What's Interesting in AdTech?

Ari Paparo is a longtime ad tech veteran, not to mention holding the disputed title as Funniest Person in Ad Tech. Some highlights from our conversation:

Innovation requires fragmentation. Ad tech’s complexity is a longtime talking point. And it is undeniably a convoluted supply chain that’s given the veneer of plausible deniability to all kinds of corner cutting, at least in my experience as an observer for many years. But Ari points out that “innovation requires fragmentation,” and besides, many of those pushing an anti-complexity narrative just happen to have “anti-complexity solutions” to sell. Go figure.

Small publishers can opt out. Google is the simple ad tech solution. Most small advertisers can just default to Google and Facebook. But larger enterprises gravitate to more complexity simply because they have more complex businesses.

Apple overturned the industry. Cynical or not, Apple’s use of privacy to restrict data flows has upended how the industry operates and will operate going forward.  It’s of course no coincidence that these privacy restrictions hurt their rivals in Meta and Google. “There's no love lost between those companies, so hitting them in the kneecaps was kind of fun,” Ari said.