Advertisers urgently need independent alternatives to Google and Facebook
Mark Grether · 1082 Why Public Sizmek Went Private to Fuel Growth via M&A in Buy Side Programmatic Space · Jul 11, 2018 · at 9:06
Mark Grether, CEO of Sizmek and former co-founder of Xaxis, discusses the competitive landscape in programmatic advertising and the dominance of walled gardens.
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“Advertisers and agencies, they need an alternative to Google, right? They need an alternative to Google and Facebook, and there won't be many alternatives.”
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Mark Grether predicts Sizmek will be the only global competitor to DoubleClick
“I think we are on a good path to establish ourselves as the only one who can truly compete with the Doubled League stack at global scale.”
Operating an ad server and media business creates inherent conflicts of interest
“If you are now also a publisher, if you're also running a media business, you would actually measure yourself. And it's obviously a conflict of interest, which you cannot go with.”
Mark Grether: Sizmek is the largest independent global buy-side ad platform
“We acquired Rocket Fuel. We combined both businesses, Seismic and Rocket Fuel, under the Seismic brand, and now we are the largest independent bi-fi platform for advertisers and agencies with about 1600 employees globally.”
Advertisers want integrated platforms instead of stitched-together ad tech stacks
“What they really want to have is one platform that they can use to do everything in one single stack, right? They don't want to have a Frankenstein, Any longer where they have to stitch things together, they really truly won't have a one platform, which is sim…”
Sizmek intentionally went private to execute an ad tech ecosystem roll-up
“So, we started a conversation when Seismic was still public, but with the knowledge that we want to actually take it private, and then we actually want to do the roll-up with other players in the ecosystem, and you can actually do that Much more easily in a no…”
Quarterly reporting forces short-term focus, harming long-term M&A integrations
“The reason is that bringing companies together, right, and forming a new business model just takes time, right? So if you actually have to report and justify yourself every quarter, you're much more short-term focused.”