Eyeo has a new head and a brand-new bag.
On Monday, the ad blocking and filtering company, announced a change in leadership, with Frank Einecke stepping down as CEO after roughly three years in the role.
Einecke, who will stay on as an advisor, is being replaced by Douglas de Jager, the founder and former CEO of spider.io, an ad fraud detection and anti-malware firm that was acquired by Google in 2014. De Jager joined eyeo late last year as CTO.
Along with its shake-up at the top, eyeo is undergoing a strategic reorg that includes significant layoffs. The company will reduce its global headcount by 40%, with layoffs primarily affecting support staff.
Although de Jager said he couldn’t share eyeo’s total headcount for “legal reasons,” eyeo’s LinkedIn page refers to a “global team of over 300 employees across 30 countries.”
“This is not a decision we’ve taken lightly, and we’re fully appreciative and aware of the human impact of layoffs,” de Jager told AdExchanger. “But we need to be as small as possible as we pursue this bigger, grander goal we have for ourselves.”
Rebooting eyeo
The grander goal eyeo has for itself involves what the company is calling a “strategic refounding.”
The term may sound like corporate jargon, but it reflects a genuine shift in eyeo’s approach, de Jager said.
Going forward, eyeo will transition from being chiefly a developer and distributor of ad-blocking products, like AdBlock and Adblock Plus, to building privacy-focused tools that make online advertising private by design.
(If you’re curious, by the way, LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman came up with the concept of strategic refounding to describe when a new leader is brought in to revitalize a company by thinking like a founder.)
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When eyeo first launched in 2011, “ads were making the internet really annoying,” de Jager said. “And so the founders set off on a journey to help people reclaim their internet experience and make the internet fun and fast again.”
But the internet has changed a heck of a lot since then, he said.
Mobile has taken over, apps have largely replaced browsers, and the phones in our pockets have become powerful tracking devices that facilitate the collection of vast amounts of personal data, de Jager said.
“People have the right to privacy and to not have their browsing history weaponized against them; we want to help fix that,” he said. “But the reality is that what we help our users with today only helps protect part of their internet experience.”
Preconfigured privacy
Eyeo is now developing new products alongside its existing ad-filtering tech that will block third-party tracking, cookie syncing and fingerprinting by default.
In other words, rather than having to download an extension or a plug-in to block tracking, users will have to do, well, nothing, de Jager said. And that’s how it should be.
“People shouldn’t have to opt into protection,” he said. “They shouldn’t even really have to think about it.”
In practice, for example, that could mean working with hardware manufacturers to preinstall anti-tracking technology directly into devices, so privacy is built into the system itself without requiring user intervention or additional software.
Eyeo is also investing in privacy tools for advertisers, including an approach to ad measurement that relies on a mathematical technique called differential privacy that adds controlled noise to data so you can still do analysis while protecting individual identities.
“Advertisers want to know if their ads performed,” de Jager said. “But they don’t need to know anything about an individual.”
The plan is to start rolling out these solutions for advertisers and users as soon as possible.
“We’re turning ourselves into a heavily product-focused organization,” de Jager said. “That means engineers will prioritize what truly matters to users, instead of just working in their own lanes, and the whole company will align around this big, important goal.”
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