MarTech Interview with Jared Siegal, Founder and CEO at Aditude

Jared Siegal, Founder and CEO at Aditude discusses what AdOps practices can drive true value to a digital ad experience in this quick chat:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jared, tell us about yourself and the journey with Aditude…

I started Aditude in 2019 as a consultant. I quietly grew the business to about 20 publishers by simply providing expert ad operations guidance. Pretty quickly I had the aha moment that I was essentially being paid as a middle man between publishers and multiple third parties (developers, ad operations companies, header bidding companies, writing staff, etc).

So I decided to build a solution that handled all aspects of monetization to allow publishers to focus on what they know best: their content. Within a year we were doing several billion impressions a month on our first wrapper iteration. In 2021 I decided to hire multiple employees and really focus on proprietary tech. In November 2021 we launched our Cloud Wrapper and Cloud Layout solution. Within a few months we were doing 30B+ impressions a month on the wrapper and several B pageviews a month on our front end cms. Over the last 12 months we have gone from a team of four to 16, launched on AMP, APP, and video, and now do over 75B requests a month on our platform.

Can you talk about some of the top ad ops best practices you feel anyone in digital advertising needs to focus on to drive better output?

Cleaning up tech debt can have a massive impact on both CPMs and ads per session. We firmly believe that the best way to generate incremental revenue is to improve session duration, reduce bounce rate, and therefore serve more ads per session.

So many ad ops teams and companies focus purely on advertiser relationships. That can only get you so far. If your prebid wrapper is erroring out 10% of the time, or third party scripts are causing a 5 second delay in ad calls, solving those can have a monumental impact on performance. That is why we spend so much time improving our load speed and support all types of back end and front end platforms with unique integrations. The days of one size fits all are over.

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How can brands use better training initiatives to empower their Ad Ops teams?

This is something we feel very strongly about. IN order to be effective at ad ops, you need to understand every aspect of the business. This includes development and sales. Everyone in every role in our company is trained in every aspect. Our ad ops team pushes more releases per day than our development team. Our development team spends hours each day inside GAM. Our sales team knows how to review a live site and verify integrations. Because every member can contribute to every aspect of the business, we are able to operate a lean yet very powerful team.

Can you share a few thoughts on the impact of AI on the future of Ad Operations?

I don’t think the effectiveness here has been proven out yet. I can envision a world where predictive analysis helps determine page layouts, ad injection logic, floors, even ssps to call in real time on the page as the user goes through an article. A lot of this is, however, only as good as the data being pumped into an algorithm. While we are in early stages of research here, the bigger immediate impact we have found to be on the development side. SOlutions allow our devs to code 100s of lines a minute, meaning we can get through product launches much faster than before.

We’d love to hear more about Aditude’s near term plans and what’s in store?
We have three areas of focus:

Growing the team. We are hiring in ad ops, sales and development – We are growing our team to be able to build more products for publishers and provide them with a team of ad ops experts and developers. On the product front, we are full force on the development and rollout of Cloud Control, our front facing UI for ad ops, content creation, and header bidding. In beta now, this system has the potential to completely change the way ad ops and development teams approach a/b testing. We plan on growing our dev team over the next 12 months to build out more features here. Our analytics platform is also underway and will be a focus as we hire more data engineers. On top of this, we will continue to improve all our existing products and launch new features as fast as we can.

Marketing and a bit of rebranding – As it relates to marketing and branding, we recently brought on our first head of marketing and will be working to solidify our brand reputation as a technology-focused ad operations company. We plan to invest in our own paid media as well as lots of event sponsorships. We also plan to host more of our own events for clients and potential partners. Additionally, we are reworking our entire brand, including a new website to better reflect our persona and increase awareness in our industry of who we are.

Acquisitions – We have our eyes on a handful of companies as potential acquisition targets. Whether it be smaller niche header-bidding companies that are fully focused on one piece of technology, we see this funding as a great way to quickly expand our reach.

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Aditude helps publishers scale their business and increase revenue through better technology and websites. The company provides a proprietary technology platform that enables tailored solutions for every publisher and works to create revenue-focused publishers with customized pricing to meet their needs. Aditude’s team of ad support experts and developers help publishers save time and money without having to worry about ad operations and performance.

Jared Siegal is Founder and CEO at Aditude