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Mediaocean is boring – in a good way. The 50-year-old marketing workflow and billing provider offers a relatively mundane set of marketing and advertising enablement tools. Its customer base is stable, its revenue predictable.

In a few years, God willing, the rest of the ad tech industry could have those same attributes.

"We feel like we've been the past of ad tech, and we believe we are the future of ad tech," CEO Bill Wise says in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. "We are leading the boring parade. Mediaocean was the first, best boring company."

Wise has a long history as a changemaker and investor in ad tech circles, and this episode surveys some interesting highlights of his career, including his involvement in pitching Procter & Gamble on its programmatic strategy back in his Right Media days.

"At the time, they were the third-largest ad network in the space," he said of P&G. "There was Google ad network, Advertising.com and then P&G, if you looked at their 149 brands as advertisers."

Also in this episode: competitive threats, skepticism on marketing technology, a gloomy view of SSPs and The Trade Desk's special sauce.