Geoffroy Martin has had a front-row seat to the development of web retargeting and personalized advertising.
He was the CEO of Art.com, an online retailer of wall art and décor, and from there became one of Criteo’s first clients when the ad tech company made its way to the US. In 2019, he joined Criteo as GM and EVP, leading the retail media side of the business.
And on Tuesday, Martin was promoted to CEO of Ogury. Martin joined as COO a year ago, switching from Criteo to the newer French ad tech startup because he said he’s in tune with Ogury’s focus on planning campaigns without advertising IDs or third-party identity data.
“The difference between personified advertising versus personalized advertising” will define the next phase of online advertising, he said.
Media expansion
Ogury, which was founded in 2014, has historically had a narrow purview of in-app branding campaigns. It indexed to video and specialized creative units.
But that’s changing, Martin said.
Until two years ago, Ogury was almost exclusively in-app. Now it’s 50-50 with the mobile web. Soon it will expand to desktop and CTV, he said, and down the line even to real-world channels like DOOH.
With the emphasis on brand building and generating value without IDs, Ogury’s supply network includes publishers like Condé Nast and newspaper and digital media companies in a given market, Martin said. Customized units like in-ad gaming elements are often in the deal as well.
Many postcookie or no-ID ad solutions are bound in a scale trap. Basic contextual or semantic targeting (say, an article about financial planning attracts a personal investment app) works, but Nike needs to find its customers in unintuitive places, not just sports sites and articles about running.
Ogury started mapping the web nine years ago. It stopped all identity data collection two years ago, a bit before Martin joined the company. Since then, Ogury has spent its own budgets to send survey ads to app and web publishers in its network. These surveys are unrelated to campaigns but ask for details that help classify the publishers and specific URLs or app pages. Next year, Martin said the company plans to double the data it collects from its own survey campaigns.
Ogury also collects the basic contextual scraping data of what’s on the page – “because why not,” he said – and data from programmatic exhaust. But it steers clear of the identity data that’s the favored ingredient for other programmatic vendors.
Most programmatic tech is built to focus on and grow user profiles (aka personalization). Ogury focuses on the publisher instead, according to Martin. Ogury doesn’t take the ID or cookie but ingests format type, viewability and scores the inventory with its own post-campaign measurement to build profiles around that media owner.
Waiting for Godo … oh, no, waiting for Google
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a French-language play, famously depicts the sorry situation of waiting for someone or something that never arrives.
For Ogury and practically all ad tech that bills itself as a new-age identity data solution, Google is Godot (or, hopefully, it’s not).
“Our thesis and my thesis in joining Ogury is that it’s a question of when and not an if that third-party identifiers are going to be a thing of the past,” Martin said.
For mobile-focused advertisers like Ogury, with iOS a large chunk of the market and Safari strong on mobile web, the notion of “cookieless” advertising is already the day-to-day reality. Privacy laws in US states and other countries are pushing businesses that way anyway, Martin said.
“Obviously, when Google is finally going to get their act together, it can only help us,” he said. “But it’s not necessary for that to happen for us to continue to execute and to grow significantly.”
Programmatic companies that use advertising IDs, even post-cookie solutions that draw in other identity data to form a user-level connection, are trying to hold onto a former way of doing things that simply won’t work. Ogury’s bet is that there’s a lot of money in the early shift away from user-level advertising entirely – in favor of segmenting media, rather than people.
“I was lucky to be at the forefront of the most exciting wave in in ad tech,” he said of the cookie-based programmatic revolution. “Most exciting, up until now.”
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