Brian O’Kelley will be speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference on October 17-18 in New York City. Click here to register.
Brian O’Kelley has been referred to as the “godfather of ad tech” for his role as CTO of Right Media (before it sold to Yahoo) and as founder and CEO of AppNexus.
AT&T acquired AppNexus in 2018, rebranded it as Xandr and eventually sold it to Microsoft in late 2021.
O’Kelley didn’t stick around for that part. He took a hiatus from ad tech shortly after the AppNexus acquisition and founded a startup in 2019 focused on modernizing the old-school industry of supply chain and logistics management.
But the lure of ad tech drew him back in. Last year, O’Kelley co-founded a new startup, Scope3, which helps ad tech companies monitor and reduce their carbon emissions.
Apparently, roughly one gram of carbon is produced every time an ad impression is generated.
One must, however, ask the obvious and cynical question: Having helped make the mess, is BOK now back to help clean it up?
It’s a “totally 100% fair” criticism, O’Kelley says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“I take accountability for my role in this,” he says, “and I hope that everyone in this industry does, too.”
Also in this episode: Stress eating during the early days of Right Media, reacting to that Twitter thread about SafeGraph collecting abortion clinic visitation data and what O’Kelley would do differently with the benefit of hindsight if he could go back in time to the dawn of programmatic.
For more articles featuring Brian O'Kelley, click here.
