Ad Tech: Seven Requirements for Next-Generation Leaders

By Ann Blinkhorn and Randall Rothenberg

Executive Summary

The advertising technology industry stands at a pivotal inflection point. With artificial intelligence reshaping business models and workflows, regulatory pressures mounting on major platforms, and the competitive landscape evolving rapidly, tomorrow's ad tech leaders will need a fundamentally different skill set than their predecessors. Based on extensive interviews with industry pioneers—including CEOs, investors, and operators who have built and scaled billion-dollar businesses—a clear picture emerges of what it takes to lead in this new era.

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Advertising technology is the most important innovation in the marketing function since the invention of the printing press.  In the 31 years since the first banner ad flashed across Internet users’ screens, ad tech has become an essential underpinning of global commerce, directly employing 1.54 million people and generating $974 billion in revenue in the United States, according  to Measuring the Digital Economy: Advertising, Content, Commerce, and Innovation, the quadrennial report for the IAB by Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus John Deighton and research consultant Leora Kornfeld. That contributes to an overall digital economy valued at nearly $5 trillion in the United States alone, representing 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Yet for all ad tech’s importance, little attention has been paid to a question that is central to the future prosperity of this indispensable sector of the economy:  What are the qualities enterprise leaders must possess today to assure their companies’ continued growth?

While “the laws of leadership have not been repealed,” as longtime NBCU, Hulu, and Netflix sales leader Peter Naylor puts it,  parsing the requirements for next-generation ad tech leadership is not an idle pursuit. First, under ad tech’s banner march nearly 10,000 companies, with more than 400 new ones launching each year,  according to the research firm Tracxn. They encompass dozens of specialties that are now central to marketing and media, including supply and demand forecasting, creative iteration, personalization, pricing, placement, procurement, performance management, privacy and security assurance, quality control, brand safety, brand appropriateness, attention analysis, cross-platform integration, outcomes measurement, optimization, and data management, for all manner of mediums. It is, to be sure, as complex an industry as it is  necessary.

Second, as vital as ad tech is to the economy, it has been subject to decades of instability, false starts, consolidations, technological hiccups, and de-mergers that would have rendered leaders in most other industries practically – and temperamentally - helpless. Against this backdrop of continuous change, the ad tech sector has settled into an uneasy equilibrium: A handful of giant platforms dominate revenues and employment, while thousands of much smaller companies populate ad tech’s mainstream. When breakouts do break out, they tend to fly into the middle market of $1 billion to $5 billion companies, as the DSP The Trade Desk ($2.44 billion) and the mobile ad specialist Applovin ($4.7 billion) have done. In short, these are difficult businesses that require hands-on leadership to grow.

Third, what may be the most destabilizing wave of innovation yet is already crashing over ad tech: the AI tsunami. As Joe Zawadzki, the founder of the DSP Mediamath and now a partner in the venture firm Amperiam, says: “Fortune 500 firms will have to figure out how to work with companies that didn’t exist 18 months ago.”

As ad tech OGs ourselves – Ann created one of the digital media and marketing industry’s first specialized executive recruiting firms, and for 15 years Randall led the IAB, the trade body for digital media, marketing, and ad tech – we set out to learn from ad tech’s most successful first- and second-generation C-suite executives what they believe their successor generation will require to become mid-market growth engines amid the next surge of disruption.

“I have realized that I need to re-evaluate everything,” says Andrew Casale, the President and CEO of Index Exchange, the global supply-side platform and first-generation programmatic advertising powerhouse. “Because there’s a new chapter of ad tech coming that has no relationship to anything that went before.”

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Our conversations produced a surprising degree of consensus on seven new competencies now required for ad tech leadership success. First and foremost is product fluency.

If you’re tempted to say, “Of course!”, take a step back and consider that ad tech, from its origins in the mid-1990s, was and remains a component of advertising and marketing, and the concept of “product” was, throughout advertising’s history until now, a foreign notion. “Product was not part of the traditional advertising mindset,” Krishan Bhatia, Vice President of Global Video Advertising & Partnerships at Amazon, told us. “Tech was I.T. and back office and systems, more than anything else.”

 What’s changed is that ad tech “product” is now central to everything the ad tech company and its customers do. Product - which we will define as a technology-based invention or, more likely, a string of inventions structured into a solution that addresses a dominant user or customer problem or need – is the core of an ad tech company’s potential. “I don’t know that you need an engineering background,” says J.P. Maheu, the former CEO of such tech-centric marketing services companies as Razorfish, Publicis Modem, and Bluefin Labs, “but you must have an appreciation, respect, and understanding of product that wasn’t necessary 10 or 15 years ago.”

The reason for the shift is that product and company strategy have largely become indistinguishable. One of the common critiques of startups we heard in the early days of ad tech was “that’s not a company, that’s a feature” – meaning that easily available venture capital frequently financed early stage companies that had little in their armature beyond a single application that often was just a slight technical spin on others’ existing offerings.

Today, slight spins do not suffice. Ad tech success requires both continuous and substantial innovation. “For next- generation executives interested in progressing, tech is now Number One,” says Lisa Utzschneider, the CEO of Integral Ad Science.

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If product and strategy are now essentially the same, it stands to reason that the second most valuable competency for a rising ad tech leader is understanding product-market fit. This requirement also represents a departure from the earlier eras’ norms. First- and second-generation ad tech leaders frequently were young, overwhelmingly men, fresh out of undergraduate or graduate engineering or computer science programs, who had developed interesting technical advances in the look, feel, distribution, analysis, or measurement of banner advertising. To use a phrase popular in the management consulting industry in the early 2000s, founders frequently were “brains on a stick.”

 Sometimes, their innovations were profound – the invention and evolution of ad server technology certainly qualifies. But founders didn’t need to know much about the marketing or advertising marketplace because, for the most part, they weren’t selling their products into the mainstream marketing or advertising industry, which remained television-centric well into the 21st Century. Early ad tech aficionados were mostly selling to each other, in a tiny backwater of an industry: In 2007, the year Randall took the helm of the IAB, digital advertising revenue in the U.S. totaled only $21.2 billion.

That insularity impeded the industry’s early growth, and almost certainly contributed to its many false starts. From deep-packet inspection to the “semantic web” to blockchain programmatic, various fads and crazes have coursed through ad tech from the beginning, diverting billions of dollars in financing and the attention of thousands of developers down alleys that proved to be blind.

Today, as Deighton and Kornfeld point out in Measuring the Digital Economy, 75 percent of all advertising in the United States is transmitted on the Internet, representing  $298 billion in ad spending. The higher stakes and enormous potential require contemporary sector leaders to have a keen grasp of industry structure and dynamics that their predecessors lacked – something Jen Wong, the Chief Operating Officer of Reddit, calls “functional and ecosystem expertise.”

 “Understanding the totality of the economics between buyer and seller, how advertising is bought and sold, and how the money flows is absolutely fundamental,” says Tony Katsur, who before becoming CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, the industry standard-setting body, was the Senior Vice President for Digital Strategy, Corporate Development, and Operations at Nexstar Media Group, one of America’s largest television station owners. “The underpinnings of that are highly technical, and you have to understand them.” 

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 Understanding, however, is not proficiency; the greatest military historian does not automatically qualify as a successful general. The act of leadership requires senior executives to possess a third critical competency: a partnership mentality that infuses both their internal and external interactions.

 In no small part, the need for collaboration derives from a merger that is immensely larger and more complex than any combination of companies: the amalgamation of once-discrete industries. Almost from the beginning of commercial media in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, publishers, advertising agencies, brands, and technology firms existed in interdependent but otherwise exclusive silos. Publishers sold their ad inventory to agencies that represented marketers, but otherwise their sources of primacy remained distinct. Brands didn’t need to entertain consumers, publishers did not have to manufacture packaged goods, printing equipment makers weren’t required to choose magazine cover stories, and after television’s “Quiz Show Scandals” in the 1950s, agencies did not produce programming.

Today, all sectors of the marketing industry are united by a common fuel: data that is produced by the technologies that underpin their supply chains. Many, ourselves included, have long averred that all B2C and most B2B companies, whatever their presumed areas of specialization, today are primarily in the data business. This forces forms of collaboration never before necessary – a codependence further reinforced by the widespread availability of information that used to reside within the four walls of vertically integrated companies. Virtually all efficient companies today – and even specific functions, such as sourcing, manufacturing, and marketing  - live inside  interdependent ecosystems.

Publishers, brands, agencies, and ad tech companies must find ways to work with each other to negotiate the fine line between protecting their own and their customers’ proprietary data, and using their data to mutual benefit to create more and more profitable sales for all partners. Successful leaders create what Amazon’s Bhatia calls a “translation layer” between disciplines that, through much of history, could get by speaking their own particular lingua franca.

“You’re looking for multilingual people who understand the power that content and brands have together, and also how tech can accentuate that,” he says. “Historically, companies have come with strengths on either side. But in the future, leaders and winners have to be able to combine strengths from both.”

Today’s ad tech leaders are quick to point out that “partnership” is not an abstract emotional concept. It also denotes an important change in the revenue structure of many companies in the marketing-media ecosystem – a move away from the direct sales of ad inventory that dominated the marketing economy for decades, toward recurring revenues built upon data integration. That has diminished the importance of personal relationships – the golf-course outings and three-martini lunches of marketing and media’s “Mad Men” era – in favor of more substantive forms of cooperation. “The profile log of the successful leader has changed,” says Reddit’s Jen Wong.

“Even in sales, the average leader of a vertical at Google is an MBA who serves as a business advisor,” she says. “Their CMO clients still matter because they’re the direct owner of the budget. But the CEO and CFO are in the CMO’s shorts on return on ad spend. The product and engineering teams need to be involved because you need data from the servers. So suddenly, you’re interacting with multiple functions, and a broad-based business advisor is more important beyond their sales and marketing expertise.”

In this way, a customer-facing partnership mentality is critical to the continual product innovation that is necessary for the long-term growth of any ad tech company. For evidence, one need look no further than Google’s loss of significant market share in mobile advertising to the upstart Applovin – a multi-billion-dollar revenue transfer that happened in part because Google was “sleeping at the wheel” on customer relationships and the product and process innovation that derives from it,  according to a report in The Information.

The complex interlocks among functions and collaborators in the modern marketing economy mean the partnership mentality is as important within one’s own company as it is with customers. “There’s a network effect to relationships and partnerships, with stakeholders inside your company as well as externally,” says Bhatia.

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Because the new marketing-media economy is built on data and data integration, a fourth core leadership competency has emerged in recent years that was ignored during ad tech’s early development: regulatory acumen.

After a two-decade infancy during which founders largely avoided the hot breath of Government, years of data breaches, privacy fiascos, and security ruptures have turned ad tech into a regulated industry, policed by official bodies around the world. Led by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation enacted in 2018, 144 countries today have national data privacy laws that cover 6.64 billion people, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Other than 2018’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the United States has hesitated to pass comprehensive national legislation, but 20 of the 50 states now have far-reaching (and in some cases, confusing and contradictory) data privacy laws, according to the law firm White & Case. Domestic expansion and international growth are almost impossible today without leadership attention to data security and privacy.

“Having one ear on the privacy world all the time will be a key leadership quality,” says the IAB Tech Lab’s Tony Katsur.

The departure from ad tech’s past could not be more profound. Randall well remembers when Facebook refused repeatedly to participate in the IAB’s monthly Public Policy Council calls, its most senior policy executive at the time telling him, doubly inaccurately, that “the IAB is an ad tech association, and we are not an ad tech company.” But Meta, as it is now called, was not alone in its willful rejection of regulatory sophistication and compliance. For years, most Internet Service Providers, in our experience, also rebuffed entreaties to work with industry and Government bodies to craft rules to protect consumers, even when the U.S. Congress’s investigation of deep-packet inspection technologies threatened their businesses. Among the small startups that dominated the burgeoning ad tech industry through the first two decades of this century, policy expertise – even, in many cases, in-house legal expertise – was the exception, not the rule.

“The new regulatory environment is real,” says Index Exchange’s Andrew Casale. “We routinely get 300-line questionnaires from regulators around the world. This is a new part of the job that wasn’t there before. Government and regulatory agency leaders want to hear from you, the CEO, directly.”

Even beyond direct Government inquiries, regulatory acumen is a progressively greater component of an ad tech leader’s daily activities. As data partnerships among brands, ad agencies, publishers, and tech companies become a principal source of growth for companies, functional and enterprise leaders must have enough perspicacity to be able to qualify potential partners’ fidelity to ethical and regulatory norms.

It doesn’t mean that next-generation ad tech leaders have to be lawyers, says Casale, “but you have to learn it. It’s risk mitigation and industry expertise.”

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Because a handful of large digital platforms have dominated marketing for the better part of a decade, first complementing and now replacing such earlier dominant distribution and technology platforms as print, broadcasting, and cable television, we wondered whether platform experience is a must-have – or even a nice-to-have – for next generation ad tech leaders? Not necessarily, we heard, but it led to robust affirmations about a fifth central competency: next-gen ad tech leaders must possess a scale sensibility.

Most of our expert correspondents indicated that large platform experience could prove an obstacle to growth. For one, at the large platforms – whose presence is required on virtually all marketing plans for all companies large and small - staff become accustomed to having their calls answered, breeding comfort that can readily descend into complacency. They are must-buys that already have achieved product-market fit. “You can almost succeed because you don’t know you’re not supposed to succeed,” says longtime digital sales leader Peter Naylor. “That’s when you get too smart for your own good. An outsider who doesn’t know they shouldn’t challenge the status quo can be more successful.”

Another way platform experience could be detrimental, as Reddit’s Jen Wong notes, is that “unless you’re director level or above, your work can be very atomic,” and hamper an executive’s ability to develop cross-functional knowledge and relationships.

But there is an important exception to this observation about the limitations of large platform background: Especially if an executive came in through an acquisition, the experience of working in “Big Tech” can provide invaluable training in building a business to global scale.

“It’s like being at a startup in a big company,” says IAS CEO Utzschneider, who worked for a decade at Microsoft before taking charge of the small advertising sales function at Amazon and building it into a $1 billion operation (which has since grown to $56 billion under her successors). “When you have that Big Tech experience, you understand their language. You understand how they’re highly matrixed. You understand their engineering, how they put together annual operating plans, the tradeoffs they make, their product roadmaps.” Quadrupling the size of a startup from $50 million to $200 million is no small achievement, but it doesn’t provide the practical education that constructing a billion-dollar-plus operation can.

“You learn to have a strong executive presence in front of boards, to run a P&L, to hit goals – both top-line and EBITDA,” she says. “When I was hiring for a Chief Technology Officer here at IAS, I realized how few leaders there are in ad tech who’d built billion-dollar businesses.”

Here again, one might be tempted to arch an eyebrow and ask rhetorically, aren’t all enterprise leaders required to be concerned with growth? Yes, but: History shows that the normative answer in ad tech, surprisingly, was “no.”

Through much of ad tech’s first 15 to 20 years, the sector was led by founders whose goal was not to launch enduring, independent companies, but rather to sell their company to one among a handful of consolidators. So profound was the cash-out objective among startup founders and their VC backers that we would argue it was the underpinning of the industry for most of its history. Their dreams had a valid source: An analysis by Vienna University of Economics and Business economists Klaus Gugler, Florian Szücs, and Ulrich Wohak found that Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft made 912 mergers and acquisitions between 1987 and 2020, more than half of them between 2010 and 2019.

That period – the aforementioned that’s-not-a-company-that’s-a-feature era – was characterized by a consuming attention to market share over growth. It led many founders to give away their products (sometimes to brands, occasionally to publishers, overwhelmingly to ad agencies) to build their market presence. It generated a complex marketplace filled with doppelganger startups offering lookalike products. As a typical example, at one point, more than 20 venture-funded ad verification companies with differing and incompatible methodologies had entered into low-cost or no-cost agreements with ad agencies.

That period came to an abrupt end about three years ago. Even before the current wave of antitrust scrutiny, the large platforms had reduced their M&A activity. In 2023, for the first time since its 2004 initial public offering, Google made no major acquisitions, according to an analysis of public data by Wired. The magazine found similarly significant dips in acquisitions at Meta, Apple, and Amazon. VC and private equity firms took note, and funders began requiring revenue growth paths for their portfolio companies.

That transformed the leadership profile in ad tech. While the sector always boasted outward-facing founders and CEOs who enjoyed mingling with customers and staff, the prevailing caricature of founders was different, and to some degree accurate: introverted, private, and awkward STEM grads who were uncomfortable with the requirements of leadership and outsourced much of them to their senior teams.

Today’s CEO requisites include an ability to communicate clearly and persuasively to at least four distinct constituencies: funders, customers, staff, and the firm’s leadership team. “Looking back, I wish I’d invested more time in becoming a better communicator, a better storyteller,” says three-time CEO and former Twitter VP of Global Sales J.P. Maheu. “Especially for a CEO, the ones who are great storytellers are likelier to succeed in today’s environment.”

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Maheu and his peers point out that effective communication is not a one-way street: It requires listening, and listening, in turn, is an essential part of the sixth central competency for next-gen ad tech leaders: a perpetual learning mindset.

Future ad tech leaders must be students of their space. They must demonstrate curiosity about emerging technologies and market dynamics. The technology changes too rapidly for anyone to rely on historical knowledge alone. This learning agility extends beyond technical knowledge to include regulatory environments, privacy frameworks, and global market dynamics. The most successful leaders will be those who can "positively disrupt themselves" and constantly evolve their capabilities.

 The industry is entering what multiple interviewees described as a period of "punctuated equilibrium"—fundamental change that requires leaders to be comfortable with ambiguity while maintaining clear strategic direction.

It’s critical to point out that the leaders to whom we spoke do not consider the perpetual learning mindset to be a passive exercise - the leadership equivalent of study hall, if you will. As with all the other new leadership requirements on which we heard consensus, curiosity improves performance through internal means as well as external.  A hunger for mixing it up with colleagues across the firm’s hierarchy represents a form of self-awareness about one’s own limitations and abilities that helps CEOs staff teams that themselves are capable of the continuous learning that can grow the enterprise.

“You need to lead by example,” Maheu says. “That means going on sales calls with younger people. It’s basic leadership hygiene.” Index Exchange’s Casale agrees: “We’re in media and advertising, and you can’t get by because your mousetrap is so incredibly impressive that it sells itself. Trust is earned, and so is knowledge.”

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At this point, however, we feel compelled to quote the pun that is the title of technology writer Nicholas Carr’s notable book: Does I.T. matter?

Across ad tech and Big Tech, there is a near-universal belief that AI technology – including tools that already are available in the market – will change marketing (not to mention other facets of commercial and social life) irrevocably.  As Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale puts it, “If we can now raise platforms through prompts not in months or quarters but in minutes by leveraging the latest AI models, that’s an acceleration to the pace of innovation we’ve never seen before.”

There is very little agreement on how. Indeed, one of industry leaders’ favorite current pastimes is debating with each other about how AI will change marketing, media, and advertising.

Current workflows subject to enhanced efficiencies - including media planning, campaign activation, audience discovery, and creative processes - already are being “AI’d” and subject to “agentification,” with governance processes (that is, the way companies negotiate and otherwise relate to each other) closely behind. Less recognized is the degree to which large marketers have begun to implement AI tools already in market to develop and assess the potential of customer segmentation schemes and customer experience programs across their product and service offerings. AI implementation appears at least partly responsible for the wave of layoffs that recently hit the advertising business, reducing employment across the sector by 8,300 positions since last April, in a U.S. economy that has been adding jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mediamath founder and VC Joe Zawadzki sees this activity representing new layers of abstraction about the meaning, content, and purpose of the firm, offering, “It used to be if you didn’t have rock-solid engineers to install your on-premises firewalls and racks of servers, you couldn’t start a business. Cloud computing said you didn’t need that - your company can have a higher order of abstraction. AI has created another new layer of abstraction that’s made even more arcane things easy” and reduced some human staffing requirements.

But after that, the questions begin.  “Is it an agent-first experience where humans are the second order, where you have brand and media and consumer agents negotiating and navigating first?” asks Zawadzki. “Will we still need rock-solid engineers, or will liberal arts majors be able to direct systems they couldn’t before? If so, will that unleash more human creativity into marketing?”

He concedes his crystal ball is cloudy. “It’s like the early days of the commercial Internet,” he says. “We - peers, activist shareholders, everyone - are grappling with ‘how do we deal with AI?’ There’s extraordinary pressure to channel these capabilities. But there’s no playbook yet.”

Absent that playbook, a seventh essential quality for next-gen ad tech leaders has risen: grit. The word surfaced throughout our conversations, far outpacing its softer cousin, “resiliency.” Unlike founders during the sector’s cash-out period, today’s CEOs and their senior teams must navigate through forms of innovation laden with uncertainty, rally staff to follow them into the gray zone, and shape strategic and operating plans with the knowledge that those plans will evolve more quickly than ever before.

“That takes grit,” says the Tech Lab’s Tony Katsur. “Grit is overcoming adversity, never say die. It’s hard to interview for or screen for. But leaders with true grit are rare, and never have been more necessary.”

Joe Zawadzki puts it even more strictly: The coming AI era in ad tech means leaders “have to be anti-fragile. You have to love the chaos.”

Ann Blinkhorn founded Blinkhorn in 2009 as one of the digital media and marketing industry’s first specialized executive recruiting firms, following seven years as a leading recruiter with Spencer Stuart. Blinkhorn focuses on senior-level executive and board search for companies at the intersection of media, marketing and technology. Her clients have included Hearst, Comcast, Microsoft, Business Insider and ProPublica, among many others. A graduate of Smith College with an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, Ann began her career as an executive with The New York Times Company.

 Randall Rothenberg is the former Chief Executive and Executive Chair of the IAB, the digital media and marketing industry trade association; the former Chief Marketing Officer of Booz Allen Hamilton; the author of Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); and the proprietor of the strategy and marketing consultancy Randall, Ltd. He has served on the Boards or Advisory Boards of EDO, Digital Remedy, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council, the Ad Council, and the International Center of Photography.