Rubicon Project wants more customers on its Buyer Cloud and has hired ad sales vet Adam Chandler as SVP of revenue to bring brands to the platform. He started Monday.
“There’s a lot of education needed on Madison Avenue and with brand marketers directly to explain what automation means,” Chandler said. “I see a big hole for us to come in and simplify that process.”
In his last role at Millennial Media, as head of global programmatic revenue, he signed on 300 buyers in a year to the MMX exchange. Chandler came to Millennial when it acquired JumpTap, the mobile startup where he worked.
He also spent eight years at Yahoo.
The Buyer Cloud, Chandler said, has its technology and features built out. “It’s more about adoption,” he said. And that means educating more buyers about programmatic.
Though Rubicon’s entry point into programmatic was as an SSP, it’s expanded to the buy side. In this respect, Rubicon operates as an exchange, allowing other DSPs and ad networks to plug in.
Rubicon is an exchange, but not a DSP – rather, DSPs and ad networks are among the customers who plug into Rubicon. Chandler’s focus will be adding more brands and agencies to that buyer set, which already has wide adoption among the DSP and ad network crowd.
Those brands, agencies and trading desks will have access to a Buyer Cloud that includes orders, private marketplaces, automatic guaranteed and open auctions. “It’s a collection of apps and tools to address the needs of the buyers. It’s the bridge to a supply,” Chandler said.
Rubicon also hopes to entice existing clients to invest more in automation, a concept that goes beyond advertising and extends to packaging, workflow, insights and execution, Chandler added. In leading with the concept of automation, Chandler hopes to avoid Buyer Cloud being pigeonholed as a programmatic solution, which is often perceived as only a line item instead of a strategy.
“The past decade and a half the core of what I’ve been doing is working with brands directly and agencies,” Chandler said. “It’s connecting Madison Avenue with the technology and making it translatable to their goals.”
