The global market is becoming increasingly restricted and regulated. Walled gardens are dominating the web and consumer privacy is front and center in any discussion concerning the future of advertising. This level of complexity isn’t new to AdTech/MarTech, and some companies like Zeotap continue to thrive amongst the chaos and spin up innovative solutions that enable businesses to build on a nucleus of first-party data and win themselves.
Matt Barash joins our host, Cory Davis, to discuss his role and experience at Zeotap. Matt is the SVP Global Publishing + Platform Partnerships at Zeotap, where he oversees all global commercial relationships with publishers and automated advertising, data, and marketing technology partners. Matt has 20+ years of experience in the space and has held leadership positions at Opera/AdColony, Forbes, and News Corp.
In this episode of the Identity Revolution podcast, you’ll get to hear Matt’s insights about some burning topics in the industry. How can we leverage customer data without the risk of privacy invasion? Do walled gardens represent a threat to the AdTech space? And what does the future hold for media publishing?
Zeotap aims to help companies better understand their customers and predict behaviors by unifying the fragmented profile of the user, adding identity resolution to it, and allowing for enterprise data and modeling on top of that. “We are helping them not just to have better first-party data assets but also to set those free in the wild.”
What drove him to join Zeotap as an SVP Global Publishing + Platform Partnership
“Right after iOS 14 was announced last year, I got a little worried. Said the signal is going to be diminished. Programmatic is going to be challenged, not sure how the mobile app ecosystem is going to fair throughout all of this. And I started to evaluate all the identity providers in the market. And the one that stood out for me was Zeotap. The pitch was interesting. It was unique. The origin of the company was different. It’s also a company that was based in Berlin, so if their privacy by design is important to how you approach data and identity in this world, what better place to be in?”
Using privacy and security as a competitive advantage for customers
“We’re enabling the marketers who leverage our CDP technology the ability to go out and use that data that they’ve gotten; that first-party data across major media companies. […] We are committed to supporting the open web, publishers who need to rely on effective monetization to keep that content free flowing to their consumers, and marketers who are looking to leverage in and transact on the datasets that we’ve almost taken for granted over the years.
There’s a love-hate relationship with the walled gardens in the industry
“I think that it’s funny when people ask me about Google or Facebook, or they ask me about Amazon’s ad business. I always ask them the same thing. And I’ll ask you this, ‘Do you love to hate them or hate to love them? Have they built brilliant businesses?’ And should we sit there and give credit where due, or should we sit and say, ‘Hey, this is monopolistic behavior. And this is problematic.’ I think that’s very much the wild card in all this, which is: where does it all go?”
“Whether you love them or you hate them, they’ve made it easier if you’re a buyer or seller to run your business.”
[8:53] “We are helping them not just to have better first-party data assets but also to set those free in the wild. So, how can that help to build a smarter addressable business in a cookieless world, which we’re about to enter into.”
[10:17] “Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got media, you’ve got data, you’ve got the tech, you’ve got regulation, you’ve got operating systems. You have a tangled web. And I think what’s interesting about that is where there’s chaos; there’s opportunity.”
[16:42] “I would love to sit here and say that the walls will get knocked down, but I don’t believe that’s the case.”
