← AdTechGod Pod
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- [00:01]
AdTech God
A word from our sponsors Headed to Can so are we. With the addition of Audigen, Experian is now your end to end solution for data driven advertising, helping you understand your customers, reach them across channels and measure what matters. The result? More relevant experiences for consumers, more revenue opportunities for publishers and better performance for brands. Book a meeting with our team@experian.com can that's experian.com C-A N N E S this podcast is brought to you by Audiohook, the leading independent audio DSP. Audio Hook has direct publisher integrations into all major podcast and streaming radio platforms, providing 40% more inventory than what could be accessed in omnichannel DSPs. What's more, audiobook has full transcripts on more than 90% of all podcast inventory, enabling advanced contextual targeting and brand suitability. Audio Hook is so confident that in addition to CPM buys, they offer the industry's only pay for performance option where brands can scale audio and podcasting with peace of mind, knowing they are only paying for outcomes. Visit audiohook.com to learn more. That's audiohook.com welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTech God. Welcome to the AdTech God Pod, your go to for conversations with female sales leaders in advertising. Today we have Heather Carver, the Chief Revenue Officer at Freestar. For those who don't know Freestar, it's a programmatic services company focused on header bidding, custom ad solutions and expert yield management. Prior to Freestar, Heather worked at companies like Amazon Ads. She also spent nearly 10 years at Rubicon, which is now known as Magnite. Heather is an advocate for females in the space and an advisor for multiple companies. Heather, thank you for joining me today.
- [02:07]
Heather Carver
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
- [02:09]
AdTech God
Same here. Thank you. And you know, we were chatting before the recording. It sounds like you had an amazing time at Possible. I did as well. I thought it was, it was great.
- [02:17]
Heather Carver
Very busy, huge turnout. I heard a lot of people saying they felt bad for the, the guests that were staying there, the few guests. But it was a really great turnout, really great show.
- [02:28]
AdTech God
It was. I agree. Heather, I, I looked at your background, I looked at where you worked Amazon, you worked at Rubicon for nearly 10 years. But I'd love for you to kind of run through how you got into this space, how you got into the industry and what led you to being CRO Freestar today.
- [02:43]
Heather Carver
You know, I was telling you before the recording, I Was listening to some of your, your podcasts and a lot of people said sort of post college, got right into marketing or you know, a startup in ad tech. I went to a liberal arts college, had no idea what I wanted to do really after college and was in the service industry, was a waitress. But I also worked at a law firm, I thought I went to a liberal arts school. I did some history, economics. I worked at a Social Security disability law firm. Not fun. And then I had a friend who worked at a headhunter and said, hey, there's this cool startup in the Boston area. It was called Bus Radio. They made custom radios for school buses and had custom programming. And I thought that sounds really interesting. I met the founders, it was a small scrappy startup. I ended up being there for about three and a half years and really loved the advertising space. I did a little bit of digital, but I worked with our sales team on RFPs, works with brands and agencies doing custom promotions. I did trafficking, managed our CRM. So I wore many different hats and really liked being part of a smaller organization. So after that company was sunset, I ended up around 2009 getting more into the digital ad tech focused side of the business. I worked at Tech Target, which is mostly a B2B marketing company, but I worked on their business to consumer sites like Technology Guidelines, Digital Camera Review, PC Review and did some product marketing there. And that's really where I learned terms like roas and CPM and cpc. And then I ended up getting a job at a company called Snagajob in Richmond, Virginia. And that's really where my love for ad tech kicked off. I worked in a Snaga Job is a company where a lot of the business was focused on like a career builder monster type website, but focused on hourly career jobs but they had a ton of inventory. So we were a small part of the business, but making a ton of money on ads. So I work as a direct campaign manager optimizing our direct campaigns. But then I was given the task to optimize the remnant inventory. For those of you, you know, before the term programmatic, we were one of the first publishers to integrate with Google Ad Exchange. And I thought it was incredibly fun to kind of figure out how to stack the different ad networks and build relationships with, you know, Undertone and AOL and figure out how to put it into the ad server, make it compete with adx and make as much money as possible. And during my year and a half there, we accelerated revenue incredibly. And it was just fun to see this Little kind of side hustle, part of the business. You could really impact the revenue and make a lot of money. And that's where I was first introduced to the concept of SSPs which at the time SSPs were all focused on, for those of you who are familiar still that the term Ad Network Optimization, you know, really there was no real time bidding at the time. It was just SSP is trying to help publishers manage their different tag based, you know, waterfall tag based partners. And then from there I, I ended up moving to New York. So I gotta, I met someone who I'm married to, he's in the advertising programmatic space as well. And I figured he wasn't going to move to Virginia. There wasn't a lot of ad tech in Virginia. So I moved to New York and got a job with Match Media and that was an incredible experience of the founders of OkCupid got acquired by IAC match.com so they brought me on board to merge all of these 30 different personals properties into one instance of at the time called DFP, which is now known as GAM, and figure out how to maximize revenue. They were only about 10% directly sold through. And this was really, I think where my huge passion for ad tech really got sparked. And there's so much activity happening in, in New York that I got a ton of exposure to different companies while I was there. But the founders of OkCupid were Harvard Math majors and they built a proprietary ad server that they called Daisy on top of gam. And they explained to me the concept of skimming the cream off the top. Like I didn't really understand why would you ever serve a $2 programmatic ad over a $10 direct ad. And they kind of gave to me the whole concept of programmatic and scarcity. And that was really eye openening and even more fun to me to figure out how you could use internal proprietary technologies, how you could partner with. You know, when I came into OkCupid in the match world, they were partnering with ADMLD and PubMatic and Rubicon and OpenX to figure out how they could maximize every impression. So this is almost like pre header bidding, before header bidding even existed. And that ultimately is how I got to know Rubicon. You know, I partnered with all the SSPs and Rubicon ultimately pulled me over and said, look, the guy who hired me, I still look at him as a, he's a close friend and a mentor. Said, you know, you're working at Match, but you could come work at Rubicon and be more of A consultant and work with the news corps of the world and the Viacoms and you know, Walmart and match.com and really get a deeper experience. Experience. So that is where I then shifted over to Magnite. Spent 10 years consulting with, with publishers and spent all of my 30s there have many dear friends that are still there. But eventually got to a point where I wanted to make myself uncomfortable, continue to grow and decided Amazon can't be a bad place to go. Check out and see if that's a good fit for me. I spent about a year and a half there. Very interesting to learn the dynamics of a bigger company. But I think ultimately for me, I really wanted to get back to my roots of tech and publisher. And I had known David Friedman, the founder of Freestar, for a long time, Kurt the CEO. They always joked for years that someday I'd come work for them. The timing was just right. I called up Kurt when I was kind of ready to get back in it, be busy, wear multiple hats and go somewhere where I thought I could make a bigger impact. You know, I had a job there a couple weeks later and year and a half later I'm, I'm still here.
- [09:13]
AdTech God
So I have a question for you. Number one is how do you live in a household where everybody works in this industry? My, my wife does not. And then two, having worked on the publisher side of, of the world, the supply side of the world, I'd love to hear about how maybe things have changed. You know, 10 years at Rubicon, then you know, moving into working at Amazon and working into Freestar. Have you seen a lot of changes in the way publishers monetize outside of, you know, including the technology rollouts of header bidding across the board. But where do you feel like the changes have really happened in how they monetize their inventory?
- [09:50]
Heather Carver
Yeah. I mean, so on the household front, my husband is very good at separating work. I would talk about work all day long. I'm a self proclaimed ad tech nerd. I love looking at the numbers, I love talking about all of that. But I have, you know, other outlets and people that I talk to at this point and I'm sure very much like you and a lot of people in the industry, there are a lot of people who love to talk about ad tech, so we're able to keep it pretty separate. And then we're very busy with our children. So, so there's that. And I'm very grateful that he helps to set that boundary, which is very nice. And then how things have evolved in terms of the publisher side. I mean drastically different than the early days of when I was on the publisher side. Even just thinking about the term remnant, it just makes me shudder a little bit now to where the more mature term programmatic has, has come into play and, and it's a critical part of publisher success and businesses especially on the display side right now CTV it's growing and, and that automation is important but it's still very dominated by private marketplace which I think is. Is great and helping to learn the lessons a little bit of what has transpired on the display side. What I see now is a shift more on heavy yield focus and not. Let's just see what we can do to monetize with this inventory. We don't really care about to it being a very prominent part of publisher monetization and I think that's been great to see. When I started at Rubicon years ago, back in 2011, I think 85% of our platform is still ad networks and within five years we sunset ad network optimization and 100% of the monetization came from real time bidding. And of course in 2015 header bidding exploded which was obviously it's great to see where we are with Google today, but it was a way for publishers to really take back control and be able to maximize revenue in the world of where Google sat on both sides of the market and you know, could take advantage of publishers and prevent as much, you know, maximizing of the revenue. On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat or trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone. So it's definitely come a long way.
- [12:29]
AdTech God
I remember when it was all waterfalls and I remember optimizing on like request fill and opportunity fill and cpm and it was annoying. Can I say that? It was kind of annoying, but it was like an art and it was a lot of like exporting reports and pivoting and you know, optimizing the network basically meant allow list disallow lists and just constantly tweaking it every few days to see what drove the most revenue. So it's interesting where it is today with everything just, just being programmatic and the importance of, you know, those direct campaigns pacing for delivery but then not over how Do I say it? Not delivering on your direct campaign and ignoring your unsold. So being able to prioritize your programmatic over your direct, it's changed a lot. Like I, I genuinely saw that happening over the last maybe three or four years across like the CTV space, but prior to that it was all just waterfalls.
- [13:21]
Heather Carver
I was telling someone earlier today, there was a woman on my team at Snagajob early days. She would spend the first five hours of her day logging into every single ad network platform we worked with, including our direct campaigns and our lead gen buyers, just to catalog what our revenue was the previous day. And you know, so you see all the innovations that have happened, you know, freeing up people's time to innovate and create new interesting technologies and obviously AI is going to accelerate that even more now.
- [13:52]
AdTech God
But so innovation obviously like this year has been the year of AI and I feel like comes up in a lot of the podcasts and AI in particular with you know, the news from Brian o' Kelly and how it's going to be utilized there. AI to streamline your processes. AI even for setting up campaigns and delivering and how you can just type in your audience segment that you want the product that you have and it can make suggestions of how you want to target. I think Vayant does stuff like that. Where do you see AI playing a role in the space that you live in and kind of like the publisher facing role. How do you see AI playing a bigger role in your clients and the people you work with?
- [14:29]
Heather Carver
Yeah, I mean I would say AI we've been using machine learning AI for many years now to automate things within our technology stack. So things like timeout settings, dynamic floors. It's, you know, I'm sure, you know, you're well aware it's not really physically possible for a human to set a different price floor for every single impression based on geo time of day, the domain that it's on. So we've been using AI for a long time to take all of that data and figure out the best floor floors on a per impression basis and the right timeout settings, the right bidder configuration. Right. Knowing certain bidders maybe don't perform client side. So why even have them in the wrapper and you know, have that additional, you know, code on page. So we're going to continue to use more data to do that. But then, you know, what's happening now is figuring out how to use AI in our day to day workflows. So automating some of the manual processes that we have some of the reporting that we're doing across our different buyers. So we're in the early days internally figuring out how we can leverage it, you know, to be more efficient in our day to day. You think about the Shopify CEO talking about, you know, hey, before you hire an additional headcount or you ask for other resources, is this something where you could use AI? And that's some of the questions that we're asking internally as well. Could we use AI in these areas? And maybe Ben. And doesn't necessarily mean we're not going to invest in Headcount, but does that mean we can hire another engineer to kind of innovate and build some of the new products rather than hiring someone to do a process that actually could be automated with, you know, an agent or something like that.
- [16:13]
AdTech God
When you think about the advertising space overall or the ad tech space overall, is there like a particular perspective or view that you have of the industry that might be different than other people?
- [16:25]
Heather Carver
I mean, there could be certain topics for sure that, that I might have disagreements with people on. Obviously a topic that a lot of people talk about right now is curation. And that's one, you know, in particular I am very bullish on. And I think that it is really good for publishers. But I do know that, you know, that that's not a popular opinion in many circles that maybe curation is just another ad tech tax, another middleman. It's, you know, making things more complicated and just, you know, another invention of the ad network. So for me, you know, my opinion, I have a lot of conversations with people about this who, who disagree, but I, I think it is a very positive thing and hopefully helping to, you know, the, the size of the, you know, is curation actually bringing dollars away from the walled gardens and into the open Internet? You know, the answer might be no right now, but I think what it is doing is channeling money to the more, you know, the publishers who are focusing on quality content and you know, away from mfa, that really, you know, MFA may have its place for some advertisers that want to tap into that inventory. But I do think it is going to shift the balance of that pie to the publishers who are bringing true value to consumers and creating those close relationships.
- [17:48]
AdTech God
I kind of agree with you. I don't really think about the ad tech tax that plays a role. I kind of think about what the end goal of it is, like curating the inventory, like reducing the noise and programmatic that you get, but like also like the control Part is like really important, I would think, from a brand's perspective. Look, there's been so much controversy about inventory quality. There's been things that have happened over the last few years where people are like, oh my gosh, how was it served on this type of site? We have every possible solution in place and yet this is still happening. But the reality is like, technology isn't perfect, so sometimes curation is actually just another layer of brand safety. It's another layer of quality. Like, I don't see it as like the save all of advertising, but I think it's a nice to have and I do think it's important. I just think like, let's not overcomplicate it like we do with everything else. Like, let's just call it what it is. Like it is a curated deal and let's focus on quality and focus on outcomes, on everything that we do.
- [18:51]
Heather Carver
Yeah, I completely agree. And you know, analytics is shining a light on some of the horrifying inventory that this stuff is showing up on. So if you can make buyers feel comfortable that, hey, this deal is telling you that you're not going to show up on that and allow those dollars to flow to the right publishers by all means. And as a publisher, then educate yourself and ask, you know, who are the partners that are doing curation? Do you have visibility? Most of the major platforms, Magnite, Pubmatic, Index Exchange, you can see what's happening in their platforms, you can see what's being curated. And I like it happening on the supply side as well, where I can go to my supply side partners where if there was curation or targeting happening on the DSP side, I'm so another step removed that it's harder to really understand how what's important to you, what are you looking to buy? Whereas when it's happening on the sell side, I at least have more visibility and transparency and can try to influence it.
- [19:48]
AdTech God
I agree with you. I just think in any scenario outside of our industry, like I would never just go and blindly buy something without knowing what I'm buying. So just like taking it to the basics, like, yes, Target has 20,000 SKUs, but I know that all 20,000 went through a quality check process. So whether I'm buying a towel or a trash bin or a toy, I know that that all went through a quality check. So just knowing that curated inventory went through some sort of quality check and that somebody's eyeballing this and making sure that it's okay, let's forget the data that comes across or how you segment it, but just, hey, this is an actual process to check this inventory for good quality and brand safety. Like that's enough. That already reduces the margin of error and the potential of something happening with you. I like curation. I hope we keep going. I just don't want it to get too complicated and crazy.
- [20:40]
Heather Carver
Agree.
- [20:41]
AdTech God
When you, when you think about the next 18 to, I don't know, 24 months in the space, what's something that excites you? What's something that you're bullish on that you feel like is good for advertising?
- [20:52]
Heather Carver
Overall, you know, I'm excited about where AI is going to go. I'm not anxious about it at all. I know there's anxiety from some people, are we going to lose jobs? And yeah, some jobs will go away, but that opens up opportunity for new types of jobs that I don't even know what those could be at this time. But I also think if you're a person who works hard and stays ahead of the curve and understands what's happening with AI instead of burying your head in the sand, those people will be fine and tend to find jobs. And this is still a very relationship driven industry. So I'm excited about the AI and all the kind of explosion of innovations. I'm really excited about what's going to happen with Google. I know it's not going to happen overnight and the ways that Google could move forward. I think personally it'd be really exciting if Google bid into. It would be a very funny full circle moment to have Google bid into pre bid. I think that would be pretty incredible. So there's going to be ton of innovations around that. There are so many smart people in this industry that I know are already thinking about this and have thought about it. I don't know what that is, but I'm very excited about the innovations that are going to open up there and more competition which between the news with Google and AI innovations and how that's going to transform businesses to be more efficient and maybe again also allow companies to have fewer jobs, you know, doing certain roles, but then can invest in other roles like engineering to innovate those new products. I think that's what I'm really excited about. You've already seen it. I mean personally in my own personal life, even with my kids, I've seen a ton of things that AI has, you know, made more efficient. And so there's just going to be a lot of opportunity over the next 12 to 18 months.
- [22:41]
AdTech God
You know, the innovation piece is really interesting. To me, I had a conversation with someone a few months ago and the motivation that it's going to create and the spark of innovation that's going to happen over the next few months as we figure out in detail what this actually means with Google being out. Like for me in particular, Heather, Like, I don't know a world without Google domination. Like, I really don't. And I think none of us really do because it's been so long. And so even though the piece of the pie that we're all, if you want to call it fighting for, is sizable, well, what's that going to mean when the pie becomes even bigger and those pieces of the pie become bigger? I just don't even know what that means in terms of new products that are brought to market. So even though I'm really excited about it, I'm also a little bit confused. Like what does this really mean for innovation? Like how much of the market was controlled by them? And what does this mean for the companies that are dependent on them today? And what does this mean for new companies that come up in the next 18, 24 months? I don't know. I think it'd be good, but I just have no idea what's going to happen.
- [23:47]
Heather Carver
Yeah, so I would say Freestart, you know we, while we use GAM and adx and we all do, yeah, we've, we've actually done a really good job at keeping adex well sub 30% of our monetization. You know, building our own tech, really focusing on, you know, pre bid our own innovations around floors and dynamic timeouts and having the right partners and going deeper. One of my initiatives right now is to, you know, cut out resellers and really double down on my direct SSPs and, and find a way to have them spend more rather than Google be 50 of my monetization. Like I feel like I'd be losing. So we're about to, you know, just over 20% now without XP or monetization. And that's also partnering with really great new identity partners out in market the you know, optimals and things that live intent are doing. And it's fun to find other partners, build your own stuff, but then also partner others who are doing things to help, you know, lessen that dependence.
- [24:50]
AdTech God
Heather, I wanted to thank you and thank you to Freestar for having you here. I really appreciate you taking time out of your, your, your day today to chat.
- [24:57]
Heather Carver
Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it, of course.
- [25:00]
AdTech God
Thank you. 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 inside insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of ad tech innovation.