Transcript
Ron Jacobson (0:00)
Foreign.
James Hersher (0:12)
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. Today's episode is sponsored by Philo Ads. Philo Ads is built for brands that want premium connected TV placements without the premium price tag. With highly engaged audiences on fan favorite networks like Discovery, TV One, mtv, ame, Own, Lifetime and more, Philo Ads delivers a CTV experience that gets results. Kick off your next campaign with Philo Ads today at Ads Philo tv.
Allison Schiff (1:02)
Hello there and welcome to the Ad Exchanger Talks podcast, our weekly program featuring guests from across the world of data driven advertising and media. I'm Ad Exchanger's James Hersher, filling in this week for Managing Editor Allison Schiff. Before we start, let me give a quick pitch for the upcoming Programmatic IO conference in New York City, which will be September 29th and 30th at the Marriott Marquee. The agenda is coming together beautifully. A couple sneak peeks I don't even think are on the site yet include data and advertising leaders from CUR, Dr. Pepper and Coinbase, not to mention a recent FTC commissioner. So get your tickets now and I'll see you there. Should be a good one. But back to the show. Joining me this week is Ron Jacobson, who some listeners may know as co founder and CEO of Rockerbox. Jacobson has been deep in the weeds of programmatic advertising, starting as a relatively early product manager at UP Nexus and for the past 12 years or more has been the leader of Rockerbox, one of the longest standing attribution providers, whatever that means anymore, and which actually sold to Double Fairy in February this year. So, Ron, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Ron Jacobson (2:10)
Thanks, James. Looking forward to, to catching up.
Allison Schiff (2:15)
So, so yeah, let's, let's start by rewinding quite a bit. How do you, how did you end up in, in this space? And yeah, at AppNexus, I guess to start.
Ron Jacobson (2:26)
So that's going back. Going back a while. I was fresh out of college. I had a COMSCI engineering degree, and at the time I was actually a software engineer at the Federal Reserve bank of New York. And it took me all of six months to realize that working for the Federal Reserve is not aligned with what I'm looking to do with my life for a host of reasons. And I literally remember finding this list. I think it might have been Business Insider of like the top 100 startups in America. And I think I applied to like 95 of them. Just like straight up, I'm like, I need something new and somehow I wound up in that Nexus office back then on 18th street interviewing for a job at a company that I frankly had no idea what they did. I remember an interview question was something around like what I would do with creatives or something. And my response is I'd ask you what a creative meant because I literally had no idea what the. About anything about this, about the industry. But yeah, it was really lucky, really fortunate Apex, this was an amazing place to be. It was a 45% company at the time. So just one of those really unique environments with super smart people at a hyper fast growing company. So got really, really lucky. I, I wound up there.
