It was great to sit down with Vlad Stesin, Co-Founder and CSO of Optable, for an informative chat about current trends in the adtech ecosystem. As Vlad notes, the past five years have been a period of great change in the industry, especially regarding cookie deprecation, the rise of privacy regulations, and the advent of LLMs (whose use is already undercutting traffic to publisher sites).
We discuss the origin and growth of Optable, a company focused on privacy-compliant clean rooms and identity management. The company was founded in 2020 amidst the pandemic and the shift towards privacy-focused legislation, including Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies. The company has grown to 55 employees and serves numerous customers.
Our discussion emphasizes the importance of building robust identity graphs for publishers, which enable better monetization and yield improvements. Alternative identifiers and data collaboration through clean rooms are also key strategies. Our  conversation also touches on the impact of regulatory ecosystems, the rise of AI, and other challenges and opportunities in adtech.
Discussion topics include:
- How the clean room concept and first-party data anonymization benefits both publishers and consumers.
- The fact that data collaboration using clean rooms is one way to monetize identity graphs, but alternative identifiers have also emerged as a major way to increase yield for publishers.
- Why publishers benefit from building a robust identity graph, which is essential for monetization and data collaboration.
- How the adtech ecosystem has become fragmented over the past five years, with multiple new ways of connecting identity between buyers and sellers.
- The impact of regulatory ecosystems, including GDPR and potential national regulations in the U.S.
- How the complexity of compliance varies across different geographies and jurisdictions, requiring significant documentation and technical controls.
- The risk of erosion of open web traffic due to the rise of zero-click search and LLMs, making it crucial for publishers to create value from their existing inventory.
- Why publishers are focusing on developing video content and non-text formats.
- How AI is creating new opportunities in rewiring addressability in advertising, using a combination of deterministic and contextual data.
- The potential of session-based ad targeting and the role of AI in improving ad targeting within a session.