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- [00:01]
AdTech God
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- [00:49]
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- [01:33]
AdTech God
Your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTech God. Welcome to the Ad Tech Godpod, where we speak with the revenue leaders and partnership leaders of our industry. Today we're joined with Giuseppe la Broca, the VP Global Enterprise at StackAdapt. Giuseppe is a seasoned leader in digital media and ad tech with over a decade of experience across Yahoo, Verizon Media and iProspect. He's played key roles in native advertising, commerce media and programmatic partnerships. You were highly recommended by a good friend. Welcome to the Ad Tech Pod.
- [02:11]
Giuseppe la Broca
I appreciate that atg. Thank you for having me. I know the backlog is very long, but I'm excited for this conversation.
- [02:17]
AdTech God
You know, I received the message and they said, you know, this person is a friend of mine and about two months ago I posted something that I'm only really accepting referrals. Like I want referrals from prior guests. So it means a lot to me when someone reaches out and says this is a genuinely good person. I'd love for them to be on your pod. I looked and I'm like, look, I'm going to get them in.
- [02:36]
Giuseppe la Broca
Thanks for being you're an expert podcast host you already got me feeling high with the fact that I made this cut so well. Amazing, amazing news.
- [02:44]
AdTech God
I warmed you up a little bit before, before we start recording. That's kind of the goal. People are waiting to record. I'm like, no, we got 10 minutes. Don't worry, we're just chatting here. Giuseppe, I wanted to ask you, you've come from a great background. You worked at Yahoo. I've had some guests from Yahoo. On the pod, from Verizon Media, iProspect. How did you get into the space? And specifically, how did you get into enterprise partnerships at StackyDoct?
- [03:06]
Giuseppe la Broca
It's a pretty long and winding road. I'm from Gloucester, Massachusetts, the town north of Boston. And my family, we were Sicilian immigrants, were super blue collar, super hardworking ad tech, advertising. It was just so distant to what my day to day was. And I remember working with my father during the summers. He did masonry. So tile work, model work, brickwork, really difficult labor. And that adage, control. What you could control could not be more true for that environment. In construction, you can't control when the demolition is happening or when a plumber needs to go and set up the room for you to tile or for you to do marble work. But what you can control are two things. You can control the quality of your work and the effort that you put into it. I spent a lot of time thinking about that today for some reason, but that really shaped me and how I got into ad tech and who I am today. When I was coming out of college, I had a really difficult time finding a job. I remember sitting in Starbucks for eight, nine hours, filling out different, you know, indeed. And LinkedIn applications, and just nothing was working. I finally landed a job in finance, which it sounds like a lot of folks in ad tech did. And I was working on my Series 7 at the time. But I also put together a digital marketing plan for the firm. And I remember presenting it to the principal at the time. And the comment that he made to me was, you know, this is awesome, but I think you like this more than you like the actual job. And he couldn't be more right. And so that comment really shifted my path and eventually, through a lot of hard work, again found my way to iProspect in Boston, which was really an amazing experience. I cut my teeth on daily ad checks. I remember doing screenshots of search engine Results page of Staples.com Taking that screenshot, putting it into an Excel spreadsheet, and then sending it to the client. That was like my work for three Months. But I really learned paid search, I learned biddable media, I built a real love for performance marketing. And most importantly, I was surrounded by a lot of young, hungry people that learned fast, loved the industry and loved being a part of it. You know, just celebrating together just as much as they did learning together. And so that was a really formidable experience that really promoted my love for the industry and what it is and what it could be there. I landed a job at Yahoo. And to go back to not really having a lot of folks in the industry at the time, what I did with that opportunity at Yahoo is I was a sponge. I learned from some amazing leaders. Sarah Martinez, who's a mentor of mine, former CRO of iaf, Elizabeth Herbst Brady, Jeff Lucas, Missy Schnorstein and DJ Rao, all of these individuals that have gone do amazing things. I used it as an opportunity, almost like business school to sponge from these leaders. I even remember, you know, during the Oath acquisition, or rather the Verizon acquisition that became Oath, I would see Tim Armstrong in the office and we didn't really have any sort of relativity, but I'd see how I schedule the conference rooms next to his room and I'd see how he'd conduct his rooms and I'd see the questions that he's asking. And so even then I was trying to sponge. At a certain point I was really ready for leadership and ready to make my mark as a people leader at the company. And I remember talking to an individual, Chris McCaro, who's a former CEO at Beachfront Media but also led multiple sales teams at Yahoo. And he gave me this piece of advice that I still think of today, which is build the role before you get it and then it becomes obvious. And so I started to do that. I built out the Yahoo Gemini sales and strategy team. Gemini was obviously one of the babies and darlings of Marissa Meyer and that was a really successful product and team. Helped launch retail media at Yahoo back in 2020 and then oversaw different programmatic teams. After about 10 years at Yahoo, the learnings become diminishing returns. And so if I really wanted to accelerate my own professional development, I realized I probably needed to step away from the walls of Yahoo. And what was important to me was aligning with the company's vision, but even more importantly the purpose of that company. And so I started talking to Stackadapt, more specifically Christian Jaran, who's my boss now. I'll tell you, a 30 minute conversation went two hours and then we had another two hour conversation and then met with all the founders, and it was unlike any DSP interview or conversation that I'd been on because we weren't talking about an arms race in the DSP world. We were talking about the future of ad tech and martech and the convergence of that and how we can be in the best position of any ecosystem player to put our flag in the ground. And that just really inspired me. And so In October of 2023 I joined StackAdapt to lead their enterprise, their large customer sales division. And I haven't looked back.
- [08:09]
AdTech God
So question for you, like StackAdapt is in the market. I know that it's kind of a mid market product you're leading up on enterprise, which is not how I would have thought Stack Adapt fit into the overall marketplace. How are you working differently than I guess your colleagues and other departments at StackAdapt to work with these types of enterprise clients? And what are enterprise clients in your world?
- [08:33]
Giuseppe la Broca
So a lot of folks see us as a demand side platform, and that's true. But at our core we've always been built to accelerate customer growth across all channels. And we've always felt that advertising is just one lever. And so we've evolved from being a really exceptional demand side platform to one that bridges ad Tech and MarTech to drive outcomes throughout. We've been around for 12 years and for 11 of those years when we talked about accelerating customer growth, we were really talking about that mid market customer. And we started with one channel and we grew into new channels and then we took that customer segment, that mid market customer, that atg. I don't know if you feel this way, but I think it's perpetually gets overlooked as part of the ad tech ecosystem how important that customer segment is. But we took that customer segment and then expanded it across North America and then EMEA and then apac and a few years ago I think the ecosystem really started to pay attention to stackadap because we were providing the ecosystem with diverse incremental demand that a lot of the larger enterprise DSPs weren't necessarily doing because they were competing with direct sales teams. And so what that allowed us to do is grow in our importance, but naturally grow into a platform that drives growth for not only mid market customers, but large enterprise customers as well. And there's definitely some learnings in going up market. Right. What works for mid market isn't 100% what's going to work for enterprise. So we did a couple of things in our journey to set ourselves up as a really successful enterprise DSP as well. So One of the things that people would always tell me was how are you going to compete against the trade desks and the DV360s of the world and even Amazon? And I don't know if it was me being naive or maybe a little dumb, but what I would say is that we can be successful and they can be successful. One and two. Maybe the DSP world looks a little bit different in the next five years. Maybe we're not in the same race in five years as we're in today. But what was fundamentally true was that we needed to listen to customers. If we listened to customers and built on behalf of customers, I think we would find the right path. And so for the first couple of months atg, we didn't even sell. We did nothing of the sort. We just listened to customer challenges, be it at the agencies and at the brands directly. One of the things that we uncovered in this was the sort of the notion of outcomes. And this was at the time, November and December of 2023 when we were talking about outcomes, we noticed that the way agencies were talking about outcomes was very different than the way brands were talking about outcomes. Agencies often looked at efficiency metrics which I think DSPs were really stood up well to help drive, be it reach or CPA or cpm. But when we talk to the vertical or brand marketers, what was important to these marketers were outcomes related to effectiveness. So think about economic impact or retention or market share or driving loyalty, right? And so what we focused on doing was how do we ensure that just as much as we have efficiency outcomes built into our platform, in order for brands and advertisers to be able to drive, we also need to be thinking about the effectiveness outcomes. And the effectiveness outcomes are all fueled by first party data and having good storage of that data for interoperability. And so that's what we learned externally, internally. One of the other interesting things was we would see these mid market customers that were on the upper echelon of mid market and by some definitions would be enterprise that were operating 10 to 15 person agencies, trading hundreds of millions of dollars and leaning very quickly into agentic AI and the workflows that we've built into our plat. And at the time we thought and either this is something that's nuanced within mid market or this is a broader trend that's going to affect all customer segments. And we felt that our platform was really positioned well for this next pendulum swing that we're seeing in ad tech, which is better utilization of workflows to drive efficiency, more agentic AI to be able to drive outcomes and a seamless platform to be able to execute.
- [13:04]
AdTech God
You touched upon a lot there. I have a lot of questions for you because I, I, I'm really intrigued by this mid market thing. I'm really intrigued by enterprise. Just overall I think I understand where, you know, the trade desks of the world are kind of targeting their clients and where the mid market solutions in market target. Now that you're moving into enterprise and have been for a while, it sparks a couple questions. I think the first one for me is how are buyer behaviors different? How is dealing with an enterprise client different than dealing with kind of a mid market client where the decisioning process is different, the solutions that they need might be different, even some of the managed type of solutions. I don't know if you have managed service for your clients, but they may need a little bit more handholding than a larger enterprise. How has that taught you the difference between, you know, a mid market client and an enterprise client?
- [13:52]
Giuseppe la Broca
One of the interesting things about mid market is packaging is important. It can't be too much and your platform cannot be a switchboard of sorts. It's gotta be an easy to access platform to be able to drive the outcomes that are important to them. And when we're speaking to mid market customers, we've gotta speak to them in a different way than maybe we're speaking to enterprise customers who are accustomed to all of the measurement solutions in the market. All of the brand safety solutions in the market are a little bit more intuitive with their abilities to trade on platform and require much more nuance, I would say. And so packaging is super important for mid market customers. The through line though, I would say ATG is outcomes. They care about outcomes just as much as the enterprise customers care about outcomes. And why it's a little bit more high stakes in mid market is that if those campaigns don't drive outcomes, do you know what they do? They turn the campaigns off, pause. They can't afford to put more investment into the platform. And that's what's fueled our platform realizing that mid market actually is high stakes. If we can drive outcomes for these customers, then we can focus on the nuances for enterprise. We can drive nuances for enterprise as well. A lot of learnings though too, just in a company upmarket from mid market to enterprise. I think one of the things with enterprise that you don't have to necessarily worry about with mid market is navigating these large agencies. As an example, you have to do deep account mapping work, tops down, bottoms up, to just establish perception alone, let alone change perceptions. And that's just externally. I think internally one of the biggest learnings for me, ATG has been because we focused on a customer segment for so long and know that customer segment intimately. The way we spoke externally, the way our product team was thinking was for that customer segment, that mid market customer segment. And in order to go after a new customer segment being enterprise, you need to bring the company along on the journey with you, have them understand how the enterprise customer thinks, what's important, the challenges that we actually need to solve, the product, the features, the functionality that we actually need to drive within platform. And until you actually bring all of them along on the journey because everybody wants to help, you might be met with some skepticism. I'm happy to say that with stackadot that hasn't been the case. We've brought a lot of cross functional folks along on the journey who are intimately thinking about enterprise challenges or large customer challenges and they see the opportunity that Stack it up can provide.
- [16:41]
AdTech God
When you look back at your time at StackAdapt and your time at Yahoo, 10 years, which is really long time by the way. Most people I don't think make it past four or five. So being there 10, actually let me rephrase that, some don't make it past two. But to be at a company for 10 years, you saw so much change there. You probably saw a bunch of growth, acquisitions, rebranding, everything possible that you could think of. Where do you feel Stack Adapt is today and where do you feel you are as leading up on enterprise in that phase of growth? Because stackadap, who I had kind of heard of three years ago and was familiar that they were a player in the market, I knew that they worked with clients that I didn't at the time work with. Where do you see things trending and where do you see the positive growth happening for you as both a person and as a, as a team leader and as a company?
- [17:30]
Giuseppe la Broca
What's so exciting about it at ATG is that because we've never boxed ourselves into just being a demand side platform, it's allowed us to think a bit more broadly about the challenges we can solve for customers. One of the things that we just announced recently was our foray into MarTech, which encompasses a customer data platform, mail solutions and dynamic creative optimization. But I say that to say what we realized is it's one customer journey. But for so long we've been looking at that customer journey in a bifurcated way and measuring it in a bifurcated way as well. And so when I think about the future of Stack Adapt and where we are in terms of our own growth, we're almost at a point where we're reaching a new frontier and so we're continuing to grow shure as a DSP that is driving outcomes for customers. But now with the introduction of Martech and the convergence of those two worlds, we're showing up a bit differently. And so I think what you see across all the stack of death, unanimously, whether it's leadership on down is just this general excitement to the way in which we positioned ourselves for the future.
- [18:43]
AdTech God
Where do you see all the growth coming from in this space? I usually ask people what are trends that you see? So whether it's AI comes up all the time because everybody's really excited about it. But what is a trend that you're seeing in market that's really exciting where you feel like, you know, there's, there's massive growth opportunity, product enhancement opportunity and really just improvement for, for both the buyers and, and the sellers of inventory.
- [19:07]
Giuseppe la Broca
I would say two things. Number one, I'll be a bit more tactical. I think there are ways in which platforms are thinking about making the executional nature of programmatic trading way more efficient, way more. And that's through leveraging AI for better workflows in platform. It's something that I think we've done well, but I think it's going to be a trend that we continue to hear more of, especially in the coming weeks. And so how do we just get way more efficient with what we're doing on a day to day? And we save time, we save investment and we reallocate that investment into growing areas. So that's one. The second I would say is with live sports. If you take a look at the consumer evolution from linear to ctv, one thing that's primarily remains in linear is live events, live sports. I think that's slowly starting to come over to the CTV side and thus the programmatic side. More inventories being made available. Programmatic. I do think though that there are a lot of challenges with programmatic live sports that we should be aware of. I think number one, it's really easy to get trapped into. They've got the best inventory or this is the most premium inventory. Let's align with these partners. But if you don't align with platforms with a strong live sports programmatic practice, you might be in difficulty. And by practice I mean do the platforms, are they able to handle the amount of qps that's required. You know, talking about winning impressions in milliseconds to onboard live sports creative failure rates, which is a huge issue in ctv, let alone live sports programmatic. In ctv, you cannot have creative failure rates when an event is scheduled at 7pm and they're not going to move that event to ensure that your creative gets loaded in time. And so are the platforms working to protect your media investment and uphold really the publisher integrity too? And then planning is super difficult with live sports as well. Think about forecasting for certain events. You need to be working with a team that really sets you up well to Prepare for those 10 pole events programmatically. And then the last piece is obviously outcomes. And are these live events that you're driving programmatically, are you able to actually measure and show the outcomes from that event? So while there's a lot of excitement around live sports and we positioned ourselves well to have a strong practice, I think there are a lot of things to be aware of as a buyer as it relates to buying those live sports programmatically.
- [21:52]
AdTech God
I don't know if you remember the. Was it, was it the Mike Tyson fight where we saw major latency and cut off because like it's, it's extremely hard to forecast ad inventory in a life experience. It's hard to support that many concurrent users. The servers could be overwhelmed, there could be an ad break, there could be issues with the creative. But I feel like over the last, I think that was a year and a half ago, we've had more and more live events that are streaming and the quality has improved a ton in such a short period of time. Like you're starting to see, you know, less breakage for the stream. You're starting to see better ad insertion from advertisers. You're starting to see distribution channels change and where you can access that content across streaming solutions and market. So it feels like the opportunity, or at least I want to say the fight that live will never get off of traditional linear kind of television is not that true. I can see live really taking over streaming in the next couple of years where we'll find a majority of the consumer is streaming this instead of through the traditional methods of traditional television. Yeah.
- [23:01]
Giuseppe la Broca
And if I think of my own consumption, probably 90% of the time I'm actually watching live sports through some sort of CTV app. So there's no question that live sports just going to be more and more ctv. I think for buyers, you got to have a really strong practice to be successful. Then if you look at the slate in 2026 between even Disney and NBCU with the World cup and everything, that's the Olympics. There's just so much happening next year that there's no question the ad dollars are going to go there and the programmatic ad dollars are going to go there. But you got to make sure that, that you're setting up your practice correctly.
- [23:37]
AdTech God
Why are you still in ad tech after all these years? Giuseppe, you've worked in the space for a while. Why do you continue to work in ad tech and what keeps you here?
- [23:45]
Giuseppe la Broca
It's a good question. You heard a little bit about my background. I didn't come from a background of higher education. I came from a background, really hard work. And I look at this industry and I just got a ton of gratitude. There's a lot of cynicism in this industry, don't get me wrong. But there's also a lot of great and there's a lot of innovation and most importantly, there are a lot of great people that I just genuinely enjoy working with on a day to day basis. So I think my perspective is just a bit different. But that's what's kept me here and I'm optimistic about the future of this industry as well. Obviously there's a lot of chaos going on, but there's also a lot of amazing innovation. So I choose to lead with positivity. I also realize that it's just ads at the end of the day, so there's an element of humility there too. And I always want to surround myself with great people. And so those three things have really kept me around and will probably keep me around for the foreseeable future.
- [24:48]
AdTech God
I'm not going anywhere either. Giuseppe. I like the industry and I especially like a lot of the people in the space and the fact that the market's going through a weird, turbulent, changing time now and I think it's scary for many. But at the same time, when you think about the overall growth in digital advertising, overall the trajectory of that growth, this is just another phase. This is Digital Advertising 2.0. Yes, it might get tough for a period of time with some companies and some solutions in marketing, but overall, I don't intend to ever leave. The people are too good, the innovation is great and I just generally like working in the space.
- [25:26]
Giuseppe la Broca
Yeah, I think you nailed it and I'm glad that you're never going to leave. I think I just want to say one thing. You've done a great job and I don't know how many of your guests will tell you this, but you've created an amazing voice in drumbeat of positivity and really hope for the industry. I think it's a big part of why you've been so successful in addition to your work ethic. But I just want to say I hope you're not going anywhere. I think we need you in advertising, so I'm happy to hear that.
- [25:57]
AdTech God
I think it's important. I think when you look at everything that happens around us, whether it's industry related, advertising related, whether it's threats on the way our jobs are done with AI and technology or anything else, we look at political climate. When you look at all those things, right, it's important to have light at the end of the tunnel and it's important for me. This has become very therapeutic for myself as well. Like being able to just highlight and block out the negativity and highlight only the positivity I think is important for me as well. So I'm glad that you find it valuable. But you know, in one way I also look at it as, as a way for me to stay positive and looking forward towards a, you know, a better future and a better industry.
- [26:38]
Giuseppe la Broca
That's well said.
- [26:40]
AdTech God
Awesome. I wanted to thank you, thank you to Stack Adapt as well for having you here as my guest. Giuseppe. I wish you the absolute best of luck and enjoy can 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 adtech innovation.