If you’re waiting for OpenX to follow in the footsteps of Magnite, PubMatic and others and make a long-awaited debut on the public market in 2022 – well, it’s not happening.
The earliest OpenX would kick off the process is between 18 and 24 months from now, says CEO John Gentry on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Why not IPO when the going seems good on Wall Street? There are other priorities right now, Gentry says, including investing in the company’s product road map.
“We’ve got a lot we want to do, big areas we want to invest in,” he says.
One such area is OpenAudience, a product OpenX first launched in 2019, which allows advertisers to create their identity graphs to target against OpenX supply. In October, OpenX partnered with Dentsu agency Merkle for data activation across the open web for audiences using its Merkury identity solution.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. In December, OpenX paid the Federal Trade Commission a $2 million fine to settle allegations that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting the personal information of kids under 13 without getting parental consent first.
“Our policies were correct on our manual review, but we made an execution error in terms of putting the right flag on the right apps – and we take that very seriously,” Gentry says. “We own it, we’re accountable for it and we fixed it.”
Also in this episode: An update on OpenX’s decision to run its entire stack on top of Google Cloud Platform, the ongoing challenge of ensuring quality supply in an open exchange and the life-saving and vital importance of organ donation.
