Ep. 109 Building Advertible: Priti Ohri on Reinventing Native Ads and Leading with Purpose

This is Attec God and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing, and of course the people that work in this great advertising industry. So go to MarketTextureMedia.com, check out all of our brands. We have multitude of shows from the brand forum, the advertising forum, the monopoly report, the Attec God Pod, the MarketTexture Pod, and more. We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out, markettexturemedia.com, or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon. Welcome to the Attec God Pod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, Attec God. Welcome to the Attec God Pod, where we speak to the female founders of our industry. Today's guest is Priethiore, the co-founder and CEO of Advertible. Prior to founding Advertible, Priethi spent time at Ericsson and Mar Intelligence, Data Zoo, and more. She's also the founder of this, CS, a South Asian community for Attec. Priethiore and I have more than a few mutual friends in the space, but as of today, she still doesn't know who I am. I'm excited to meet you today, Priethi. Welcome to the pod. Thank you for having me. So excited to meet you in person. Same here. Thank you for joining. I know that you were recommended by a mutual friend, so I'm happy that you accepted when I reached out. Absolutely. Priethiore, I'd love to go back. You worked at Ericsson in Mar Data Zoo. I'd love to hear about your career and then truly why you created or co-founded this company, Advertible. Sure. So I think that I think all of us go back to our first job really out of college. My major one was at Viacom, so I worked at MTV Networks. That was my first introduction to media. There I did more than a few things. I started in accounting. I did Petty Cash. I handed out Wads of Money to producers. I then realized that the ad sales teams were the ones that were getting the most money. So I followed the dollar signs and decided that I wanted to move into ad sales. Did that for a little while and then ended up going back to school, getting my MBA and realizing that I wanted to understand why consumers were buying things and wanted to go more into the luxury brand side. So I worked at Coach, Elvia, M.H. really to understand what is the mindset of people when they're making purchases, especially irrational ones and helped on planning and buying there and then realize very quickly that I did not have enough data to make the decisions that I was making. So I was making millions of dollars of investment decisions, didn't have any real time data and decided I need to go where there's data. And so followed that next hunch and ended up in AdTech where I went from an ad tech startup to more of an ad network. I worked at demand media for a while and when we started selling programmatically, I then realized this is where I want to go. This is actually changing the way that we buy in sell media in a very important and critical way and I want to be part of this change. So that's where I ended up at Data Zoo. That was the career turning point in my life, I would say that helped me to realize it all clicked. It made a lot of sense to me in terms of what we were doing and the impact that programmatic was having continued in the space went into more of the data play for second third party data ended up in retail media and then to a platform with an Eric Sin that had both buy and sell side in one place. We were trying to come up with some differentiation and at that point realized we needed a new format, a small group within the company including myself and my team that led product strategy developed and launched what we call native for our SSP and we realized in doing that that it was a critical format that most people most SSPs hadn't invested in and started thinking through ways that we could create something extensible as any good startup. We launched once we got laid off and really the concept was how do we deliver a product of value that requires little time and effort investment from very large players that could make revenue off of it very quickly but also in create a format that is better for the consumer experience, it is better for the advertiser and it brings a better environment overall for the publisher and so native provides for all of those things and advertible when we launched it and as it stands today is essentially a plug-in solution that enables SSPs to deliver native rendering out of the box so that every ad looks and feels like it belongs in the environment on the surface and in the device that it's showing up on. It's incredible that you had this concept, Eric Sin laid you off which I'm guessing now looking back was probably a good thing. Oh yeah. Yeah, you're like thank you. Thank you for getting me out of here but you addressed the market pretty quickly and then launched advertible. What about native was different for the existing supply site platforms? Was it just a formatting issue? Was it a demand alignment issue or was it just like a particular niche of inventory type that they just never looked at? Yeah, so native on its own as a format is unlike banner or video. It's not it's not as straightforward and so you need alignment across a number of different teams both back in and front end you need design alignment. So you need expertise if you have mobile you need mobile expertise so you need expertise from a number of different engineering teams in order to make this one format work and if any one team makes a change it could make the whole thing fail and so there's a there's a lot of expertise and that goes into developing and deploying native properly and because of that very few players invested in actually building out that technology so it was truly like triple if nativo share through those guys have the corner on the market and because of that there never really was a huge uptick in demand so there was a set of demand there's obviously more demand than there is supply and so it kind of stayed within these these they're not necessarily wall gardens but there are few players that really specialized in it and I think part of it is that you know 2015 was this like this year of emerging formats if you might say in programmatic and that included audio it included digital out of home it include native so it was almost like a small blip on the radar before ctv came into into perspective and with that everyone jumped over those emerging formats and straight into ctv where there were bigger dollars to be made I would say that if folks had not invested in the resources by that point they likely didn't invest after that and so there's this whole green space that's available or white space that's available for folks that didn't invest in it and really it's about how much engineering resource would it take to get it off the ground so what we've built is a solution that number one delivers on a lot of the things that were idealized in the beginning but never fully delivered on so we have what we call a sizeless render so it can fit any size container on any page or any any surface so we don't need preset definitions of the actual ad unit itself we can take any number of assets so native is built on assets or components so headline image logo caption it can be anywhere from like two of these to 13 or 16 of them and so with that you can imagine that's another set of variables that are hard to predict and then on top of that the third piece of it is matching the look and feel of the publisher or the environment and so that is another set of variables that's in the tens of thousands so how do you take all of these pieces which can turn into an exponential problem and simplify it with a single solution that can take any number of assets any container size on any publisher and make it look like it belongs there so when you were founding this company and getting this started and ramping up and obviously in a situation where you're no longer employed and now you're like okay I'm leaning full into founding a company what do you feel with some of the the biggest challenges you have as a founder myself as a co-founder myself and going through the challenges it takes to scale and build and generate revenue and just make payroll and and just figure things out what do you think was your biggest challenge when starting this up for you to reach a point where you felt comfortable and satisfied with the direction it was heading in yeah I mean I think there's a few things that go into when you're founding a company you know the first thing is do you have a do you have product market fit right so that's one challenge how am I going to support myself that's another challenge do I you know being a founder is a lonely place because most people do don't understand your day to day, I'm sure you get this. Like most people don't totally understand what it takes, what the risks are that you're taking. And so I think it comes down to like, do you have the right support system? So I think those pieces together make this level, create this level of uncertainty that if you're not comfortable with uncertainty, you shouldn't be a founder. Yeah, and so like for us, it was really about like, creating milestones, making sure that we had enough feedback. So we had milestones around like getting the product right. And then we had milestones around when we needed our first contract signed by, and then when we need the first dollars to come in by. So from a actual company and revenue perspective, you have to have difficult conversations with your co-founders. It is very much a marriage where you're deciding, what are we willing to take and for how long? So I think for us, it was really like, we need to get out there. And the first six months we need to determine is this something that has legs. And we started pitching immediately. It's funny, because you sound way more organized than we were. For us, it was like, let's just run with it. Let's package it up and Jeremy, who's now the CEO, 'cause Harry's set the status chairman. He's really kind of like the brains behind the commercial aspect of things. And he just came, he's like, I think there's opportunity here, here, here, here, here. I'm like, all right, let's do it. Let's spin up the content, let's roll with it. But there was almost, in the first few months, this feeling of, God, are we gonna make payroll? - I mean, the fact that you had payroll is one thing. We were like, can you survive? - Yes, yes. I mean, to be fair, right? We had three independent companies. We had the market texture with Harry. We had @techgod, that was me. And then there was the former @techform. Now, advertising form, that was a 50/50 partnership between Jeremy and I. All three generated revenue, but it was combining all those assets together. And seeing, can this actually float all three of us and go from there was the challenge. I think the hardest part I could see on your aspect, pre-theist, like getting your first contract, getting those in, where did you really lean in to getting those contract signed? Is this all built off of existing relationships? Was this where you lean into your prior partners and your prior contacts? How did you scale it and hit those milestones consistently? - Yeah, I mean, it was a lot of just being out, being visible, having conversations with folks we knew in the industry. And it was a lot of refining our idea of what it should be. So we are an infrastructure. So part of it was being able to pitch the solution without having the product fully in this state where it could plug in right away. But having enough of a concept of what that would look like so that we could talk through it. So our first iteration was, okay, we're gonna be in AWS and we're gonna co-locate and we're gonna do all of these things so that it's really simple and easy for us to work together. Most of the SSPs were like, no, sorry, that's not gonna work for us. We need you to be directly within our, like part of our actual ecosystem. So then we had to iterate again. And so it was a process of iteration, but we were getting the feedback. So it was really relying on the partnerships we had, the people we knew and folks really, I think the one thing is that your reputation precedes you. And you know this as well as I do that people will talk to you if they know you and trust you, even if they don't fully understand yet what you're doing. So those 20 years of building relationships really help to get you in the door the first time. - It's wild to me because the support level, like I think this is something that's, I don't know if it's unique to add tech if you wanna call that, but in add tech it's an unbelievable level of support that you get from peers. I think that's one thing that maybe I didn't notice prior to starting this account. I think for me, like for me, I was like, I would have just worked in this industry and it's big and it's vast and there's thousands of people. But the more I leaned into, look, I'm gonna support you, I'm gonna help you, you're gonna help me, we're all gonna help each other. Let's build up our products and let's be successful together. I quickly realized even though it's thousands of people, just how small it is. - Yeah, I mean, we're built on rooting for the underdog. It's a community of innovators at the heart of who we are. We are the weirdos looking for solutions in places that no one else thought about. - It's funny you mentioned that it's, yeah, with a handful, less than a handful of companies dominating 70% of the market. - Oh, yes. - I guess we're definitely the underdogs. I'll take it though, you know? I'll take it. Still, 30% is still a big market. - Yes. - Could be bigger though. When you started to scale and build out your team pretty, I'm always curious how founders do this. How did you find your first hire? How did you select your first add-on to the team? What were character traits you were looking for? I'm always curious for who that first person is that somebody brings into the company. - So we're still pretty small? - We're still the founders and I would say who we brought in was advisors. And so for us actually, you know, our advisors are part of our team. I rely on many of them regularly, talk to all of them almost monthly. And so it's a different angle of hiring for your team. However, I would say that the advisors we sought out were ones who really believed in our vision and ones that understood what we were doing. And that had deep knowledge and expertise in that area so they could help to refine our go-to-market, refine our product strategy, and refine who we were talking to and make introductions for us. Because the SSP market isn't huge, but you still need to get in touch with the right people and you need to go in there with the right recommendations. And so for us, it was really folks that had relationships that had a deep understanding of native of the SSP market and then ones that had influence in the industry that could help to elevate our message. - When you think about your day to day and as a growing startup, and as you mentioned, I didn't know. I thought I saw more people on the LinkedIn, but the probably advisors is probably where I'm seeing it. When you're picking these advisors, we can kind of fill the gap and assist in scaling faster. What do you do when you kind of have those challenging moments where you just wanna like hang it up and walk? Because I know that that happens at times to all founders where it's just a tough day, tough week, tough month. What keeps you driven, what keeps you moving forward? - I think I'm really lucky. My co-founder and I have a very, very tight relationship. So he and I are like Yen and Yang. My co-founder Alex is our CTO. I obviously sit and I do all the commercial, the front facing, but we do a lot of things together. We are very, very tight in communication. We start our day talking to each other and we recognize we are quite opposite in the way that we think about things in the way that we live our daily lives. However, our values are very tightly aligned. And so we can also see when one or the other needs a pep talk or some motivation. And then I think also having, I think having the advisors that I can call on and say, hey, can I run something by you so that I can get another perspective from someone who understands what we're doing and that can give a reality check is important. But I think beyond that, community is a really important thing, especially as a founder in a small space where our team is small. And sometimes when you talk to each other, you're in a bit of an echo chamber you need outside support and community. And so I think especially when we're used to being at big companies, which I'm sure you are as well, where you have teams you can rely on or groups or water cooler chat. Don't really get that as much as a founder. And so you have opportunity to create the community you actually want. And so I've built that in many places. There are female groups, so female founders and other female executives that I can call on that I know will understand or be able to listen to a South Asian community that we founded. They see us great people there that bring another perspective overall and that satisfy a different piece of my structure and my life that I need. And then there is a founder's group that I'm part of as well and they have another perspective as well that I can go and reach out to them and ask questions. And so having these different groups that can satisfy different facets of my personality have become really important. - I was gonna actually ask you about that with your South Asian focused community that you created. What have you felt that's created for yourself and others in the space? Because being a minority in the space, being a female in the space, you're almost like double whammy. Like minorities across the board. Like what void has that filled and how has that helped you and others in the community? Like lean in and be more more vocal and supportive of each other. - I think what it does is it helps us to be seen. And I think when we can see each other, we can all perform better, even if we're not performing together in the same place. And so just that validation of recognizing there's somebody else that looks like me and that's experiencing something similar gives me that satisfaction of knowing, okay, I'm not alone. But then the flip side of it Oh, wow, I've been given this great platform. And for, you know, for whatever it's worth, I've been given this luck of having the ability to lead these groups in these communities. I find great responsibility and great satisfaction in knowing that I represent them as well. And that perhaps them seeing me a woman of color in the position I'm in gives them the freedom and almost the permission to go about doing it in their way as well. And I think that that is something that I didn't realize I was going to get from building this community. But that's one of the biggest pieces is knowing that I'm giving somebody else that ability to stand up and be strong in what they believe. Fast forward to the future, preview. Where do you think things are heading in this space? We have a gentick going on. We've got AI going on. We've got Google antitrusts happening. Where do you think we're going to be in 12 to 18 months from your perspective and where you sit? Yeah, I think that look like we've kind of optimized this programmatic thing to an N's degree and we're ready for some massive change. I think a gentick brings that to the forefront. We saw that with the ad CP announcement. I think 2000 people are so logged into that. I think it's super exciting. I am not saying it's going to solve all of our problems, but it offers a new tool set that can help us to reimagine the way that our industry is structured at the moment. And you know, for us, the way we've set up our tool and the way we've built our solution, it is already prepared and ready for the agentic future. We have a creative agent. It's it's almost ready to go live. So for us, it's it's really just about creating new expanded opportunity and giving folks a new way to think about advertising in general, which is something I think we all need right now. We need something to rally behind. We all need a big thing to root for together as a community. Maybe this is it. Maybe it's going to create some friction for a little while, but I think in the end, if we can take the automation, we've built through programmatic and open our TV and give it intelligence with agentic. I think that would be a really exciting place to go. Yeah, I agree. I don't know much about the ad CP or ADCP that was launched. All I know, it's like, how do they all talk to each other? How do they all communicate and standardize it? What that means? I don't know yet. I've tried reading up on it. I'm trying to have the look. I don't know what this means in terms of operations, in terms of advertising. How this is going to benefit the industry. All I can say is that there seems to be some very influential companies and people leaning into building this out. When you've got, I think it was like seven or eight companies they listed. Pubmatic was on there. Obviously, scope three was on there and a few others. I'm like, look, I am not that smart. I will lean into you guys to tell me whether this is a good solution. I'm just looking forward to seeing what this all does for us. I'm crossing my fingers that just creates growth for our industry overall. Great. Awesome. Pretty, I wanted to thank you for joining me today. Thank you for being my guest and good luck with everything with that vertical. Thank you. I wish you the best. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Same here. 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 AdTech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X, Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget, a TG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of AdTech innovation.