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AdTechGod Pod
Ep. 73 Balancing Act: Psychology, Partnerships & the Future of AdTech with Ali Wendroff
00:27:58
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- [00:01]
AdTech God
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- [02:00]
Ali Wendroff
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
- [02:02]
AdTech God
Same here, Ali. Thank you. You know, the podcast initially started with me reaching out to people, but now I really ask for referrals, really, because I want to bring good people to the pod. So thank you for being here and thanks for taking time out of your day.
- [02:15]
Ali Wendroff
I appreciate it and I'm honored to be referred and it's a pleasure to officially, you know, make it on the Ad Tech God Pod podcast.
- [02:22]
AdTech God
Thank you. So Ali, you've worked at some great companies. All of them are great. You spent what, a little bit over five years at Triple Lift. You worked at Cargo Pubmatic and now at Sharethrough. Can you tell me just how you got into the industry and what, what kind of attracted you to the space?
- [02:36]
Ali Wendroff
Absolutely. And yes, I've been very lucky to work at some incredible companies along the way in so many different facets of the SSP world. So as I like to say I was birthed into Programmatic. You know, coming out of my college days, I ended up, you know, really just hitting the pavement and looking for, you know, a job where I could really learn something new, learn a new language, I like to say. And I was thrown into the ad tech abyss and I never really looked back. So, you know, looking back though, and, and kind of to pave way of where I am now, I actually, like, I grew up in New York, I'm an only child. And so I learned really early how to build, you know, trust and confidence and autonomy. And so before my ad tech, you know, career, so to speak, began, I was actually on a path to being a child psychologist. I volunteered at Sloan Kettering Children's Hospital. Later, I actually became a severe traumatic brain injury survivor myself. And I worked in a child life program at nyu. I really love people. I love. I loved to help people and work with people and understand people. And these experiences really taught me about, you know, putting human and customer service first. And it shaped my career behind the scenes. And so when the career world entered for me, I ended up channeling these sort of non ad tech experiences into a passion that really fueled, you know, this idea of who I wanted to be in my future, which was, you know, a passionate, driven, strong woman in the space. A glass ceiling girl that could model after my mom, who paved way for women in the music industry, but someone that really wanted to push and challenge the status quo and like, really relentlessly drive to succeed. So getting into the ad tech space, I challenged myself because I absolutely knew nothing. And when I got to Pubmatic, you know, I came in so hungry and eager to learn and was fortunate enough to get a chance there where I was a little bit of an underdog. And I came in, you know, pretty green. And it turns out that the majority of the team, when I had shown up, was actually going on maternity leave. And so I inherited a $60 million book of business, like very early on and had an incredible support and learning system surrounded by so many valuable mentors and cheerleaders that really became like a family back then. It was our like Pubmatic Network. And this was where like my huge, you know, breakthrough sort of came of all the dots connecting in the, in the ad tech space. You know, learning the language, understanding my customers, working with DSPs, reaching across the aisle to the publisher side and really diving in headfirst in my mind, like having nothing but the incentive to try and succeed and prove to those around me that had invested their time in me that I could do it. So that's where things really started for me for sure.
- [05:52]
AdTech God
And you mentioned a couple things like, you know, just to touch up on it, you know, the focus on the human element, the focus on the customer, you know, satisfaction and customer service aspect of it, paving the way and breaking glass ceilings and kind of inheriting that innate drive to just be better and to better yourself and to make a name for yourself. How, how much of that do you think does come from, you know, your surroundings and the people that influence you, whether it's at work or you had mentioned your mother. How much of your drive is actually driven from watching those who are just as driven or more driven than you?
- [06:27]
Ali Wendroff
Oh, a tremendous amount. I am so inspired by so many people in the industry that I come across and folks that, you know, want to have a geeky ad tech conversation with me or creators and, and I am very fortunate to have, you know, support from my family, you know, my, my husband as a very career driven woman and to also now work at a company where I'm actually surrounded by fellow really strong women as well. All of which we really work as a unit together. And I think on top of it, it's, it's that I am someone who really tries to hold myself to the highest expectation and standard because I feel that that sets the proper precedent for those that I'm fortunate enough to hire or work with or partner with. You know, if I don't, if I can't give my best, then, you know, I don't feel that I can ask for the best of you. And so it's, it's a standard that I've set for myself. But it's because, you know, as you said, I've been fortunate enough to see such greatness around me and also recognize where there hasn't been and own that. And that's a big part of it too.
- [07:38]
AdTech God
Ali.
- [07:39]
Ali Wendroff
Yeah, and make sure that I can, you know, find that path to what is, what is, you know, the highest level of excellence, so to speak.
- [07:48]
AdTech God
It's great that you say that because I feel like we often look at the success stories around us and sometimes you have to look at the failure stories, whether it's in our own lives or others, and you look and you say, look, I saw the path that, that went down and that's not the path I want to go down. Definitely not where I want to be. I'm going to do the polar opposite and work differently and treat people differently because I think that that's what's going to be best for me because this is the path I want to be.
- [08:15]
Ali Wendroff
On, that's for sure. And I think in, you know, following Pubmatic and moving over to Cargo, I challenged myself there to really learn from the bottom up. Cargo was building their programmatic business at the time and this was a really big challenge for me. You know, I hadn't started from building at the ground, you know, at that level. And I love puzzles, you know, it's something that I grew up doing. I love them and I always look at the ad tech world like a puzzle and how to fit the pieces together or rearrange the pieces. And Cargo helped me early on to see things from a different lens and build from the bottom up, you know, from development and onboarding, DSP partners and integrations and then pairing that with their magnificent salesforce, you know, and being able to become actually like a programmatic specialist to help the sales team really work with their clients and migrate, you know, spend from, manage to programmatic and really learn a lot more about that side of the business too. So I was fortunate enough there to, you know, further expose myself for not only the end to end process of building and developing DSP partnerships, but starting to connect the dots between the sales organization and, you know, your DSP partnerships teams which back then and even still at many places now remain very silent, siloed. And following that, that's what brought me to Triple Lift where I initially came on to build the PMP marketplace. So back in the day of, you know, looking at the history, you know, Pubmatic connecting supply and demand, executing on PMPs, cargo, which was much more of a PMP first place, you know, building that market development and coming on board to Triple Lift, this was a really unique experience because it was the first time I sat on supply and got to really understand how to work with publishers and where their gaps were and how to drive, you know, transactions between a side that seems so far away incorrectly from the demand side. And I played in that space for the beginning of my time at Triple Lift and ended up coming up with this thesis and idea of what's called a DSP engagement team, which I moved over and built this idea off of servicing a very, very underutilized and probably under supported teams at the largest DSPS in the world. So working with internal account teams to build materials for them, support them, they are not just the pipes. And I built a team around this over the five years that I was at Triple Lift. That ended up becoming one of my greatest success stories, you know, and, and I'M so proud of all that. You know, to see what we were able to do at that time. It became a massive revenue driver adjacent to our sales team and a completely net new revenue source prior to the Triple Lift acquisition. So that was a really big moment of take a chance. You know, think about the ideas, put people first, service the teams that maybe are never thought of and turn it into revenue.
- [11:41]
AdTech God
Ali when, when moving from, you know, Pubmatic to Cargo to to Triple Lift and now it's sharethrough. What is it that really attracted you to sharethrough overall? I mean they're, they're in the native ad business. They have, you know, various types of banners and creative right as well as outstream video. What is it that attracted you to share through the most that made you take the leap after a little bit over five years at Triplift for sure.
- [12:06]
Ali Wendroff
So, you know, I had had an amazing run at Triple Lift and I think there are times in your career where you also realize that sometimes you need to take a chance on yourself and you also need to put yourself first in the space. And I had a lot of big ideas and felt that a lot of what sharethrough had to offer was an amazing fit for me where I was also able to partner with key sales leadership and agency leadership and actually stitch an even larger idea of a really unified demand organization together. And so sharethrough really is all about enhancing the ad experiences across all channels for better outcomes. So our ad platform is all about maximizing user attention and performance through research backed creative ad enhancements, you know, curating inventory to optimize for directness, you know, sustainability, quality, all things that are really important. And sharethrough really invested in building creative technology that seamlessly can activate for clients and easily integrates with DSPs and publishers. So the execution as well as the creative first approach is a magnificent story that they are able to tell for where we see the industry going of streamlining, you know, ease of use, not charging extra costs for creatives, putting the client first at the advertiser level, at the DSP level, at the publisher level, really trying to make things easy, but also differentiating from other partners in the space and complimenting all of the other amazing SSPs out there. And so I felt that it really checked all of my boxes of where I could feel I can make a difference. I could bring an alternative approach to DSP partnerships. I would have incredible camaraderie around a team that, you know, hustles really hard and has the end client and then also works really hard to make DSPS easier to transact. So that was really the bread and butter for me while giving me the creative license to take some chances and feel really empowered and supported in doing that.
- [14:36]
AdTech God
We've seen a lot of change over the last year. We're expected to see even more change over the next year. What do you think are some, you know, trends that you feel are either, you know, positive or negative for the industry? And where do you, where do you think we're heading with all of this?
- [14:52]
Ali Wendroff
First and foremost, I see transformative and differentiated partnerships happening from DSPs to SSPs and things that were not happening before. I also definitely can see, you know, there's a lot of increase in CTV creative first programmatic transactions, you know, distribute. Despite that, you know, we might be seeing some headwinds overall in ad spend and where the economy is at. I do believe that overall we're seeing deeper investment in brands that are maximizing on their ad effectiveness and really starting to think about their creative strategies. This, you know, on one hand can go in two directions where it's very ROI and maximizing on return on ad spend and performance driven. But there's also this element of how to stay relevant and make sure that where you're investing your dollars are most effective into reaching your consumers. So I see that, you know, from the CTV space to OLV to, you know, deeper investment from a creative perspective. And then I also see AI, you know, naturally, which is for some a scary topic. I like to look at it as a way to help make tooling easier, to help streamline reporting or things that, you know, take up a lot of time. I look at it from a much more efficient standpoint or how we can improve on formats for brands. But I do look at all of these moving parts and pieces and curation and all these buzzwords as yes, the latest trends that are hard to keep up with. I remember the days when we could keep up, we can't and that's okay. But I think it's really focusing on what trends matter most to your clients and that are most relevant to you and your business and how can you help them make things easier and make decisions around that.
- [16:53]
AdTech God
You mentioned creative units, various high impact units. Is that something that sharethu does across connected television also?
- [17:02]
Ali Wendroff
So what we've seen, you know, in the last year of me coming on board, sharethrough has really transitioned to a video first SSP from, you know, where we were in native. We still have all of our capabilities, but last Year we saw such incredible growth overall, like as a platform with the largest investments in video. And so that's because we try to do things around dynamic captions, you know, using AI to pull the video out of, like to pull what's normally going through is the audio and populate that in the caption seamlessly for brands so that it's user friendly and it's not intrusive. From here we saw even greater investment into CTV where we have overlay formats and we pull in things like sports tickers where we can put the context of our CTV ad formats. And surrounded by relevant, whether it's sporting events and scores, we put them in context of like the US Open Women's sports, we can do weather overlays. So we try to make sure that our brands are not only hitting the audiences that they're looking for, but actually really increasing the magnitude of, of, of where they can scale. So for example, we can put a travel client, you know, that's looking to open up a new hotel. We can put that in the context of where that hotel is weather wise. Or we could target it to maybe colder weather and it's incentivizing folks to go to warmer weather. And we pull all this in in real time. So all of these units allow for any brand to use an existing video creative and just repurpose that and we handle all the creative heavy lifting on the back end. So, so for sports we can do any sporting event that's taking place. We can change creatives seamlessly as well, which is really shocking for a lot of folks because I think you think of high impact creatives or CTV creatives and probably creates a little bit of nausea thinking about maybe how much you have to do. We again, make it super repurposable for any brand that has an existing video and allow for them to create a high impact experience that they could run seamlessly in the exact same DSP as well.
- [19:28]
AdTech God
You know, taking it to the next question, your background was not in marketing, your background was not in technology. I think you had mentioned it was psychology.
- [19:40]
Ali Wendroff
Yes.
- [19:41]
AdTech God
Have you found any things that connect psychology with what you do today in terms of your management of partners, in terms of what you think works in terms of ad units or technology solutions. Have you found any connections there?
- [19:55]
Ali Wendroff
Absolutely. So I think, you know, for me it was as automated as our world is, as much as AI. I am old school and I believe that everything is really done at the human level. I always believe in picking up the phone. I believe in overly communicating. I think that it is the greatest asset that we have is our voice and asking questions. And I've always been a very curious person and I think that that really translates to understanding the consumer and understanding who is a client. That is how I was able to develop a team around an idea where folks thought that DSPs were just the pipes and so be it. When in all reality we were able to create now, you know, at Share through a partnerships team that works with our DSPs on from a business development perspective, from a commercial perspective, you know, from sales enablement perspective. And all of that is to say because my biggest mantra outside of Better Together is answer the why. But the why is not about you. The why is about your clients. And if you are able to understand your clients. Because every DSP is different. If I don't know my partners inside and out, I'm not doing the best that I can do for them. And so knowing a DSP inside out or knowing your client inside out, you no slide, no collateral, nothing should be built. If you can't answer why for that, for that slide, why it matters to the client, why should they care? Because if you're building decks that are all about you, you're failing.
- [21:41]
AdTech God
Ali, it's funny you mentioned that in a past life that was something that I did. It was get in touch with the teams, understand the teams that you're working with. But also what are the org charts look like, who is the point of contact, who's the person in Tide? That's going to be your, your, your go to for trying to get things moved along, but also like understanding what's their vision, what are they doing, what do they want? 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months from now. And that truly is the piece that helps you be successful in any sort of partnership role is understanding like what are the pain points and what do they want? And then how do my solutions help you?
- [22:19]
Ali Wendroff
You're exactly right. I used to do the same thing. You know, you get a deck, you get the meeting, you pitch the meeting. You know, that to me is how you start, right?
- [22:26]
AdTech God
Right.
- [22:27]
Ali Wendroff
And then as you start to build the confidence or as you start to really understand your clients, that's where I think you see that switch, you know, or, or where you start to really think about maybe if I don't follow the same model, right? Or maybe if I push the status quo, or maybe if I ask a couple more questions, I'll learn a little bit more than I came here thinking and knowing and I'll come back better next time.
- [22:53]
AdTech God
You know, Ali, I. I love communication. I hate email. So for me, I pick up the phone and call Like, I'm notorious for it, notorious for it. I'm like, hey, you want to just hop on a call? I'm going to go for a walk. Oh, cool. I could use a break. Cool, we'll call it a meeting. And it's just a walk. It's just a. What are you guys doing? Like, what are you. What's the problem? Who. Who do we need to talk to? Like, what's the issue? Is it pricing? Is it product? Is it timeline? Is it resources? Like, let me know what you need. And I'm here obviously to make money, but so are you. So, like, how. How can we make this work? I think it's that piece of the human connection, like you said, and even the psychology connection of just how do I reduce their stress, how do I reduce their anxiety, and how do I just make them look good, really, in return, just makes you look good, too.
- [23:41]
Ali Wendroff
That is. That's a hundred percent it. And I also believe in, like, be direct, don't waste time. You know, we're all here for a reason. And I think, as I like to say, it's like when. When. If you go to a store and you put on a pair of pants and. And a salesperson says they look great and, you know, they don't look great, your trust is there, right? But if you're a salesperson and you're a great salesperson, you know, and you're someone who understands the business and clientele, and you're like, I don't know if these are great, but you should try these three, right? And most likely they're going to find something better, and you're also going to then develop a rapport with that person. And I look at that in a way of psychology and understanding and the human aspect. First of all, of us are, you know, swimming upstream in so many ways. Like, how can we make it easier for each other and not waste time and be, you know, be better together?
- [24:32]
AdTech God
Ali, you have a ton of change coming into your life.
- [24:35]
Ali Wendroff
I do.
- [24:36]
AdTech God
You are a woman in the space that, you know, has. Has really grown in ranks. And thank you for being here again, like, just as my guest. But what do you think? You know, keeps you motivated and driven, even with these changes. Like, what keeps you happy? Let me rephrase that.
- [24:50]
Ali Wendroff
It's a great question. You know, I am some. I love what I do. I love to work. I find a lot of passion in it. I love the social Aspects of being able to come to the office, you know, when I. When I'm in, you know, a couple days a week. I love winning together as a team. I love learning, and I love to hustle. I'm a native New Yorker, and I definitely move at the speed of light. I own that. There's nothing that brings me more joy than, you know, succeeding with a team. And whether it's breaking a deal or, you know, celebrating someone's milestones or seeing a fellow teammate achieve something that they've been working towards, all of those things make me very, very happy. You know, I am someone who as very passionate about what I do. I love to travel, you know, with work, I love to travel personally, I love to cook. And I balance with cooking and eating and baking and trying new skills at home. And I think as a woman in the space, I feel so grateful to be able to say how much I love what I do and how I've been able to hopefully help other women and colleagues along the way to find that joy, be better, you know, open up, you know, if you're struggling to find your voice. I really enjoy a lot of. Of of of that. And. And balance is hard. And I have, you know, I'm. I am about to have a baby, which is really tremendously exciting and new. As someone who's put their career first their whole life, I'm sure I'm in for an amazing learning curve. And all I have is, you know, excitement to sort of say, in the superhero way that women seem to continue to do this and strive and grow and balance, all of it. I'm sure that I will figure it out and find that balance, but probably a new balance, which is newer for me, but I feel energized around it. I really do. Maybe I won't be so energized in a little bit, but I really do feel supported and grateful to be at a place in my career where I'm lucky enough to be on the verge of growing my family and at a company that supports me and with fellow women and men who, you know, see the. The future as really, really bright and will, no matter what, support me in getting there.
- [27:22]
AdTech God
Incredible. Ali, thank you for being here. And again, congratulations on the. Thank you to be a new addition to the family. I'm happy for you. I'm happy for your husband, and I wish you the most success.
- [27:33]
Ali Wendroff
Thank you so much, and thank you for having me. This has been such an honor, and it's great to be here.
- [27:40]
AdTech God
Thank you, Ali. I'll speak to you soon. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates, so follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of ad tech innovation.