Joanna O’Connell is one of the most recognizable names in ad tech, a fame she built over the course of three decades as an industry analyst, and marketer, among other roles. O’Connell is now evp of innovation at R3.

In this episode of Digiday’s Oral History of Ad Tech, she speaks with Seb Joseph about her role in helping to build one of the media industry’s first agency trading desks at Publicis Groupe during her role at Razorfish in the mid-to-late 2000s.

In this discussion, she covers

• The desire to illuminate the black box of programmatic advertising
• Holding companies’ desire to use ad tech as a means of carving out new revenue in austere times
•  How the ‘agency-friendly’ model of ad tech prevailed

In the coming weeks, Digiday’s History of Ad Tech, produced by Digiday Media’s audio producer Sara Patterson, lifts the lid on some of the key undercurrents in ad tech over the last 20 years with Seb Joseph, senior news editor, and Ronan Shields, senior reporter, advertising technology, in conversation with some of the key players during that time.