The Aperiam Podcast Yobi Striving to Redefine Consumer Decisioning
Oct 8, 2025
Max Snow and Frank Portman, co-founders of Yobi, share their journey from a behavioral science research lab to building a powerful privacy-forward data estate. They discuss their commitment to ethical consumer behavior prediction sparked by their Princeton roots. The duo reveals how they've innovated in programmatic advertising and CTV, leveraging partnerships with Microsoft Azure to enhance privacy while scaling. They also touch on modeling consumer behavior dynamically and navigating the current AI landscape amidst the hype, while maintaining transparency and trust.
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Academic Roots Sparked Yobi
- Max Snow started Yobi in 2019 with Princeton behavioral science roots and academic collaborators.
- He built a research lab to access unique datasets and apply machine learning to predict consumer behavior.
Data Estate Competes With Walled Gardens
- Yobi invested heavily to assemble exclusive first- and second-party data from retailers and banks.
- That dataset powers models aimed to rival walled gardens on open web advertising outcomes.
Plug Models Into DSPs For Execution
- Integrate decisioning models into DSPs to select the best person, price, and time for an impression.
- Focus on bid differentiation to capture alpha in how much to pay per opportunity.