imagine when a consumer can have a conversation with her refrigerator about what brand of milk she should buy!

Creativity

A new way of contemplating advertising requires a new contemplation of creativity. Advertising has always been premised on the idea of catching attention. But when the medium is no longer novel in itself, then the message must do the heavy lifting. That worked just fine when one brilliant TV commercial was enough — but in a highly fragmented world where consumers have increasingly high expectations, it’s just not enough anymore.

Because the concept of true addressability at scale is still so new to so many brands, the idea of bringing real creativity into this mix still feels far off for many. But as consumers get better at tuning out non-relevant advertising, ad creators will need to up their game — getting closer to the process of data-driven media planning and buying, understanding and mapping to deep segmentation, contemplating the implications of real-time optimization against business goals as messaging is contemplated… really, thinking about the medium and the message in the same thought, rather than as separate questions.

Next stop 2027

The last 10 years have ushered in nearly wholesale change in advertising and, more broadly, marketing. I would expect that the landscape of 2027 will be even more starkly different. It’s possible, for instance, that we will no longer be carrying our smartphones with us everywhere because we’ll be wearing smart glasses or some other device that we can’t imagine now. It’s also possible that VR will be so popular that it will really seem like a (normal) alternate reality for many. Now, for a second, think about what either — let alone both — of those things would mean for marketing! Head –> explodes.

What we can predict is that the industry will not stagnate. This is why I for one love this business — it’s never dull. And I can’t wait for another week’s worth of discussion at this year’s Cannes about how we all innovate, invent, reinvent or blow up today’s norms in preparation for our next reality.

For more insights on programmatic’s past, present and future, check out our #10Then10Ahead Content Hub!

People

Adtech Company MediaMath Secures $175M Credit Facility

June 7, 2017 — by MediaMath

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch.

MediaMath, a company offering tools and data for automated ad-buying, announced today that it has secured a $175 million credit facility.

The deal was led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from Santander Bank.

The company says this financing will fund its continued growth and allow it to refinance existing debt. (MediaMath’s 2014 funding round included $105 million in debt.)

In a note to MediaMath employees, CFO Stacey Bain said this doesn’t mean the company chose more debt “instead of” an equity funding round: “In fact, this line of credit allows us to be flexible in terms of how and when we decide to raise another round of equity, ensuring we get the best deal for MediaMath.”

And while the IPO market seems to be improving for tech companies (including, perhaps, adtech), Bain also wrote that this isn’t setting MediaMath up to go public: “Right now, we like operating privately and we’ll explore an IPO when and if it makes sense for MediaMath.”

The company says it now has nearly 700 employees and works with all of the major ad holding companies.

“We’re thrilled to work with Goldman Sachs and Santander, who are equally ambitious to support the growing scale of our business today, and motivated to support the needs of a reimagined and increasingly sophisticated supply chain in the future,” said CEO Joe Zawadzki in the funding release.

People

MediaMath’s Career Journeys Program

June 6, 2017 — by MediaMath

“A career path is rarely a path at all. A more interesting life is usual a more crooked, winding path of missteps, luck and vigorous work. It is almost always a clumsy balance between the things you try to make happen and the things that happen to you.” — Tom Freston, MTV cofounder

At MediaMath we appreciate that career paths are often crooked and winding. Each new role, experience and assignment can be a destination or a stop along the way. Our life journeys don’t always occur in a straight line. Often, the most rewarding careers take us to new locations, create adventures in projects we never encountered previously and teach us about ourselves and other people.

Since so many people follow a circuitous career path, MediaMath has decided to elevate career development in new ways via the MediaMath Career Journeys Program.

Across the organization our people are asking good questions about career progression. They share exciting stories about their own career development at the company. Each person tells a different story and have unique definitions of what career success means to them.

To help our employees follow the path to self-discovery via their career, we often move people to help develop a more holistic impact on the business and will explore creating new roles that maximize individual potential.

How it works

Personal interaction between our Voyagers (employees) and our Navigators (managers) is the heart of the program. In addition, we have simplified career planning and will continue to challenge our people to make the most of their journeys.

MediaMath’s Career Journeys Program reinforces the notion that career conversations are not merely promotion conversations and that “up” is not the only way to grow. In particular, the program helps our people to do the following:

Define interests: Where do they want to go and why?
Assess Reality: How ready are they, what is realistic and what resources do they have?
Create Options: What do they want to see and do?
Develop Plan: Who do they want to travel with, how will they get there and what do they need to pack?

We are excited to take career development to the next level and further enable the bright people at MediaMath in creating wonderful career journeys for themselves.

Learn more about our career opportunities here.

People

Making a Good First Impression Is Knowing It’s Not Your Last…

May 31, 2017 — by MediaMath

This byline written by Gloria Basem, Chief People Officer at MediaMath, originally appeared on Fortune.

For good or ill, humans often make snap judgments. We place a lot of stock in preparedness, remembering someone’s name, attire, posture, firm handshakes, tone of voice, and word choice. These are important, but to really make a successful first impression on someone, you should treat the initial meeting as the beginning of a relationship.

Here are a few ways to start off on the right foot:

Be curious

When it comes to first impressions, asking is more important than telling. Interviewers and clients want to know that you’ve spent time learning about the company, but they also want to tell you about their company. Even if you believe you know the situation, asking them to tell you about the company’s history, culture, challenges, and opportunities will help you learn more, as each person has a unique perspective on the situation. In taking this approach, you’ll make them feel special and they’ll trust you more.

Find a connection

Before meeting someone new, research them on LinkedIn. Past companies and alma maters can provide a number of conversation starters. But be careful about referencing people in common until you know the nature of the relationship they may have with that person.

When meeting someone in their office, look for visual cues to help build a connection. I always look for photos, children’s drawings, unique décor, and books we may have both read. While the person leading the conversation is often responsible for creating the small talk before the discussion, you can help take the pressure off and therefore establish a good rapport.

Tell stories

When it comes time to share information about your own experiences, tell concise stories that demonstrate how you would handle similar situations in the future. Telling great stories can help others relate to you and your thought process. Try to include humor to make your stories more engaging.

Be positive

Never underestimate how important it is to smile and project friendliness and optimism to everyone you meet. If you talk negatively about past colleagues or employers, people will worry that you’ll do the same about them someday. Furthermore, people are attracted to those with a can-do attitude. If you’re going to be working with them every day, they’ll want to know that you’re a positive presence in the workplace.

Don’t talk about your old job

Interviewers certainly want to know what you have done in the past, but your first day is not the time to tell people how you did things at your old company. That said, make sure to share any lessons learned from your old job that are applicable to your new one. If you take the right approach, your new colleagues will feel like you’re invested in your new company.

People

Ask Digiday Careers: The Non-Technical Skills That Ad Tech Companies Look for in Candidates

May 5, 2017 — by MediaMath

How do adtech companies balance technical skill and creativity in the talent they hire? For Digiday’s recent Careers column, Jenna Griffith, SVP, Head of Professional Services for MediaMath, weighs in.

At MediaMath, specifically at entry-level positions, the skills that we are looking for are not tremendously different than other industries. First and foremost, we look for people who are smart, passionate, and nice. There is no ‘ad tech knowledge’ mention in there purposefully. I often find bringing people in with expertise in other industries to be helpful — different perspectives can add a tremendous amount of value when focusing on client service. Yes, employees need to learn the technology in order to understand how best to apply it. But the technical aspect is much easier to learn than learning how to creatively approach a client problem and return a solution. One of my favorite interview questions is asking a candidate to teach me something, anything, about which they are passionate. I have learned about rugby, quantum dots and electronic music — each of these people had little adtech experience at the point of hire, but are now some of our most highly valued employees given their passion, creative mindset, and attention to detail.

People

MediaMath and Seva Partner to Preserve and Restore Sight in Low-Income Regions

April 12, 2017 — by MediaMath

You might wear glasses or contact lenses, but aside from an annual checkup, you probably never think about your eyesight. But for the 35 million people living in developing countries who are blind, this disability can strip them of their livelihood and condemn their families to extreme poverty. The good news: 80 percent of these cases are treatable or preventable. Half of blindness is caused by cataracts, and an individual’s vision can be restored through a quick 15-minute surgery.

Seva is an international non-profit that partners worldwide to prevent blindness and restore sight. Seva works in over 20 resource-poor countries, focusing on communities where a small contribution goes a long way. In these areas, the average cost for a surgery to completely restore a person’s eyesight is just $50.

MediaMath is stepping up to support Seva in a big way. We first heard about Seva through The Life You Can Save, an organization that promotes highly impactful nonprofits. Seva stood out as a charity that aligned with our own values: creating impact via measurable outcomes. This is an example of how a low-cost intervention can change someone’s life. And it means a lot to MediaMath—it was the #1 supported charity by our employees in 2016.

To support Seva, we are launching an internal program called “Campaigns Count.” For every 20 campaigns in our platform, MediaMath will fund a sight-saving surgery for someone who suffers from low vision or whose blindness is treatable.

We want this program to be more than just MediaMath.org doing good on the side—we want giving back to be in MediaMath’s DNA. With that in mind, and to help keep track of our progress, a group of us joined the recent MediaMath Hackathon to create a feature inside the MediaMath platform to monitor the number of people helped as a result of our campaigns. The widget tracks the number of surgeries we will fund in real time. By adding it into our product, we hope it raises awareness with clients and users, showing that their campaigns count and inviting them to learn more about our program and get involved.

We aim to help restore sight to thousands of people through the program. As MediaMath grows, our impact grows.

Thanks to everyone involved.

People Trends

Joe Zawadzki Talks About the Birth of his Career and Foray into Programmatic

April 7, 2017 — by MediaMath

Joe Zawadzki has been at the game for almost 20 years.

After starting his career as a financial analyst building real estate valuation models, he launched his very first start-up— a suite of apps for online shopping—in 1999. In his next venture, Poindexter, he found his wheelhouse of applying technology to advertising. The rest is history.

Zawadzki spoke with Gartner analyst Martin Kihn about his career trajectory and his presence during the pivotal moments in the evolution of programmatic. A portion of this interview is included below. To read the full discussion, visit Kihn’s blog here.

WHEN DID YOUR AD TECH STORY START?

It was around 2000 or so. We were doing clustering algorithms for personalization, using our tech to decide what to show people when they navigated a site. The purpose was to improve conversion on the site. It was a natural extension then to wonder, you know, how do I get better prospects onto my site in the first place. The obvious way to do that was to do an analysis of the best customers, what they looked like. We had access to B.I. and a lot of insights around [existing] customers. So we could potentially do a lot. The problem was the media buying process itself was broken.

HOW WAS MEDIA BUYING BROKEN?

At the time, it was basically you go to the top twenty retail publishers, you buy space on all of them. Sort them by click-through rates. And, you know, God will figure out the rest. We had these strategic accounts, including AOL, American Express and Delta Air Lines. They had these great insights and as it trickled through the value stream of media, it just got watered down to age and income. You’d take that and bounce it against the publishers and get an index. Measure engagement with a banner using clicks. I thought: This can’t possibly be the best answer!

WHAT DID YOU DO?

Well, we launched a passback network. [Note: “Passbacks” are ad impressions that do not get a qualified bid, i.e., remnant inventory.] We would get an impression offered to us by a publisher and we would score it in real time and pass back what we didn’t want. We did about 85-90% passbacks on an ad by ad basis. There was a big discrepancy for redirects [i.e., data leakage]. Basically, we lost 2% of the traffic for each hop along the passback chain. What that meant was the publisher might sell for $3 CPM and keep 5%, passing back 95%, say. That rejected stuff would drop back into the system as a house ad usually at about 25-50 cents [CPM].

It was basically a terrible system — very inefficient, obviously. And it didn’t scale. But we represented extremely valuable marketers, sophisticated and demanding with big budgets and quantitative goals they could commit to. We basically forced publishers to do what we wanted from a business model, workflow, and technical implementation standpoint. Which worked as well as forcing people to do things generally does.

At this point I’m wondering how can we bring this real-time idea to the publisher landscape. Basically, how can we help advertisers buy the wheat and not the chaff. Poindexter was a buy-side solution. And it became obvious to me that to do this [real-time impression valuation] thing at scale we would have to fix the publisher problem.

We had this dynamic advertiser performance solution already. And I had the idea for POE for Publishers [Note: Predictive Optimization Engine, the core of what would become [x+1]’s ad tech platform]. It was a product for publishers. We were selling into the DoubleClick Sonar network, which was the performance media arm of DoubleClick. At this point DoubleClick decided to sell off its media business to L90 [later Max Worldwide], and DoubleClick itself was pure tech — an ad server.

Later to be sold to Google, of course. At this point, the story gets complicated. (For a more detailed telling, see Mike Smith’s fascinating 2014 book Targeted.) So here is Zawadzki, CEO of Poindexter/[x+1], and he’s working with a refugee from DoubleClick’s media business, an ace sales guy named Mike Walrath. It is now 2005.

At this point, the size of the opportunity got better. We realized we could mash together two media offerings around our ad server. Walrath and I were spending hours and hours each day banging out this idea. We were basically going to adapt the ad server so it could pick impressions that performed the best. We wanted to automate a process that was manual.

And just as we’re getting closer to making it work, L90 gets acquired by Excite. Now Excite already had its own ad server, so it didn’t need this thing.

BUT YOU DIDN’T GIVE UP ON THE IDEA?

Mike and I still saw this as a real opportunity and we were like, Why not do it anyway? Walrath left Max Worldwide. He was doing go-to-market strategy on the publisher side for [his own start-up] Right Media. We were building the core tech underneath. We spent about nine months building this idea out, working with Brian O’Kelley who was Senior Director of SmartServe, which was our own ad server.

This was on 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue. We were building the product. We had all of the joint venture and entity formation agreements ready to sign, and I went into my board. They were the investors and I was this crazy founder guy. I didn’t have the greatest relationship, you know. And the board shot it down. They said no.

Read the rest here.

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