OpenX

Today's guest is Gil Summer, Vice President of Product Management at Freewheel, and a product leader with more than 15 years of experience building across programmatic advertising.

Before he joined Freewheel, Gil led product at OpenX, He oversaw management, design, and marketplace quality.

He has a great background having worked at Kinetics and Fiverr.

Fantastic product guy.

I'd love to hear a little bit about you.

I saw all the podcasts the same way.

I want to hear about your background, what you did at Fiverr, OpenX, Kinetics, and now Freewheel.

And then we'd love to hear more about the CTV space overall.

Welcome to another episode of our Life in Digital podcast series.

I'm joined with the lovely Stacey Borer from OpenX.

Stacey, thank you so much for joining.

How are you?

Yeah, great to see you.

It's a shame we can't be in person, but we're making this work over Zoom and I really appreciate your time.

And of course, it would be great if you wouldn't mind starting us off and telling us a bit about you, Stacey, and of course, a bit about OpenX for anyone who's maybe not heard of you guys.

Absolutely.

Pubmatic has stood it up.

I know, I know it's on OpenX and Magnite roadmap.

Like it's being used.

The agentic real-time framework is, it's actively being used.

And I thought, "That's where I need to go.

Follow the money." So I moved into ad tech, um, started with OpenX as an SSP.

That was the rise of header bidding.

The timing was absolutely perfect.

It's how it feels to me.

Yeah.

Um, having worked at OpenX, uh, Equative, various other ad techs, what do publishers need, and you talked about the idea of partnership, but from a, a great tech partnership at this point in time?

I think what, what people are looking for is always, you know, we're always looking for incremental value, incremental uplift, or it doesn't always have to be about money.

And I think given that programmatic is a world that, you know, is, you know, it's very built up on scale and volume and high reach.

So we started working with the SSPs, so Padmatic and OpenX.

And again, like, When we talk about people who want to be at the frontier of innovation, I think these are two SSPs who have really shown that in terms of not just what they say, but what they're doing and how they're pushing us internally across their organization, which is really valuable for us as an out-of-stage business.

But in terms of how we actually work together, so SSPs obviously collect heaps amount of traffic and data across all their publishers and their networks.

I'll also point out kind of a key difference that I think is at stake here, kind of playing the devil's advocate here.

I think the auction manipulation that I saw is like the publisher, SSP reporter, you have Google with its ad server kind of controlling the rules and being the auctioneer there that then affects Google, which was a participant in the auction, Google AdX, as well as these other independent ad tech companies, the OpenX, Magnite, Pubmatics of the World, Criteos, and then the publishers themselves.

So you had all these independent ad tech companies who couldn't really run their businesses the way they wanted to because they were stuck in this Google ad server auction.

Whereas I feel like for Amazon, or I mean, there was also some, we got the shaking the couch cushions comments in the Google search trial where they acknowledge kind of manipulating some of these prices in order to meet their quarterly earnings.