Seven months after the abrupt departure of its CEO Dave Clark, TripleLift has a new chief at the helm.
On Wednesday, the SSP announced the appointment of Dave Helmreich as CEO.
Helmreich, the former chief commercial officer of TV ad tech provider Innovid and former CRO of (the now defunct) Oracle Marketing Cloud, is assuming his new post during a challenging time for the SSP market – and amid a hostile political climate for minority-owned businesses like TripleLift.
Publishers increasingly view SSPs as interchangeable commodities unless they can offer some unique product, service or demand. Plus, with media-quality concerns top of mind for buyers, SSPs are often held responsible for cleaning up programmatic supply chains and preventing bad actors from monetizing.
Making TripleLift stand out among the pack is one of Helmreich’s top priorities, he told AdExchanger, as is ensuring supply-chain health.
And, he added, the company has no plans to shy away from its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Creative differences
In terms of differentiation, Helmreich sees TripleLift’s focus on unique creative formats and how those play into publisher monetization strategy as its main selling point.
During his time at Innovid, he said, a major focus was helping brands and publishers improve the consumer experience, which ultimately pays off for both buyers and sellers. He plans to embrace the same philosophy at TripleLift.
“Creative has been underemphasized in the past 10 to 15 years of this programmatic journey,” he said. “I love where [TripleLift] sits at this intersection of driving value for publishers using creative as a tool, and ultimately creating a better experience for not just brands, publishers and agencies, but consumers.”
Asked for specifics on how creative can improve consumer experiences, Helmreich pointed to TripleLift’s work to develop and monetize new creative formats for CTV.
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“In connected TV, there are a number of platforms now that want to have a differentiated experience for brands,” he said. As examples, he mentioned Roku’s home screen experience and its Roku City screensaver, which depicts an animated city complete with ads placed on billboards and marquees.
“We have the ability to help them be more strategic in how they actually offer that inventory,” he said.
Helmreich also pointed to stagnation in CTV ad formats, such as underwhelming standardized pause screen ads and a lack of interactivity with smart TVs for performance campaigns.
“Those are just a couple of examples where our creative tech and the ability to compose those experiences is going to drive value and engagement,” he said. “That is going to be very different than just putting a standard unit and forcing the individual to pull out their phone and use a QR code.”
Helmreich also sees opportunity in the intersection between CTV and retail media. He called out TripleLift’s relationship with Amazon, through which TripleLift offers off-site audience extension for Amazon’s retail media platform, as well as the traffic-shaping data partnership TripleLift and Amazon announced earlier this month.
He added that outcomes-focused platforms like TripleLift are well positioned to benefit from the retail media boom. “Retail media is, in many ways, taking dollars from other underperforming channels as a result of being very focused on outcomes,” Helmreich said.
Diversity as a strength
But some of the challenges TripleLift will face in the coming years have nothing to do with the market dynamics of programmatic advertising. Instead, they spring from a crackdown on corporate DEI policies being pursued by President Donald Trump’s administration and his supporters in both the public and private sectors.
TripleLift is a minority-owned business, due to its ownership by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. And TripleLift has deals in place with advertisers to help them meet their commitments to spend a portion of their marketing budgets with minority-owned publishers and businesses.
“We work with a number of brands and agencies where there is a requirement and there is a mandate, but we’re doing it for the right reasons,” Helmreich said. “We will continue to invest in having a diverse workforce. The best way to run an amazing business is to be surrounded by diversity and diverse opinions.”
Still, it’s a tough atmosphere to operate in. Attorneys general are bringing lawsuits against companies for their DEI policies, and legislators are threatening to make diverse hiring and spending commitments illegal.
The potential outcomes of the government’s anti-DEI push are not lost on Helmreich, who lives in the Washington, DC area and has been steeped in the increasingly politicized conversations around DEI.
“Candidly,” he said, “it’s something we are all reacting to in real time.”
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