An Interview With TripleLift's Dave Clark

I’ve known each of TripleLift, the company, and Dave Clark, its CEO for many years.   When I was a sell-side analyst covering stocks associated with the advertising industry during the 2010s, I tracked hundreds of smaller privately-held companies, and organized events for clients and the industry to better understand some of the fastest growing ones, including TripleLift, and so have followed them closely since then.    Because they approached ad tech from more of a creative asset and native advertising perspective, they were both more novel in their approach to the business, but also harder to directly compare to others in the space.  I’d argue these differences have been a source of strength for the company.  As for Dave, I likely met him for the first time when he was a co-founder of Joost, one of the world’s first efforts to build an internet TV service, back around 2006.   After time in senior leadership roles at MSG, the Weather Company and Freewheel, he became CEO of TripleLift in 2022.     Ahead of next week’s Cannes Lions where TripleLift typically has a big presence (and events you can register for here), I thought this was a good time to catch up with Dave on his company’s business and its new offerings.

For those unfamiliar with it, how do you describe TripleLift?  Who are your biggest paying customers by type or name?

TripleLift is a digital advertising platform offering creative advertising solutions, high quality publishers, actionable data and smart targeting. Founded in 2012, TripleLift is a leading programmatic advertising platform that connects publishers and advertisers to maximize revenue and engagement. TripleLift has evolved over the past 12 years to house technology that allows the world’s leading brands to find audiences globally across online video, CTV, display and native ads. We now boast more than one trillion monthly ad transactions and are focused on helping publishers and platforms meet their goals and monetize their businesses beautifully and effectively. TripleLift partners with a number of clients across the retail, apparel, soft drinks, pet food and large consumer software categories, to name a few. 

Is it equally accurate to call you an SSP? Alternately, why is it wrong to call you an SSP?

Our SSP is a core layer of our offering. However, our SSP is seamlessly integrated with creative tech, audience targeting and customer service.

Although your history is very different given the company’s initial focus on “native” advertising and custom formats a decade ago, given where the bulk of the business is now, what’s the big competitive advantage or difference you claim vs. other SSPs?

Behind the innovation of Native Advertising at TripleLift was an ambition to deliver outsized impact in digital advertising at a time when we believed the ecosystem wasn’t working well enough for advertisers or publishers. And that meant leaning into powerful formats and creative. That ambition stays at the heart of TL, even if the tools needed to deliver on it continue to evolve. Today, we not only continue to invest in innovative creative formats for advertisers, now across all screens including CTV, but have invested aggressively in first-party audience targeting which we believe is the other major primary source of outsized impact for advertisers in the future.

Regardless of label and product format, you’re a really important source of monetization for a lot of your customers, and so you will have a lot of insight on what’s best for their businesses. I’ve argued that traditional publishers, whether focused on video or text-based content who don’t invest in global scale and cross-platform capabilities are at a meaningful disadvantage vs. walled gardens.  Sure enough, when I calculate “open web” growth I see low single digit growth rates. When I look at today’s TV network owners including their streaming services and connected TV inventory, I see negative growth rates now and going forward. With all of that noted, is the opportunity that follows from working with you that a publisher can improve the share of budgets they capture regardless of underlying growth trends?  Alternately, what do you think these companies can do to collectively accelerate their businesses?  If you look at customers of yours who are growing quickly, what are they doing differently vs. customers of yours who are not growing?

Your analysis is exactly right. From our perspective at TripleLift, we believe the winners will do a couple of things really well:

1. Offer high-attention inventory in clean, well lit, uncluttered environments from the most premium publishers.

2. Transact via direct, un-gamed programmatic pipes.

3. Target using advanced, first-party driven contextual and behavioral segments to drive performance.

4. Make it all easy, backed with excellent customer service.

This is what the market is looking for right now, and they are finding some of it from the walled gardens. We believe open web can deliver all of it.  

Retail media is one of the spaces capturing a lot of growth right now.  Can you talk about working with retailers who want to generate revenue from advertising? Do they think and act in the same way as traditional publishers? Or is there anything different about working with them because they aren’t media companies, per se.

Outside of a handful of the major players, most retail media networks are still getting organized and set up, and many are still formulating their basic tech stacks. We are still very early in what we believe is a long period of dynamic growth. What makes RTM unique is the need to compile an ad in real time from an asset or SKU database and deliver it on the retailers’ site or even off site. This is something TripleLift has a lot of experience with as the underlying tech needed is very similar to Native. So it’s been no surprise that many of the top players in the space have reached out to us for help, including Amazon.

On this topic, you announced “Adaptive Commerce Solutions” last month, which if I understand it right, allows an advertiser to use assets from an Amazon product page on ads that run elsewhere.  Do you think this helps non-retail-focused publishers capture shares of retail media budgets?  Or does it just make for higher-performing media on the open web?  Or both?

Shoppers deserve better retail media creatives, which will create higher performance for brands and higher revenue for publishers. Retail Media has (rightly so) over-indexed on data/targeting and has omitted to see how to use dynamic assets (ie, components in a product detail page). In the early days of AI and a developing CTV landscape, a creative tech like ours combined with a contextual data tech can offer massive performance uplift for many years to come.  

In my opinion, it’s not an either/or it’s an and - retailers are realizing that in order to scale their offsite business, being great at data and targeting is just table stakes. You need to marry that to high-impact creative formats that drive attention and down the purchase funnel. And that’s where we come in.

Identity has to be one of the biggest issues (still!) as we all await the death of third-party cookies in chrome browsers.  You work in environments where there are cookies and where there are no cookies. How do you think the world of advertising and your business evolves when the end eventually comes?

Earlier this year, we launched TripleLift Audiences, a solution for generating cross-site audiences without relying on cross-site identity, cookies, or similar methods. This technology creates audience definitions and distributes them to individual publishers, allowing targeting across multiple sites. By doing so, it maintains consistent audience definitions while expanding targeting options to include double the inventory compared to cookie-dependent solutions. We recently conducted a test for a major global consumer electronics brand, which incorporated 230 million impressions. It showed that TripleLift Audiences improved outcomes for the advertiser and publishers, with 39% lower CPC and 26% higher CPMs. Publishers also saw improvement from TripleLift Audiences. Over the course of this test, TripleLift found that publisher CPMs (the currency on which they get paid) increased by 26%. 

TripleLift Audiences was developed by leveraging Zurich-based DMP 1plusX technology, acquired in 2022, to create the framework of sophisticated, data protection, and privacy standards necessary to form an actionable approach to first-party data segmentation. In addition, TripleLift turned to its trusted relationships with publishers, built over a decade, offering integrated native ad solutions. The solution is now available for buyers and advertisers in the United States and will be rolling out across other countries in 2024. 

What initiatives will you and your team be focusing on in Cannes next week?

We have a lot of fun activities coming up in Cannes that we’re excited about. Our conversations will very much be focused around our latest innovations such as TripleLift Audiences and how it outperforms cookie-based targeting solutions and how our partnership with Amazon is positioning us as a true leader in scaling retail media business. We’re also going to be discussing our CTV offering and how our traditional strengths as a creative innovator are uniquely positioning us via our unique ad forma offerings which deliver outsize impact. On top of this, as a proudly minority-owned business, we will be sharing findings from our State of the Industry Report that highlights advertisers’ and publishers’ insights into establishing economic inclusion commitments and improving investment in diverse-owned media in digital advertising. We have many other social events that we’re hosting or attending.  Please feel free to check out our full calendar here: https://tripleliftevents.com/cannes-2024/attendeeli 

Last question: I know you’ve been to Cannes many times.  Do you have any favorite places to go while there?

As great as the city of Cannes is, what I look forward to the most is getting out of the hustle and bustle and either getting out on the water or up into the hills to some of the amazing dining spots that exist outside of Cannes, like Le Figuier de Saint Esprit in Antibes.  This restaurant's location in Antibes' ramparts under an ivy-strewn canopy always makes for a great evening.

Thanks Dave!