Matt Wasserlauf, founder and CEO of Blockboard, sees the growth of connected TV advertising as a perfect money for the ad industry to undergo a necessary ad tech reset.
He knows it won’t be easy.
Having built and stewarded a previous startup through the early days of digital video advertising, Wasserlauf has seen what happens when a market becomes overrun with too many intermediaries. CTV offers an opportunity to build more transparent and efficient ways of doing. business. But the instinct among many CTV players has been to replicate what has been built for video and display.
“Nobody is willing to take what they’ve built over the last 10 years and scrap it,” Wasserlauf told Beet.TV “We’ve gotten a little bit too cute for our own good. We have created our own problems.”
One of the reasons he founded Blockboard was to take on those problems, such as the ongoing preponderance of bogus bot traffic and fake websites and even phony CTV apps. The challenge is, “The bad actors are way ahead of the good actors,” he said.
That’s why it is crucial, in his view, that advertisers insist on more control, and more direct paths to ad inventory. “When you have too many hands in the pot, that’s where the problems happen,” he said.
“CTV is the major leagues,” he added. “This is a huge opportunity for our market to graduate.”
You’re watching “From Opacity to Openness: The Technology Behind More Transparent Digital Advertising,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Blockboard. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
