Aly Nurmohamed is keenly aware of the problems faced by advertisers and publishers now that advertising IDs and data signals no longer tie them together.
He spent a decade at Criteo, exiting as Global Managing Director of Publisher Partnerships in April 2020 (eek!) to join Permutive, where he was GM and COO for more than four years.
With that intimate experience of the current online ad system, Nurmohamed set out last year to “build something from scratch,” he told AdExchanger. That work led to the launch on Wednesday of Nodals AI, a London-based custom algorithm advertising company. The startup has raised 2 million euros ($2.1 million) from the European VC firm Stride and a coterie of ad tech angel investors, including the investment fund Aperiam, Brian O’Kelley (AppNexus, Scope3), Mike O’Sullivan (of Sincera fame), Joe Root (Permutive), Ben Barokas (Admeld, Sourcepoint), Marc Grabowski (IAS COO) and Mike Ng (Epsilon revenue chief).
How Nodals AI works
Nodals replaces the DSP, SSP and ad exchange because it is, in effect, an ad network. “Though I wouldn’t say it’s an ad network because it’s fully transparent,” Nurmohamed said.
The idea is that Nodals integrates directly with publishers to create custom identity and audience signals for its advertiser clients. There is no identity graph or IDs that work across sites in the network, he said.
Nodals is beginning with a couple alpha advertisers to prove out the concept. The company is targeting the type of advertiser who has moved beyond clicks and post-impression sales, and has begun running incrementality testing. The incrementality results inform what types of potential customers to target, and which media channels.
The advertisers on Nodals are bidding on first-party publisher data, as opposed to third-party tech like third-party cookies and device or advertising IDs. But they’re targeting works publisher by publisher.
Netting the network
For Nodals, having direct publisher connections is another major hurdle. Advertisers are the clients, but the company must build out a partner network consisting of direct publisher relationships. When advertisers are accustomed to tapping into SSPs that aggregate thousands of sites, this process of manual addition is a big pill to swallow.
There are hundreds of sites with mid-scale or large audiences, Nurmohamed said. “But we don’t want to be working with hundreds of them; we want to work with dozens of them.”
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For its early testing, Nodals is working with seven top UK-based publishers and two to five large advertisers, he added.
At some point, Nodals may integrate with third-party DSPs, SSPs or other ad tech, he said. But it’ll be after the startup has proven out the use case of building custom bidding algorithms for advertisers, based on direct publisher deals.
“The decision we made early on was that we were going to build all the infrastructure from scratch, because we see this as the new problem,” Nurmohamed said, “and we’re building for this problem, rather than on top of any of the other infrastructure.”
