Most recently, he led DoubleVerify through an initial public offering (IPO) of stock to raise $340 million. The company has a market value of about $6.23 billion, based on its current stock price.

“We look at the journey to an IPO as not one in which the IPO was the destination. It was one step on a much longer path towards continued growth over time,” Zagorski said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The IPO provided us with lots of capital that we can continue to invest and grow in our mission to create a stronger, safer and more secure digital advertising ecosystem.”

As a company that seeks to make the digital ad market more transparent by ensuring that real people see ads and not bots, DoubleVerify also aims to build confidence in its business by disclosing its financial performance as a public company, Zagorski said.

Before joining DoubleVerify, he was chief executive of sell-side platform Telaria, which last year completed a merger with Rubicon Project to form Magnite. The deal was another sign of the ongoing evolution of the ad-tech industry.

“It’s always changing, and there’s always a new opportunity for growth,” Zagorski said. “The companies that I’ve been lucky enough to be part of have been…at the forefront of what’s next. That’s what has kept me engaged over all these years.”

Investment Partners

As important as fundraising is to startups, they also need to find solid investment partners that can provide strategic advice when necessary.

“You need capital to continued to grow, but money is, I hate to say it, money’s not easy, but money is plentiful,” Zagorski said. “It’s what comes with that money that’s most important. What you really need to consider is who’s your partner that’s helping you bring those new dollars in, and what are they going to be after those dollars come in.”

The best investment partners are ones that are thinking beyond transactions and about the longer-term growth prospects for a company. That view includes those times when businesses face challenges.

“When times are good, there are lots of people who want to be your friend,” Zagorski said. “It’s those that are going to be there when times get tough, when you need strategic advice, when selling your story isn’t a slam dunk to every investor that you meet. Those are the real partners, and that’s who you should look for as a strategic adviser.”

Outcome-Driven Advertising

The digital ad market is going through a period of upheaval as privacy concerns drive tech companies to end support for tracking technologies like third-party cookies and device identifiers. The shift from people-based measurement will force advertisers to develop other ways to measure engagement in a cross-screen environment.

“The companies that are not only tracking that activity, but learning how to engage with users across all those screens are exciting opportunities for companies like mine who want to partner with them, but also for investors who are looking for growth opportunities,” Zagorski said.

You are watching “Innovation, Leadership, and Value Creation: Strategies Explored,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Progress Partners. For more videos, please visit this page.

In September, Zagorski joined as CEO of DoubleVerify, after exiting the same role from Telaria amid its merger with Rubicon Project.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, he says his new mission is to build advertisers’ confidence that connected TV is a reliable and effective medium.

Connected growth

“What’s really interesting around connected television is the fact that, unlike traditional linear television, there is no single metric by which all buyers can evaluate the efficacy and reach of their buys,” Zagorski says.

“You have a Nielsen statistic in linear television, which has become the de facto gold standard of measurement, but there’s no such thing in CTV.

“I think one of the great opportunities for companies like DoubleVerify is, when we look at that $70 billion in linear TV ad spend, how do we move that to connected television?”

Comscore recently reported US households streaming OTT content had jumped 17% between April 2018 and April 2020, to 69.8 million. EMarketer in November 2019 forecast that US connected TV ad spending would hit $8.88 billion in 2020 and $14.12 billion by 2023.

Finding viewability

But CTV’s growth is not without its travails. Zagorski says a key challenge is whether the ads are viewable in the first place.

“There’s this grand assumption that, well, since it was delivered to a television set in someone’s living room, it must be viewable,” he says. “Well, the reality of it is in many cases, it’s not.

“New digital formats may not take up the full screen. If it’s not a full-screen CTV ad, as well as the fact that, if the full ad isn’t viewed, is it truly viewable?

“We found a large percentage of ads don’t get delivered through that first quartile of viewing. It’s not truly viewable. As a matter of fact, we’ve seen only about 88% of ads that are delivered to CTV meet our viewability criteria. Viewability is not guaranteed.”

Fraud building

DoubleVerify measures ad fraud, viewability and brand safety.

For Zagorski, that means a shift in emphasis. At Telaria, he was concerned with reducing friction to make ad trading easier and automated.

At DoubleVerify, he says: “The bigger question is, how do we build confidence?”

In the background, is the looming threat of ad fraud, a practice through which nefarious fly-by-night publishers set up and automatically initiate ad views to take ad spend. Methods include fraudulent apps containing bots, cloud server farms and spoofing

DoubleVerify’s (DV) new Global Insights Report 2020 lifts the lid:

• Q1 2020 CTV fraud was 161% up on the prior year.
• Since March 2019, DV has identified 1,300 fraudulent CTV apps — 60% of which were identified in 2020.

We're thrilled to launch our 2020 Global Insights Report! In it, we uncover actionable insights for advertisers to drive efficient return on their media investments and address future trends expected to impact digital advertising strategies. Download here: https://t.co/YQGxvgCjqU pic.twitter.com/ayOXhr7SyX

— DoubleVerify (@doubleverify) August 19, 2020

Programmatic to problematic

Now Zagorski says programmatic is a little… problematic.

“It’s great for reducing friction, but it also creates a lack of transparency on what’s being delivered from the content and producer to the buyer,” he says.

That is a key reason behind the emergence of connected TV ad fraud.

Zagorski says programmatic buying growth created a lack of transparency.

All of which matters to ad buyers for whom COVID-19 has throttled their appetite to spend, at the the same they are trying to navigate the kinds of ad environments in which they want to be seen in what is an increasingly charged and polarised society.

This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Rubicon Project and Telaria announced their agreement on Thursday, without putting a price on it.

They say the combined company – owned 47.1% by Telaria shareholders and 52.9% by Rubicon shareholders – would “offer a single platform for transacting Connected TV (CTV), desktop display, video, audio, and mobile inventory across all geographies and auction types”.

Telaria CEO  will become president and COO. We are republishing this video interview from May, in which he told Beet.TV: “If you think about advertiser demands, they increasingly are becoming focused on addressable. Broadcasters are going to have to catch up on what they’re doing in the online space.” In the merger announcement, Zagorski says he is eyeing creating “a scaled, omnichannel platform”.

Rubicon is the pioneering programmatic specialist, Telaria is the “video management platform”.

Although ad-tech consolidation continues apace, this one is unusual in that it is two publicly-traded companies combining.

They are projecting making cost cuts of $15 million to $20 million.

This Q3, Rubicon slimmed its net loss and swung to profit on an EBITDA basis. In the same period, Telaria gross profit grew though it clocked a small loss on an adjusted ABITDA basis.

The companies say they are starting with $150 million in cash and no debt.

The merger was managed by LUMA Partners.

“If you think about advertiser demands, they increasingly are becoming focused on addressable,” Zagorski says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent LUMA Partners Digital Media East event. At the same time, advertisers want to know “how do I reduce the friction between me and the seller?”

As a video management platform, Telaria works with virtual MVPD’s, broadcasters and app-based companies in CTV and OTT. “I think where we see a ton of growth is the app-based world. That‘s where consumers are just starting to experiment,” says Zagorski, who joined the company two years ago.

He believes that virtual MVPD’s “are going to get so much of a share,” about 10% of audience versus cable, “and the broadcasters are going to have to catch up on what they’re doing in the online space.

“So the guys in the middle, which are the app-based companies that came digital first, provide a really interesting opportunity for advertisers” because they’re relatively untapped.

Overall, CTV and OTT have “rapidly gone from the discussion being what is it to how do I get it to how do I make it better,” Zagorski explains. “And I think we’re on the verge of that how do I make it better discussion. Which is how do I make it more addressable. How do I make reduce the friction, how do I create more transparency in the buying process.”

Those are three areas “that we’re going to be pushing conversations in” at the upcoming 2019 Cannes Lions confab. “How we make it more relevant across the board for advertisers and consumers and make a better experience for them.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.

As the likes of Netflix, Spotify, news publishers, grocery services and more attract monthly paying customers, they aren’t just causing brands to worry about a diminishing ad hole, they are also pushing some to fret about looming “subscription fatigue”.

Mark Zagorski is one who sees it coming – but he thinks the risk will keep media honest, in a state of equilibrium between ads and payments.

“Consumers can only subscribe to so many services whether it’s Prime or Netflix or Hulu or Sling, etc,”  the Telaria CEO says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“At some point, they start to wear out, and I think that drives an opportunity which we see, which is the kind of the emergence of the ad supported, over the top video network.

“Folks like Pluto and Tubi and fubo and others who are delivering out-of-the-box free over-the-top high quality linear programming. Or some variation of that type of model where you have a half ad supported, half subscription like Hulu does now.”

That mix of revenue streams has always been the strength of media over the decades – despite the more modern zealotry of some who see either model at the be-all-and-end-all.

Zagorski sees a “tipping point” of “overwhelm” coming for customers bombarded by subscription, seeking a release valve in ad-supported offerings.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix.   This series is sponsored by Telaria.  Please find additional videos from the series on this page. 

So says one executive whose company felt so strongly about that issue, it split in two.

Telaria spun off its division serving ad buyers back in September 2017 to focus only on providing a programmatic advertising tech platform to publishers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, video publisher ad tech maker Telaria’s CEO Mark Zagorski explains why, by continuing to be beholden to both the buy side and the sell side, big platforms like Google can mislead customers.

“Those guys have content that they can compete against,” he says. “Their platform competes against the people that they’re selling technology to.

“Same thing with Comcast. Comcast creates content and they have a platform they’re trying to sell to other content producers, so every dollar you pay them, they’re going to take that dollar and use it to create competing content.

“It’s a big deal and I think it’s becoming a bigger deal as CTV and OTT become a bigger part of people’s businesses.”

The playing-both-sides question has been an industry issue in recent years. Over time, many suppliers try to hit scale by aiming to serve both sides of the ad coin.

The transparency debate has changed that, to some extent, with more platforms concluding that, to maintain customers’ trust, they need to make the best impact for just one kind of customer.

For Zagorski, a former Nielsen executive, doubling down on ad sellers comes at a time when those sellers are trying to respond to the rise in multi-screen video consumption, over-the-top TV delivery and the infrastructure requirements needed to capitalize on the power of “addressable” connected TV targeting.

“When I started (at Telaria), that part of our business was less than 3% of our revenue, and now it’s approaching 30% of our revenue,” he says. “It’s a big development. It’s a big part of our future.

But TV’s embrace of new-style “programmatic” selling techniques comes different from the way in which the tactic arrived in display ad media. Zagorski says private programmatic marketplaces, allowing sellers more control over to whom and for how much they sell their precious ad space, are more commonplace than real-time auctions.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix.   This series is sponsored by Telaria.  Please find additional videos from the series on this page. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, video publisher ad tech maker Telaria’s CEO Mark Zagorski says that “premium” publishers of video that reaches the living room demand a particular threshold of ad buy.

That is why Telaria is amongst the platform makers which offer “private marketplace’ technology, allowing publishers to ringfence their ad spots to particular buyers and to set their own terms of trade.

“People like Sling and Hulu and Pluto … are producing long form high quality content that’s going on big screens,” he says. “It’s a different market than what you think about the SSP (supply-side platform) market is for – display ads, for example – where there are tens and tens and tens of thousands of publishers of varying quality.

“In the world that we play in, this is around about serving 30, 60, 90-second ads that run in someone’s living room, so the relationship that the publishers have with the advertiser in the programmatic world is very different.”

Zagorski was speaking after his Telaria was renewed for another two years by Hulu as a programmatic tech provider.

The online TV provider this month announced it made $1.5 billion in ad revenue last year, a rise of 45%, increasing it advertiser base by 50%. Hulu uses Telaria’s VMP (Video Management Platform) – which supports decisioning, demand delivery and analytics – to measure and manage its ad monetization.

And Zagorski says the relationship is getting deeper.

“The relationship we have now with them is not just being a programmatic partner but also looking at building solutions for them to accelerate but protect the business that they have, the digital advertising business that they have in programmatic, and build unique tools and applications … things that would allow them to create a more linear-like tv experience for both advertisers and viewers alike,” he says.

“They’re looking at building more and more tools that allow them to take advantage of data and take advantage of the large screen and the addressable nature of that screen so that they’re not just providing a 30-second spot but providing all the advantages that you get out of digital advertising, plus those in TV advertising.”

“You haven’t seen a ton of consolidation, particularly on the sell side of the business, because there’s still a lot of scale to be grown,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“You’ve seen a trend toward demand-side businesses either selling off or consolidating. You haven’t seen that on the sell side, because there’s still tons of opportunity here.”

Tremor Video sold part of its business to Taptica of Israel in August with a $50mn price tag for the sale. The rationale was to exit a demand side that has become busy and to stop serving both sides of the business, something which may give rise to conflict of interest, but also because Zagorski sees the sell side with lots of head room to grow.

“The space is booming,” he says. “Video … is exploding. It’s only going to greater, with the news that you’ve seen … with folks like Disney saying they’re going to create their own OTT packages. Where we’re positioned is even more exciting. We’re in a sell-side position, there’s not a significant amount of competition…

“Look at the success of companies like The Trade Desk or Criteo – that is success that Tremor can and will emulate – very high-margin, fast-growth technology business that has nothing but prospects down the road.”

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Zagorski says ad-tech platforms which count both ad buyers and sellers as customers can suffer from a conflict of interest.

“It is now a totally unconflicted business,” Zagorski says. “It doesn’t have a demand-side platform to create friction in the marketplace for it.”

But that is not the only kind of inertia removed by the sale. By selling off, Tremor is also doubling down on its fastest growth and its biggest shot.

“It wasn’t core to where we think the big opportunity is for us, moving forward – the sell side of our business is growing at 83% … has very strong technology,” adds Zagorski, who joined in June after being a Nielsen EVP.

“OTT is a booming space. The stats we’re seeing – in the next three to four years, 50% of all television inventory will be delivered through some type of connected TV platform.”

Following the sale, Tremor Video has about $80mn in capital to invest in its new technology, Zagorski has previously said.

But digital ads that lead to digital actions mean attribution can delight marketers, says eXelate CEO Mark Zagorski.

“Did my ad work and did it drive a sale? Because everything is becoming so digital, we can track a consumer from exposure to purchase,” Zagorski tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“This is now a reality – not just in the digital world but as television and radio and all these other sources of media become so much more IP-based.”

Zagorski says brands are concerned about getting data, controlling data and measuring effectiveness.

We interviewed Zagorski as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

“We act as their data management backbone, taking a lot of their offline data and activating it in the programmatic world,” eXelate CEO Mark Zagorski tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “This is the culmination of that relationship.

“We’re bringing together two amazing data sets – the census-level data that eXelate captures in the online world, and the very detailed panel-level data that Nielsen has been known for. It’s something that the marketplace has been looking for. We bring to them the new world DNA of the ad tech world.”

Zagorski is excited about “how we take the product roadmaps and combine those to start co-building products from day one”.

More on Nielsen’s expansions reported in the Wall Street Journal last week.

“We’ve partnered with Innovid and connected mobile app data with smart TV boxes to be able to dynamically change advertising based on what you’re doing on a mobile phone at the same time,” CEO Mark Zagorski tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We’re looking to change the dynamic of TV advertising – making it more targetable, making it more related to what that consumer is doing on multiple diff devices and leveraging our unified consumer profile.”

The eXelate proposition, which just moved out of beta, sounds interesting. According to its announcement:

“If a consumer searches for auto information on a car-listing site via mobile, eXelate would sync mobile site-level data with data from Roku. When that same consumer streams a video through Roku, eXelate could dynamically alter the ad creative through Innovid based on the consumer’s presence on the car-listing site.”

Zagorski was interviewed by Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Beet.TV coverage of the IAB meeting was sponsored by SpotXchange. Please visit this page to see more Beet coverage from the conference.