MarTech Interview with Michael Hilts, SVP Products @ Stirista

Michael Hilts, SVP Products at Stirista shares a few observations on what’s driving change in the CTV ad market:

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Hi Mike, welcome to our martech interview series. Tell us about your time as a product leader in the B2B martech market.

It’s hard to believe that I have now been working in the MarTech and AdTech space for the better part of 25 years. For the last 12, I have concentrated on B2B marketing, specifically identity, account-based marketing and orchestration, demand generation and data services solutions.

I started working with Stirista three years ago and came on-board full-time as SVP of product in 2023 to actualize the company’s vision of simplifying the marketing process through the Stirista solution stack. Through continued future innovations including integration of multichannel execution capabilities for marketing and advertising with necessary APIs and automation frameworks, we enable our clients of all types to find, convert, grow and retain new customers.

We’d love to hear more about Stirista’s latest AI powered CPM optimizer and how it enables end users.

Absolutely. We are particularly excited about this feature as CTV advertising, while offering very promising potential, is still a new dynamic for ad buying. And CTV CPMs can be a challenge. Our latest feature, as part of Stirista’s DSP, uses AI or machine learning to allow marketers to buy impressions at the best price while bidding high enough to purchase the impression successfully.

Ultimately, advertisers looking to take advantage of the power of CTV are able to double their campaign impact without maxing out ad spend.

Why is CTV becoming more crucial to today’s marketers and how can modern marketers integrate CTV efforts and measurement tactics more seamlessly with the rest of their existing martech?

Good question. Consumers are increasingly shifting their consumer behavior towards streaming services and away from traditional media, like linear TV, providing an opportunity to reach targeted audiences with data-driven advertising. Unlike traditional TV, CTV allows for more precise targeting and measurement capabilities, allowing marketers to optimize campaigns effectively.

To integrate CTV efforts with existing martech, marketers can leverage data integration platforms to unify CTV data with other marketing channels, ensuring a comprehensive view of performance. Advanced attribution models that account for cross-device and cross-channel behavior are critical for accurately attributing conversions to CTV. Marketing automation tools that support identity requirements for CTV and other mediums can streamline campaign execution and measurement, ensuring consistency and efficiency across all channels. By adopting these strategies, marketers can seamlessly incorporate CTV into their broader marketing efforts, maximizing the impact of their campaigns

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What does it take to truly optimize and boost CTV campaign growth in this market?

In order for CTV to really thrive, future success is predicated on transparency and trust unlike today’s online display advertising. Marketers need to know they are reaching real people and not just bots. It is incumbent for the entire industry to establish prerequisites for CTV that have even now not been demonstrated in the online display world.

Can you share a few thoughts on the future of CTV and AI in martech?

As we’ve already seen, AI is having a significant impact on how we approach problems and opportunities in data-rich sectors like adtech. I see a not so distant future where AI will play an interesting role in content creation and ad decisioning. By detecting images, video and programming, AI could prompt real-time contextual advertising based on content. As an example, if a viewer is watching a movie, rather than the ad criteria being solely based on the user, household, or genre of the program, the advertising could also incorporate contextual signals in real-time from the scene within the movie.

Five martech highlights in terms of martech features or products from around the world you’d like to discuss here because they’ve piqued your interest, before we wrap up.

There are a ton of advancements in MarTech/AdTech space but I am impressed with these right now:

• Incorporating AI into its graphic design tools like CANVA provides marketers of all sizes increased support and idea creation around both creative and messaging. There are a lot of other solutions out there but they seem to have been able to drive adoption across a lot of industry verticals.
• Keeping with the content creation theme, there are countless solutions emerging as it relates to generating copy, images, messaging, etc. that are slick and easy to use. These have already had an impact and will continue to as their adoption grows.  There may be a few intellectual property lawyers that will benefit from them as well 🙂
• The development of MarTech solutions and features is still heavily dependent on developers and data engineers writing code. AI development tools that simplify these tasks are a game changer as even non tech professionals can use it to develop robust Martech solutions. As a bit of a coding hobbyist myself, I am able to do things using these tools at a level I never thought possible.
• Companies have gone wild leveraging LLMs to create chat bots for exploring and interacting with data throughout the organization. Several companies are using some of these techniques to enable non-technical people to explore and conduct data discovery using natural language. In addition to a ton of efficiency gains this also greatly enhances a company’s ability to evolve its data products and services.
• I was at a conference a few months back and a company was presenting on how it had built advanced machine learning models to analyze audio and visual data of public figures to determine sentiment. These were highly advanced and reliable models and it occurred to me that there are new frontiers of data for martech and adtech that are just emerging.  How these would be leveraged is yet to be seen but certainly none of this was on the table even five years ago.

Stirista is a data-driven marketing technology provider that combines the power of authoritative identity data with the execution of omnichannel marketing. Through its data and customer-centric approach, Stirista is helping Fortune 500 and mid-market brands increase brand loyalty and acquire new customers. Stirista’s privacy compliant data insights helps clients interact with customers and prospects via digital, email and social channels.

Michael (Mike) is a seasoned technology and product leader with extensive experience in the B2B and consumer Martech and Adtech sectors and a deep background in Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) and Data-As-A-Service (DaaS) solutions. As the SVP of Product at Stirista, he oversees the full product development lifecycle, from business justification and analysis to requirements development, planning, rollout, and ongoing support. Mike is responsible for product strategy, roadmap planning, go-to-market support, and managing key product initiatives, ensuring that Stirista’s offerings align with its long-term vision of enabling clients to find, convert, grow, and retain new customers. Mike’s past roles include SVP of Data Products at Demandbase, Chief Operating Officer at WhoToo (acquired by Demandbase), Chief Executive at Yesmail, Chief Executive at @Once (acquired by Yesmail), and member of the Infogroup (now DataAxle) senior leadership team. He holds an MBA from Portland State University and a B.A. from Washington State University.