AppNexus

There's, you know, fraud here and there.

Um, I remember a moment probably in 2011 when I was talking to some of my data scientists at AppNexus, and they said, "Hey, we think this is fraud.

Like, we think this particular client of ours is doing something fraudulent." And so I, I dug in, I looked at it, and I was like, "That does seem sketchy." And I actually called the client, who I've known at this point for many years, and I said, "Hey, this seems really sketchy." He's like, "No, Brian, I promise you it's not sketchy.

There's a logical explanation." And he explains it to me, and I'm like, "That does sound pretty good.

You can't do this." And so this is the sort of trade-off, right? Like, what do we do? Do we make the New York Times mad but close this fraud loophole? Do we only allow certain publishers to have private inventory? What happens if our competitors now get all the New York Times inventory, and meanwhile all of our clients quit because we closed the loophole? So I guess what I'm saying is, like, being at the heart of this moment, and, and a series of these moments through the course of the life cycle of programmatic, gave me this really strong sense of responsibility, that this wasn't somebody else's problem.

Like, these were choices that would change the trajectory of my business, of, you know, the industry.

So fast-forward, I sell AppNexus, I get into sustainability through COVID, actually, because I'm fascinated with supply chains, and I'm taking an MIT course on supply chains that has a sustainability module.

And I was thinking about this for the real world.

Roussy, 16 years in digital, and I still struggle to explain my job at family dinners.

And I started in Paris in 2010 as a media trader at Orange Advertising, working on the right majors and AppNexus.

It was the really beginning of programmatic in France.

And we were buying marketplace inventory through interface, which scratched every afternoon.