Long-time ad tech exec Jeffrey Hirsch, a veteran of PubMatic, AudienceScience and ValueClick, has seen the ad tech industry evolve from its early ad network days to today’s increasingly AI-powered programmatic ecosystem.
Now, as the newly appointed CEO of QuantumPath, he wants to use his experience in the trenches to help media buyers automate complex workflows and better streamline campaign management.
Hirsch officially took the reins at QuantumPath on Tuesday after serving as a strategic advisor since June.
By the traders, for the traders
QuantumPath, which launched earlier this year, describes itself as an “AI-native” media-buying platform that was “built for traders, by traders.”
Stripping away the jargon, that means QuantumPath was developed by people who know what a headache it can be to run campaigns smoothly across multiple ad platforms at once.
And rather than tacking AI onto an existing system, QuantumPath has AI at its core, said Hirsch. It was “built using AI to be used with AI in the future,” he said.
Before spinning off into its own independent company, QuantumPath was incubated within the 2045 Collective, an advertising services provider that creates tools to help agencies and brands manage digital marketing campaigns more efficiently and reach new audiences.
One of the founders of QuantumPath, Gautham Maediratta, is also the founder of the 2045 Collective.
[Not] reinventing the wheel
Campaign planning and media buying still involves a lot of manual work across a fragmented menagerie of buying platforms. The idea behind QuantumPath is to offer a system that lets agencies create campaigns on multiple ad platforms without having to hop around between them.
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“We’re not reinventing a DSP or asking a client to use a new DSP,” Hirsch said. “In fact, we’re using their own seat on [a] DSP.”
Recently, QuantumPath launched its first AI agent to help with planning and campaign creation. An advertiser feeds a brief into the system, which then sends it out to various DSPs and generates fully formed campaigns. The system analyzes all of the targeting criteria, data and supply access within each DSP, said Hirsch, allowing traders to look at each proposed ad format and placement and determine whether they want to include it in the campaign.
QuantumPath can access an advertiser’s preexisting data and reporting to launch new campaigns through API connections to DSPs.
Over 30% of agencies use more than one DSP, Hirsch said, so being able to set up a campaign in one place and have it “propagate and [be] ready to go live in multiple platforms at the same time is hugely efficient.”
So far, QuantumPath has integrations with two “top DSPs,” Hirsch said, although he declined to share which ones.
Trend du jour
When a campaign is generated automatically, traders can do five to 10 times more work than they were doing before, according to Hirsch, with error rates dropping from over 5% to below 1%.
Advertisers can now utilize a DSP’s capabilities to the fullest, whereas most traders don’t understand every single thing a DSP does, Hirsch said, or how to make use of all of its features. And, as everyone likes to point out, he said, the platform works 24/7, even while you’re sleeping. That’s “the du jour thing to say,” he added.
From a business perspective, Hirsch said he’s proud to be at the helm of a company that can turn around such rapid results. Within two weeks of signing a contract, he said, QuantumPath can launch and provide value to a customer.
On a personal note, he said he’s thrilled to be at the forefront of a new era of technology.
Hirsch’s resume includes nearly seven years at PubMatic, including as CMO and chief commercial officer, and more than five years in executive roles at the ill-fated programmatic buying platform AudienceScience, including as CEO, where he worked on the first audience-based ad network (“Which I think is a good word now?” he quipped).
“Everything’s being reinvented, and we’re part of it,” Hirsch said, “and that gets me excited.”
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