An Interview With Mediaocean's Bill Wise

Published in partnership with Mediaocean

The following interview was conducted by email

First off, Bill, can you tell readers who don’t know you who you are? Paraphrasing David Byrne, how did you get here?

Well I started off as a CPA and thankfully didn’t stick with that for long. After 4 years at Arthur Andersen in the 90s, I joined an upstart called DoubleClick that was going public and helped with some financial planning and investor relations.

I like to say that’s where I got my MBA and wound up in a GM role for DoubleClick Media with people like Mike Walrath, who went on to start Right Media, and Ramsey McGrory, who is now Mediaocean’s chief development officer.

When DoubleClick sold its media business to MaxOnline I moved along with it and served as CEO and COO. That’s where I met Keith “Kappy” Kaplan who was our President and a hungry AE named Aaron Goldman who’s now Mediaocean CMO. Max got rolled up by Excite and then Ask Jeeves and then into IAC. Quite the collection of Web 1.0 brands!

From there I stayed in the search space for a bit and became CEO at Didit.com then planted roots in programmatic joining Walrath and team at Right Media. I served as President, helping with the integration into Yahoo after they bought us in 2007. That’s where I first worked with Steph Dorman, who is now Mediaocean’s chief customer officer.

After 3 years at Yahoo, I became CEO at a startup called MediaBank. Along with Nick Galassi, who’s now Mediaocean President and CFO, we set out to disrupt the agency systems market and go after the entrenched player, Donovan Data Systems. Two years in we decided the industry was better off with us combining than competing and the companies merged to form Mediaocean in 2011. As CEO, I partnered with Michael Donovan, who had been running DDS since 1967, to establish the independent, neutral, foundational platform for the buy-side of our industry.

I have new employees and I try to explain what Mediaocean is. I say they are like the original ad tech company that started in “book-bill-pay” and now do a lot more – but how do you describe Mediaocean to someone who isn’t an actual customer of yours?

Yes we started with back-office accounting and created software for advertisers to create, manage, and reconcile all their invoices through our system. Over time, we moved upstream to workflow tools for planning, buying, creative, measurement, and, as you said, a lot more.

We describe ourselves as the mission-critical platform for omnichannel advertising. From TV to TikTok and everything in between, we bring AI and automation to the table so brands and agencies can be more productive and get better campaign results.

Since you joined the company, the “lot more” has come largely from acquisitions, including 4C Insights and Flashtalking. What was the strategy behind adding advertising products vs. going deeper into payment or order processing in other industries?

We wanted to go from just processing ad spend to influencing it. We knew we could deliver more value to customers by not just telling them if their ads ran but if they were working, and how they could improve them. So we acquired some complementary solutions.

4C was essentially a DSP for social platforms and so buying them gave us access to the walled gardens. And then Flashtalking brought in the ability to do ad serving across the open web, mobile, and CTV – and of course, personalize the creative across all channels.

Flashtalking had also acquired a company called Protected Media for ad verification with MRC-accredited for viewability, invalid traffic, etc. We’ve since rolled that out as Protected by Mediaocean and expanded into brand safety and attention metrics.

Beyond just the great products though, these acquisitions brought incredible talent. Grant Parker, our Flashtalking President, was CRO at 4C. And Flashtalking brought us key leaders for our ad tech business – Amanda Glen Smith, who is now Chief Client Officer and Pat DeAngelis, our Chief Technology Officer. And the list goes on.

I always say, a company’s biggest asset is its people and that’s true with Mediaocean today and every acquisition along the way.

How do you balance buying companies that compete with customers or partners of yours with maintaining those relationships?

First and foremost, we’ve always remained open and neutral in the ecosystem. We will integrate and interoperate with all the key platforms our customers use. And unlike Big Tech platforms or other Walled Gardens we don’t own any media inventory so we’re not conflicted when it comes to making decisions over ad spend allocation.

Our key tenets are choice and control. You can use our ad server, or not. You can use our verification, or not. At the end of the day, we provide full transparency into how your media and creative are being delivered and we optimize solely for marketer KPIs, not publisher yield.

So now you’re in the process of buying a relatively big publicly listed company, Innovid. What’s the strategic vision for it? And what else do you need to fill out that vision?

We’re laser-focused on omnichannel marketing and the end-to-end workflow. Since it was started in 2007, Innovid has excelled at ad creation, delivery, measurement, and optimization – especially in CTV. By combining Innovid with Flashtalking under Mediaocean, we’ll have an ad tech platform that brings together an array of complementary offerings across ad serving, creative personalization, and verification.

Driving growth for our clients and partners is always the foundation of our strategy. When they grow, we grow! A lot of it comes down to resources but also innovation. Once the Innovid deal closes, we’ll be able to compete more vigorously with Google, Big Tech, and others. Today you have brands relying on technology owned by these media sellers, which means walled off access to inventory and data, less control over where their ads appear, and media spend being optimized for publisher yield.

Combining our platforms – Innovid and Flashtalking – will empower advertisers with more control over data and decisions, more choice in where ad spend can go, and the right tools and workflows to make media investments more effective and efficient.

There’s always more we could add to fill out the vision but we feel pretty good about where we’re at right now. Heck, there’s a whole Lumascape out there. Some of those logos add value to the ecosystem and some extract value from it (aka ad tech tax) so obviously our goal is to maximize the former. For now though, our focus is on closing Innovid and integrating the team and tech.

You also announced an investment in your business from Interpublic, Omnicom and WPP. My memory might be fading, but the last time I think IPG and WPP co-invested in something it was Spot Runner! I recall first-hand what the industrial logic was for Spot Runner – and the investment from competitors in the same business – but given that you have a lot of potential sources of capital what’s your logic for taking their money? And what about Publicis?

Hah, yes that may be the last time. I was going to say that our deal one-upped them by having 3 holdcos involved but IPG and Omnicom just announced a merger.

Jokes aside, we’re obviously very excited about this. To have IPG, OMC, and WPP as investors and sharing in the upside from our value creation is incredible and they also agreed to extend their contracts for our ad infrastructure solutions which ensures our ability to provide an end-to-end system-of-record.

But the biggest impact will be from our new Certified Service Partner (CSP) program of which those 3 companies are the founding members. Through the CSP, these agencies have premier access to Flashtalking and Protected by Mediaocean with extra support, training, onboarding, and preferred rates.

As for Publicis, in early 2023 we announced a seven year international omnichannel tech agreement. That deal also incorporates a partnership to take to market primary ad serving (PAS), dynamic creative optimization (DCO), CTV/video ad serving, and measurement capabilities from Flashtalking throughout Publicis’ vast agency network and customer base. We very much value our partnership with Publicis and all the other agencies and are excited to continue to grow together.

Overall, it’s been very gratifying to see a shared vision from the agency community in supporting neutral technology partners who are not conflicted by efforts to sell their own media. Since 1967, our job has been to provide solutions that help advertisers manage a supply-chain that has only gotten more fragmented and complex. So we’re needed more than ever and that’s a good place to be!

Of note—the whole idea around SpotRunner was to create more automation around the evolution from linear to digital media... the idea was right but the timing and company were not—this time it is!