After seven and a half wonderful years at AppNexus / Xandr (which was the best home and family I ever could have asked for) I’ve made the exciting decision to join the TripleLift team as SVP, Product. Official coverage here from MediaPost.
What is TripleLift?
TripleLift got its start as the leading programmatic native advertising platform (think – advertising that is integrated seamlessly into webpages – not banner ads), but is quickly emerging as a leader in the native category and investing in adjacent areas.
Why did I decide to join the TripleLift Team?
There are 5 key reasons why I think TripleLift is the next breakout star in ad tech.
1) Native ads are better for advertisers, publishers, users, and the internet.
Some ad tech insiders have grown skeptical of native advertising due to “content recommendation widget” companies showing predominately low quality “native” ads tacked onto the bottom of websites. However, TripleLift is different. TripleLift’s core business facilitates real in-feed native advertising that is integrated seamlessly into the content of a website (similar to Facebook in-feed ads). These native ads perform better for advertisers, generate more revenue for publishers, and provide a better user experience than standard banner ads. It’s no wonder that native advertising (and particularly native in-feed advertising) is one of the fastest growing segments of the advertising market.
2) Investing in cutting edge tech
Because native advertising involves serving ads into odd shape ad slots with mis-matched creative assets – TripleLift has become expert at Computer Vision and image scanning technology to accurately crop, resize, and render native ads programmatically. This technology extends naturally into new verticals like OTT, messaging, VR/AR, social platforms, and more, where TripleLift is making major investments. Also, since TripleLift always renders its native ads (rather than serving a 3rd party tag), it’s immune to a lot of the malware, ad stuffing, and poor-quality ad problems that plague other ad tech companies.
3) TripleLift is hiring, profitable, and relatively bootstrapped
TripleLift has achieved scale, is growing quickly, hiring, profitable, and, having only raised $16M, relatively bootstrapped compared to a lot of its ad tech peers. As an employment brand, it’s one of the brightest spots in a quickly maturing industry.
4) Solid technical foundation
The founders of TripleLift are 3 ex-AppNexus employees (and my former colleagues). AppNexus has become synonymous with excellent technology and the TripleLift leadership team has maintained that tech-first mindset.
5) Diversifying outside of core ad tech
TripleLift has successfully launched and commercialized a branded content product (Content Dial) that makes branded content easy to scale for brands and publishers through an automated marketplace. This “non-ad tech” line of business helps diversity the company into new markets.
For these reasons I’m thrilled to make TripleLift my next home and I look forward to an exciting adventure in this next chapter.