New York-based AppNexus‘ real-time ad bidding platform has built the company a position as one of the leading advertising technology vendors out there, at a time when contenders are racing to hail the virtues of their own suites.
But CEO Brian O’Kelley sees one big differentiator between his company and the likes of Facebook, which recently rebooted Atlas as a cross-platform consumer targeting solution.
O’Kelley was speaking a couple of months after launching AppNexus Programmable Bidder (APB), a system to help advertisers put their own targeting algorithms in to AppNexus’ software suite.
“When I talk about ‘tech stack’, I think it’s really important that that implies an open ecosystem,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Facebook has proprietary personal information that they can’t let out of their walls. How can you build an open platform if your best asset, the data of your users, is implicitly closed?
“They’ve argued that this is a feature, not a bug, that using Facebook for everything… exist to propose that mentality. You need a platform … that protects data, that owns no data. Do we really want to be part of an open internet or a Facebook Internet?”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.
