Programming Success Into Digital Advertising

A fractured media landscape, an overflowing Lumascape, and overwhelmed marketers looking to escape - sound familiar? Can adtech fix this? This episode of What Gets Measured dives into digital advertising with StackAdapt COO, Vitaly Percherskiy, and we talk programmatic; what it is, where it’s headed, and how it can, and can’t, help agencies and brands grab a piece of the attention economy.

The Guest

A passionate technologist, futurist, and entrepreneur, Vitaly Pecherskiy is the co-founder and chief operations officer of StackAdapt, a programmatic advertising platform helping brands accelerate customer engagement and acquisition. With experience in advertising at the agency and executive level, Vitaly is bringing a diverse suite of skills to the NinjaCat podcast to talk about programming success into digital advertising.

The Interview

Vitaly begins the interview with a brief description of what StackAdapt is, when and how they got their start, and reflections on the vastness of the modern marketing technology landscape.

“Before we started StackAdapt in 2014, we all worked in the adtech space, at agency trading desks, and the marketplace wasn’t so crowded. Now, the market for technology is massive, and it can be hard to break through.” says Vitaly. 

This difficulty breaking through hasn’t stopped StackAdapt from making moves as a leader in the self-serve programmatic advertising platform space, and adapting for a much different media landscape than when Vitaly co-founded the company.

“Everything is becoming digitized, and fragmented.” Vitaly states. “A lot of advertising is being bought and sold programmatically with software, and so in this fragmented future, it’s important to know how to stitch the complexity of these ecosystems together. Advertising isn’t going away, it’s changing, it’s becoming more important.”

Vitaly then explains how StackAdapt helps agencies distribute digital advertising in a way that combines scale and targeting.

“One of the value props of StackAdapt as a platform is our access to thousands of publishers for agencies to target. We’re using technology to find a way to let brands access more users, across more devices, at more moments.”

Vitaly goes on to explain the prospects of digital advertising in a cookieless future, where data privacy is an area of concern for consumers.

“The trends with privacy and cookies are evolving, the motivating forces behind this are, 1) regulations like CCPA and GDPR, and 2) technology platforms. Browsers like Brave and Firefox take a technological approach to protecting data privacy, while regulators are seeking to address the issues in legal code.”

The conversation then shifts to how brands and agencies erroneously approach advertisement as the sole means of growing their business. 

“You can have the best advertising technology in the world,” says Vitaly, “but if the brand strategy behind that campaign isn’t thought out, the results will never match expectations.”

In regards to data and analytics in digital advertising, Vitaly believes that there are just as many opportunities as there are challenges.

“You need to have systems in place that allow not just storing the data, but combining the data, and you need people who can integrate, analyze, and offer insights.” says Vitaly.

But is data analysis and interpretation the biggest hurdle facing digital marketers?

“The unification of data is a bigger challenge than interpretation.” states Vitaly. “Because there is so much data, advertisers and brands need to rely on strategy and inference. You have to start with a why when it comes to data, the ‘why’ is your guide to data collection and campaign direction.”

In what could’ve been a big pitch for the magical powers of digital ads and his programmatic advertising platform, Vitaly ends the interview instead with a call to strategy for all businesses looking to grow through advertising.

“The most important thing to remember with digital marketing, advertising alone is not gonna fix your strategy,” says Vitaly. “You have to think holistically. Take a step back and think about objectives, and have a clear understanding of what those tactics are before you get ads set up. This is when marketing really works well.”   

The Links

Learn more about StackAdapt

Check out StackAdapt's latest feature highlight, Page Context AI

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