Question Everything

Roblox’s head of immersive media Ashley McCollum explains how the online gaming giant built its ad platform with demand for programmatic video in mind. And she previews Roblox’s ambitions to grow an ecommerce platform for real-world purchases.          

Quad Media President Joshua Lowcock asks all ad tech partners for log files as a matter of course. And if a company isn’t willing to hand them over, that’s a sign it’s probably hiding something. Plus: The fallacy of scale and pondering the true role of a third-party verification partner.

Cookie deprecation and the reduced availability of mobile ad IDs is rocking the ad tech ecosystem. But signal loss is also an opportunity for a younger company to build new privacy-preserving targeting technology and grab market share, according to Remco Westermann, CEO of Verve Group’s parent company, MGI.

Jeromy Sonne only began bootstrapping his ad optimization and analytics startup Daypart.AI in 2023, having missed the heady days of low interest rates and easy money. Still, there’s gold in them thar hills for a programmatic startup that isn’t exactly a DSP, isn’t built on cookie-based data and is native to cloud-based advertising.

If Alex Schultz, Meta’s CMO and VP of analytics, had his way, the term “performance marketing” would be retired. There isn’t a line [between] brand and performance,” he says. “It all performs.”

It’s been more than a year since Bloomberg stopped running third-party programmatic display ads on its website – and it was the right move, says Christine Cook, Bloomberg Media’s global CRO.

Businesses will always need to find a compromise between privacy and utility, but it’s more than possible to strike a healthy balance, says Graham Mudd, president and chief product officer at privacy startup Anonym.

It’s not that enterprise analytics is broken. The bigger issue, says Obele Brown-West, president of data intelligence platform Tracer, is that enterprise analytics was never all that functional to begin with.

Advertisers expect direct proof of performance from their streaming ad buys. But even though most people don’t shop via their TV screens (yet), new ad formats can still help brands boost consideration, says MediaLink Managing Director Mark Wagman.

If you’re an ad tech or martech vendor thinking about pitching a marketer, then Kamal Bhandal, global VP of brand and consumer experience at Invisalign, has some important advice for you.