When everything is changing all around you, it’s a great time to recalibrate.
Prebid.org, which oversees the open-source header bidding software of the same name, is confronting major change both internally and across the ad tech industry.
In May, Prebid announced that its president, Mike Racic; its chairman, Garett McGrath; and Christian Janelli, its director of product management, were all leaving the organization.
Their departure comes as digital publishers – Prebid’s main constituency – face AI search-driven downturns in traffic and revenue, and the broader programmatic ecosystem experiments with new agentic AI sales tools.
But instead of seeing this as a bad time for a leadership shake-up, Katie Morgart, Prebid’s VP of marketing and strategic partnerships, believes “it’s kind of perfect timing.”
“With the industry changing as a whole, as we look at new products or initiatives or working groups,” Morgart said, “this is an opportunity to reset.”
Last week, Prebid appointed OpenX CTO Joel Meyer as its new chairman after naming him interim chair following Racic’s departure. Meyer has been a member of its board since 2023 and has also served on the IAB Tech Lab’s board since last year. As a CTO with 20-plus years of engineering experience, he brings a deeply technical perspective as Prebid adapts to a fast-changing programmatic landscape.
Meyer’s first top priority is finding a new Prebid president who can meet the moment, he said. The org hopes to name a replacement in time for the Prebid Summit in NYC on October 13.
Beyond that, Prebid’s mission remains the same, Meyer said, which is giving publishers the tools they need to monetize while promoting open collaboration between industry stakeholders – a picture now complicated by the emergence of competing agentic tools.
Meyer spoke to AdExchanger about Prebid’s next phase.
AdExchanger: What would you say to people who are concerned about Prebid’s recent departures?
JOEL MEYER: A message of reassurance. There was nothing wrong behind the scenes. Mike and Garrett worked really well together, as did the whole Prebid team. You don’t want these types of leadership changes to hit at the same time, but Prebid is making the most of this opportunity to build a really good team.
Mike was a fantastic business leader. For his replacement, we’re looking for somebody who’s got even more of a product and tech bent, given the direction the space is going.
What are the biggest challenges facing Prebid?
The same ones facing publishers: the agentic change and the same with LLMs. Publishers are seeing shrinking revenue, yet growing demands on technology.
One of Prebid’s challenges is to enable publishers to meet those needs as the way they sell inventory changes. Whether it’s AgenticAdvertising.org’s AdCP, the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Advertising Management Protocols or just vanilla MCP, how do we help them navigate that? How does Prebid’s agentic project management committee evolve?
And Prebid’s growth. We do so much on not a huge budget. I’d love for us to be in a position where we don’t have to be quite as revenue-conscious and where membership feels that Prebid is stable.
You recently told AdExchanger that Prebid wants to repeat the 300% membership growth it’s seen over the past five years while remaining a voice for publishers. Will Prebid’s membership priorities expand beyond publishers more than it already has?
Yes. That’s not necessarily a new thing.
Mike, Christian and Katie all did a great job growing membership over the last five years. We saw growth in mobile, native, digital out-of-home. The next five years will show growth in different ways as we look at agentic, surviving LLM challenges and helping publishers monetize.
Publishers are our first constituent, but the money comes from advertisers. So how do we make Prebid a place where everybody feels comfortable? Some of the work we can do involves bringing trust and transparency back to the bidstream.
How does Prebid help foster programmatic transparency?
We have a strong role there already. Competitors can work together because we trust that an open-source platform is neutral and creates a level playing field.
We’ll expand that to give buyers the confidence that the playing field is level. For example, are there things we can do to extend that transparency beyond the software that we control and further downstream?
Earlier this year, Prebid took over responsibility for AgenticAdvertising.org’s AdCP seller agent. Any updates on that?
This is one of those things that Garrett and Mike were really close to, and it was a good move. But the board was arm’s length from it, and we want to get a whole lot closer.
We’re already looking at AdCP as one of many [agentic] standards, and our role is to make sure that publishers don’t have to bear the burden of all the n+1 standards that evolve. We need to design software so they can sell their inventory regardless of the protocol being used to buy it.
So Prebid is remaining agnostic on the agentic protocol question?
Absolutely. We want to stay on top of everything.
There’s been a lot of speculation about drama between AgenticAdvertising.org and the IAB Tech Lab over their competing agentic protocols. Mike Racic recently told AdExchanger that navigating any drama will require diplomacy and finesse from Prebid’s new leadership. How will you balance these competing interests?
Diplomacy will always get you farther. I stay in touch with [IAB Tech Lab CEO] Tony Katsur, as does Katie, and we all had dinner together at Cannes. The goal is, “How do we work together?”
Prebid represents a unique voice for publishers, other organizations represent buyers really well and the Tech Lab sits in the middle. There are roles for everyone. Let’s use our strengths to work together versus wasting energy sniping at each other.
Would it be in the best interests of publishers if only one agentic protocol wins?
As an engineer, I will tell you it’s always best if there is one protocol. I will also tell you, as a pragmatist, there will always be more than one – and then somebody’s going to come out with the next one to try and unify everything.
So, yeah, it’s always more efficient if there’s a single protocol the world can standardize around, but that is definitely not reality.
What advice do you have for publishers about how to face this moment?
The content you create is at the foundation of so much that we as a civilization enjoy. Without publishers, you really have nothing. No models trained on their content. No audiences consuming their content. No entertainment, no news.
We can’t lose sight of that. I would hold to that mission.
What’s your message to the ad tech community about how they should work with publishers amid all these changes?
Recognize that publishers are going through a challenging time, and it’s in all of our interest to make sure they survive this moment. It can be easy to approach things like a zero-sum game, but if one side wins, we all lose.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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