Meet the new Prebid boss, same as the old boss?
Prebid.org has appointed its former longtime chairman, Garrett McGrath, as its second-ever president, the organization announced on Thursday.
McGrath left Prebid in June following five years as board chairman after stepping down as SVP of product management at Magnite. Since he no longer worked for a Prebid board member company, he had to vacate his position as chairman. But, now, overseeing Prebid will be his full-time job.
Now that he’s back, he’s excited about the opportunity to make Prebid his sole focus as it continues to lay the groundwork for how digital publishers monetize in advertising’s agentic AI era.
“If advertising pays for the internet, then Prebid is critical infrastructure for the internet,” McGrath told AdExchanger. “We’re at a place of sea change, at least for the open web, and the importance of Prebid has never been more critical.”
Leadership shuffle
McGrath’s departure over the summer happened to coincide with Prebid’s first president, Mike Racic, also stepping down from his role.
The loss of both of its senior leaders kicked off a five-month search for a new president and chairman, said Katie Morgart, Prebid’s VP of marketing and strategic partnerships.
Prebid elected OpenX CTO Joel Meyer as its new chairman at the end of August. From there, the organization’s main priority was finding a new president, Meyer told AdExchanger – ideally one with more of a tech-focused background to complement outgoing president Racic’s efforts to bring Prebid up to speed on the business and partnerships side.
Given his more than 20 years of experience designing ad tech, McGrath fits that bill. He’ll officially step into the president role on September 15, sharing leadership duties with Racic for 30 days until Racic wraps up his tenure on October 15.
What’s surprising, though, is that McGrath originally wasn’t even in consideration for the president role. In fact, he said, he took a professional hiatus after leaving Magnite, during which he spent about six weeks camping in the Wyoming woods.
But it was during this period of being unplugged from the ad tech industry that McGrath realized he had unfinished business with Prebid. He saw a chance to use his ad tech background, his history with Prebid dating back to its founding in 2015 and, as he put it, his “pretty good understanding of how this stuff works” to “forward the mission of Prebid and shepherd us into what is arguably a new generation of the web.”
Even so, McGrath’s appointment as president wasn’t automatic, Morgart said. He still had to undergo the same interview process as other candidates, she said, and convince the Prebid board to buy into his vision for the org’s future.
The agentic future
So what is McGrath’s vision for Prebid’s future?
First off, he said, Prebid will remain agnostic when it comes to emerging agentic AI standards.
“We will support any agentic layer or any agentic function that the market asks for, and that will always be the case,” he said. “We don’t think one protocol is better than another.”
For example, even though Prebid agreed to take on oversight of AgenticAdvertising.org’s sell-side AI agent earlier this year, that doesn’t preclude Prebid from also working with competing standards, such as the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Real Time Framework (ARTF) and Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP), McGrath said.
The same goes for collaborating with other ad tech platforms, agencies and industry groups on their agentic products and standards, he added – so long as there’s demand from the publisher market and potential collaborators are committed to open-source software access.
But don’t expect any major new initiatives coming out of Prebid in the immediate future. McGrath said he promised the board that the first 90 days of his tenure would be a “listening and not deciding period.”
During this time, he plans on getting up to speed with the leaders of Prebid’s various working groups, its member companies and “companies that aren’t members but are influential in the industry,” he said.
“I don’t think the core mission changes materially in terms of what we do,” he added, “but where we do it and how we address different parts of the market should and will evolve.”
The Google ad tech remedies question
For example, Prebid might find itself working more collaboratively with at least one highly influential company that currently isn’t a member if Google is forced by the federal government to integrate its AdX SSP into Prebid auctions, which is one of the potential remedies in the Google ad tech antitrust case.
Both Google and the Department of Justice have proposed that Google should integrate with Prebid. But McGrath said he has no special insight into what Judge Leonie Brinkema’s ultimate decision will be regarding remedies in the case.
That said, he noted that it would be quick and easy for Google to build its own Prebid adapter, and Prebid itself would have very little work to do in order to facilitate AdX competing on an even playing field with other SSPs in Prebid auctions.
As for the recently filed FTC lawsuit against Amazon over alleged ad auction manipulation, McGrath said that the case doesn’t directly touch on the digital display advertising business that is Prebid’s bread and butter. It does underscore, however, the need for more transparency into how ad auctions are run – which, he added, is central to Prebid’s open-source mission.
The core constituency
But legal drama aside, publishers are facing plenty of problems that Prebid wants to help solve, including monetization challenges related to AI search eating their referral traffic.
For example, McGrath sees an opportunity for Prebid to get more involved in publisher-led deal curation and data co-ops.
And although helping publishers grow their audiences isn’t currently in Prebid’s wheelhouse, it’s been a strong promoter of interoperable ID infrastructure, McGrath said, which could facilitate more collective audience building and curation among publishers. He pointed to Prebid’s User ID Module and its SharedID as technology that could evolve to meet new challenges.
“A large portion of the identity ecosystem exists because of Prebid,” he said. “We’ve been in the audience business for a long time, in terms of enabling an entire ecosystem of extended IDs. Does that mature into audience creation? Perhaps we’ll take a look at it.”
