Ron Jacobson took the classic programmatic startup route.
Which is to say, he pivoted randomly into ad tech from a software job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York after applying to 95 out of 100 of the top startups in the US, as per a Business Insider article. He fortuitously landed at AppNexus as a product manager in 2010.
After a few years at AppNexus, he left to cofound Rockerbox, which started life as a mobile shopping app for women’s clothing that later evolved into an ad network before eventually becoming what it is today, an attribution services provider.
That was Rockerbox’s final state, so to speak, when it was acquired by DoubleVerify in February.
Now, as part of DV, Rockerbox is taking another step forward.
It’s no longer a disinterested attribution provider, supplying brands with analytics that, frankly, they can take or leave. Rockerbox and DV, together with DV’s other recent acquisitions, including Scibids, are becoming more like arbiters and adjudicators of the programmatic supply chain, making definitive calls about which media placements, data suppliers and vendors are performing and which aren’t.
“Measurement without action is wasted,” Jacobson tells AdExchanger in this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
It’s actually quite frustrating being a pureplay attribution company, Jacobson says. You can see what’s working and what needs fixing, but clients don’t necessarily take your advice on what to do. Marketers are typically loathe to inform their CFO and CEO if a marketing strategy didn’t pan out, nor do agencies jump to change their practices.
As Jacobson puts it: “Having the results of measurement sit there without some action being taken – what’s the point?”
Also in this episode: Why nobody wants to be the ad tech referee and why Rockerbox ditched its ad-buying business. (Because “we hated having the agency as an intermediary,” Jacobson says.)
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