The 900 Optimizations Your Ad Ops Team Never Gets To | Frans Vermeulen, Swivel

How do you get one ad ops person doing the work of 15 to 20? Frans Vermeulen, President of Swivel, explains how AI-driven automation is changing yield management, programmatic optimization and ad operations for large publishers and CTV broadcasters, without ripping out the ad stack. Frans has spent 25 years in digital advertising at DoubleClick, FreeWheel, Comcast, Tru Optik and TransUnion. In this conversation we cover: \- Why Swivel is an orchestration layer on top of existing ad servers, not another ad server \- How natural language creates the rules, while deterministic scripts make the changes \- Why automating the 900 small optimizations a human team never gets to adds up to real incremental revenue \- How to prove revenue uplift with holdback and control groups \- The "Rosetta Stone" problem of fragmented ad platforms, APIs and data latency \- Why the UI isn't dead, and agent-to-agent trading won't take over the world \- Where the CTV marketplace is heading as supply grows and prices come under pressure Learn more about Swivel: https://www.swivel.ai Chapters: 0:00 Introduction: AI in the ad tech landscape 1:51 Swivel's origin story and the SpringServe team 6:21 Why ad ops problems never seem to get solved 7:58 What Swivel does: scaling ad operations 12:32 Where Swivel sits in the ad stack 16:17 Where Swivel innovates: AI plus deterministic rules 20:43 Replacing human actions vs. doing what humans can't 22:33 Proving revenue uplift with holdback groups 25:05 Fragmented systems, data latency and the "Rosetta Stone" 27:34 Giving power back to the sell side 29:27 Contrarian views: the UI isn't dead 33:22 The state of the CTV marketplace 36:28 Where to find Frans and Swivel I'm James Deaker, The Yield Doctor. Through Korukea Media, I help publishers and ad tech companies with pricing strategy and yield management. https://korukeamedia.com/ Subscribe to The Yield Doctor Report: https://korukeamedia.com/newsletter/