Best Ad Tech Podcasts (2024)

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67. Ramsey McGrory – DoubleClick to Mediaocean via Right Media 36:54

2M ago36:54

36:54

Ramsey McGrory started his career in the U.S. Army and later found himself at the mighty DoubleClick in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com boom as an ad sales exec “banging the phones” selling direct-response ads to finance and insurance companies. He joined the seminal Right Media in 2004 as VP of platform and ad sales, staying on after Yahoo acquire…

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66. Daniel Jaye – starting it all with Engage 46:13

3M ago46:13

46:13

Daniel Jaye was co-founder in 1995 of Engage, a pioneer in bringing database marketing to the internet. A competitor of DoubleClick, Engage built arguably the largest database of pseudonymous profiles at the time, and Daniel and his team created innovative technologies for ETL, large-scale analytics and behavioral targeting. Daniel was also the man…

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65. Adam Singolda – the tabula rasa of Taboola 32:37

4M ago32:37

32:37

Adam Singolda is the Founder and CEO of Taboola, a performance-focused advertising company he started in 2007 after spending seven years as a cryptological engineer in the Israeli Defense Forces. Today, Taboola is a public company with 2023 revenues of $1.4 billion (and growing nicely), around 2,000 employees in 22 countries, 18,000 advertiser cust…

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64. Greg Smith – Boomerang-ing through DoubleClick, EchoTarget and Aniview 26:58

4M ago26:58

26:58

Greg joined DoubleClick in 1998 as a product manager after a stop in management consulting, and he became passionate about the early retargeting solution for advertisers called Boomerang. In 2005, he founded dynamic retargeting company EchoTarget, which was acquired by Acxiom in 2007. Today he is GM North America at Aniview, an Israel-based video m…

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63. Jason Fairchild – developing GoTo, OpenX and tvScientific 29:40

11M ago29:40

29:40

Jason was the co-founder with his fellow Yahoo veteran Tim Cadogan of OpenX, a pioneering ad server and then programmatic exchange that launched in 2008. Today he is co-founder and CEO of tvScientific, a CTV-oriented programmatic platform. Jason began his journey in business development in Southern California at one of the original ISPs, Earthlink,…

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62. John Nardone – Flashtalking about Modem Media and [x+1] 31:00

11M ago31:00

31:00

John is President at Mediaocean and former CEO of Flashtalking, which Mediaocean acquired in 2021 for a reported $500 million. He led [x+1] into Rocket Fuel and MMA before that — and his real #PaleoAdTech cred was acquired during his time at legendary Modem Media in the mid-1990s, when he was involved with the very first paid ad campaign on the int…

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61. Jonah Goodhart – Colonize-ing Right Media and building a Moat 37:02

11M ago37:02

37:02

Jonah Goodhart is a co-founder of Montauk Labs, a technology venture studio. Jonah was the CEO and co-founder of Moat (acquired by Oracle in 2017), founding investor of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo in 2007), and co-founder of WGI Group, an entrepreneur investment fund. Goodhart was a recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award i…

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60. Katrin Ribant – giving us the data on Datorama 28:26

11M ago28:26

28:26

Katrin was a co-founder of Datorama in 2012, and the platform was acquired by Salesforce in 2018 for a reported $800 million. Datorama built an innovative data aggregation, transformation and visualization engine that allowed digital marketers to understand campaigns holistically and in detail, and to optimize ROAS. It proved particularly attractiv…

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59. Andy Atherton – optimizing Yahoo, Brand.net and AppNexus 30:08

11M ago30:08

30:08

Andy was VP of pricing and yield management at Yahoo and helped lead a revamp and professionalization of the portal’s approach to pricing and selling ads. He brought on both Rapt (via our previous guest Tom Chavez) and Right Media (via Brian O’Kelley) to improve yield management and to gain access to demand on RM’s exchange. After Yahoo, Andy co-fo…

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58. Jeff Hirsch – all the -Clicks in SoCal lead to AudienceScience 29:19

11M ago29:19

29:19

Jeff was founder and CRO of the FastClick ad network, acquired by ValueClick. He was later the CRO and then CEO at AudienceScience, which may have invented the DMP for clients WSJ and P&G. He was also CMO at SundaySky and Chief Commercial Officer at Pubmatic. Today he is a strategic advisor with Pubmatic, based in NY. Jeff spent the dawn of the int…

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57. Mike Yavonditte – optimizing Alta Vista, Quigo and Yieldmo 32:13

11M ago32:13

32:13

Mike Yavonditte is the CEO and co-founder of Yieldmo, an advertising platform specializing in mobile, optimization and curation. He was formerly CEO of Quigo, an innovative semantic ad network that built a formidable competitor to Google’s AdSense and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for a reported $340 million. Before that, he worked at Alta Vista and …

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56. Tom Chavez – giving us the Rapt on Krux and data 28:11

11M ago28:11

28:11

Tom co-founded the Data Management Platform (DMP) Krux in 2010, and it was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 and became part of its Marketing Cloud. Before Krux, Tom co-founded a company called Rapt in the late 1990s, a yield-management optimization platform that sold into supply chain providers before making a hard pivot into advertising, managing pu…

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55. Ari Paparo – influencing DoubleClick, Beeswax and more 34:05

11M ago34:05

34:05

Ari Paparo is a well-known ad tech influencer, blogger, fellow podcast host, serial entrepreneur, raconteur and man-about-town in his longtime home of Manhattan. He worked in product management at DoubleClick, AppNexus and Nielsen – and was the CEO and co-founder of Beeswax, which was acquired by Comcast’s Freewheel division in 2020 for an undisclo…

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54. Lee Nadler – marketing DoubleClick in Silicon Alley 33:49

11M ago33:49

33:49

Lee was the first head of marketing at DoubleClick, hired by co-founder Kevin O’Connor in 1996 as employee #17 with a mandate to help the other 16 people meet Kevin’s vision-quest to “dominate internet advertising.” The startup had been clicked-off barely two years earlier in the basement of O’Connor’s home in suburban Alpharetta, Georgia. These da…

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53. Omar Tawakol – from BlueKai to AI and the all-new Rembrand 39:09

11M ago39:09

39:09

Omar Tawakol launches his new venture today – it’s called Rembrand (“without the T”), an AI (of course)-driven platform for virtual video product placement. Think of it as a native format for video to replace overtly interruptive last-gen experiences, particularly for creator and short-form video. Jill and Marty were honored to be included among a …

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52. Ana Milicevic – managing data from Demdex to Sparrow 30:27

11M ago30:27

30:27

Ana Milicevic was a seasoned product manager in New York City in 2009 when she joined a wily data management startup called Demdex, which was then swirling around a programmatic audience-building space soon labeled Data Management Platform (DMP). Within two years, Adobe acquired Demdex and folded it into its emerging ad tech and data suite as Adobe…

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51. Wes Nichols – measuring the impact of MarketShare

11M ago

—

Wes was the co-founder with Jon Vein of the marketing and media analytics platform MarketShare, founded in 2006 and sold to Neustar in 2015 for a reported $450 million. At the time, its annual revenues were about $60 million and customers included MasterCard, Intel and Twitter. Wes is currently a Partner at March Capital, based in L.A., and is a Bo…

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50. Brian Andersen – shining a light on LUMA Partners 32:26

11M ago32:26

32:26

Brian Andersen is the Co-Founder — with Terry Kawaja — and the Head of Digital Marketing Investment Banking at LUMA Partners, a small but mighty I-bank that is the premiere boutique operating at the luminescent nexus of digital media and marketing technology. Founded in 2010, LUMA is the best-known bespoke advisory service in ad- and mar-tech, runn…

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49. David Wamsley – running an AdAuction in the dot-com days 34:10

11M ago34:10

34:10

David Wamsley was the co-founder and CEO of an innovative platform called AdAuction.com, which procured remnant inventory from a group of publishers including Match.com and eBay and sold it in an eBay-like declining-price auction. The company launched in the fall of 1997, was folded into a B2B company called OneMediaPlace by a group of investors in…

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48. Brian O’Kelley (part 3) – the AppNexus adventure 44:38

11M ago44:38

44:38

We welcome Brian back for the third (and – for now – final) episode on his revelatory career, from his days as a high-school entrepreneur and javelin-tosser in Eugene, Oregon to his college career as a comp-sci major at Princeton and then co-founder of a dot-com Ticketmaster-manque called LA2Nite.com (in episode one); through his key role in buildi…

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47. Larry Braitman – fishing for dot-com dollars with Flycast 30:00

11M ago30:00

30:00

Larry Braitman was co-founder of Flycast, a dot-com-era digital ad network known for its direct-response focus, lower entry costs for advertisers and publishers, relative ease of use and optimization, and explicit embrace of what the Wall Street Journal called remnant (or unsold) inventory. Larry founded Flycast — named for his co-founder Richard T…

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46. Jay Schwedelson – was WebConnect the first ad network? 29:19

11M ago29:19

29:19

Jay was the founder of a very early ad network called WebConnect, in the second half of 1995, that was notable for taking a then-unusual but prescient stance against the use of third-party cookies for “tracking” — a business decision that Jay admits “was wrong,” ultimately forcing WebConnect to transform into an email-focused services shop. Today J…

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45. Jim Jorgensen – the amazing dot-com adventure of AllAdvantage 40:04

11M ago40:04

40:04

Jim Jorgensen is a prolific serial entrepreneur and co-founder of a well-known dot-com advertising startup called AllAdvantage. The company paid people to surf the web as part of a multi-level marketing program. Launched in April, 1999, without a product, it ultimately raised $175 million from blue-chip VCs and was on track to go public in March 20…

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44. Shawn Riegsecker – getting to the Basis Technologies of Centro 27:28

11M ago27:28

27:28

Shawn is the Founder and CEO of Basis Technologies, aka Centro, and a well-known figure on the ad tech circuit for two decades. He started the company back in 2001 with the vision of being a comprehensive, automated and intelligent software platform for digital media, focused on mid-market agencies and brands. In his spare time he’s an activist for…

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43. Matt Spiegel – making a Resolution (Media) for search 29:34

11M ago29:34

29:34

Matt worked at the LA-based ad network L90 and then in DRTV before co-founding the pioneering search agency Resolution Media in Chicago in 2003. Resolution was acquired by Omnicom in 2005, and Matt went on to become CEO at Omnicom Media Group Digital, ultimately helping to launch and lead Omnicom’s Accuen programmatic trading desk. Leaving Omnicom …

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42. Joseph Zito – the logic of Datalogix and Oracle 31:25

11M ago31:25

31:25

Joseph started in mar-tech at Experian before joining Datalogix in 2012. Working for Eric Roza and based in New York, he was with DLX — as it is known in the industry — through many ups and downs on its way to a reported $1.1 billion acquisition by Oracle in 2014. Post acquisition, Joseph worked with the Oracle Data Cloud team until 2019, when he l…

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41. Lynda Clarizio – making the case for AOL, Nielsen and The 98 35:49

11M ago35:49

35:49

Lynda Clarizio is an attorney-turned-ad tech exec who was a leader at AOL for a decade, running its consumer web sites, ad sales and operations, and its Platform-A rollup. She later ran Invision and Nielsen’s US media business. She’s co-founder of The 98, an early stage venture fund advising and investing in tech businesses founded by women. Growin…

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40. Brian O’Kelley (part 2) – the Right Media experience 30:58

11M ago30:58

30:58

Part 2 of an ongoing conversation with Brian O’Kelley, one of the most influential people in the last two decades of ad tech. He led the technology team at Right Media that launched the first real exchange for ad networks. After Right Media was sold to Yahoo in the eventful year of 2007, Brian co-founded AppNexus, a pioneer in programmatic advertis…

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39. Brian O’Kelley (part 1) – from LA2Nite to Right Media 26:37

11M ago26:37

26:37

Part 1 of a multi-part conversation with Brian O’Kelley, one of the most influential people in the last two decades of ad tech. He led the technology team at Right Media that launched the first real exchange for ad networks. After Right Media was sold to Yahoo in the eventful year of 2007, Brian co-founded AppNexus, a pioneer in real-time bidding. …

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38. Brian Lesser – from 24/7 to Xaxis and Xandr 38:23

11M ago38:23

38:23

Brian Lesser was a long-time leader at WPP entities such as the Media Innovation Group (MIG), Xaxis and GroupM. He left GroupM in 2017 to join AT&T, ultimately guiding the newly-formed Xandr ad platform, which included AppNexus. Since 2020, Brian has been CEO of InfoSum, a distributed data collaboration platform. His exposure to the ad business beg…

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37. Blagica Bottigliero – going into Orbitz, social and affiliates 26:31

11M ago26:31

26:31

Blagica (blah’-gee-tsa) is a two-decade deep web pioneer and currently Director of Affiliate Marketing at JEB Commerce. Her journey began when, inspired by her fictional childhood idol Angela Bower of “Who’s the Boss?” she applied for and won a year-long bivouac in NYC with Ogilvy & Mather after majoring in advertising at Western Michigan Universit…

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36. Ben Barokas – real-timing the supply side at AdMeld and Google 24:47

11M ago24:47

24:47

Ben Barokas is the Co-Founder and CEO at Sourcepoint Technologies, which provides data privacy tools for digital marketers. He launched the company in 2015 after three years as GM of the Global Marketplace Development team at Google, which acquired his previous company, the pioneering supply-side platform (SSP) AdMeld, for a reported $400 million i…

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35. Michael Katz – double-clicking on InterCLICK and Yahoo 30:51

11M ago30:51

30:51

Michael Katz is the co-founder and CEO of mParticle, a pioneering customer data platform (CDP) that launched in 2013. Before that he was founder and president of InterCLICK (hereafter due to caps-aversion: Interclick), a data-informed ad network which started business in the Boston metro region in 2005 and was sold to Yahoo in 2011 for a reported $…

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34. Andrew Casale – from Casale Media to Index Exchange

11M ago

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Andrew is the President and CEO of Index Exchange, a supply-side platform based in Toronto. Index itself was born in 2015 out of Casale Media, an ad network that Casale founded as a teenager around the turn of the millennium with some help from his father, an electrical engineer. Andrew was VP of Strategy at Casale Media from 2001-15. (The official…

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33. Nancy Marzouk – taking a DrivePM through L90 and [x+1]

11M ago

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Nancy is the CEO and founder of MediaWallah, an identity resolution provider she started in 2013 as a way to “give back” to an industry that has been generous to her. Nancy has been present at a number of seminal moments in the history of ad tech, including: L90’s acquisition of DoubleClick and the formation of MaxWorldwide; the latter’s acquisitio…

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32. John Ferber – putting the dot-com in Advertising.com 31:41

11M ago31:41

31:41

John was the co-founder with his brother Scott Ferber of the very well-known Baltimore-based ad network eventually called Advertising.com, which began in 1998 and sold to AOL for a reported $435 million (plus about $60 million cash) in the summer of 2004. The brothers stayed at AOL for two years, John working as a Chief of Product. Subsequently, Sc…

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31. Steve Latham – taking an Encore at Flashtalking 27:42

11M ago27:42

27:42

Steve was the Global Head of Analytics at Flashtalking, which acquired his advanced ad measurement company Encore Media Metrics in 2016. Then last July 2021, Mediaocean acquired Flashtalking for a reported $500 million, and Steve decided to “pull the pin” on his army-of-one and leave ad tech after a 20-year tour of duty. Today he devotes himself to…

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30. Dave Zinman – on the first ad server, BlueLithium and beyond 32:23

11M ago32:23

32:23

Dave co-founded a company while at Stanford Business School that built the first demand-side ad server, and he later went on to develop products at pioneering powerhouses such as BlueLithium, Yahoo, InfoLinks and Drawbridge. Since March, 2020, Dave has been Global President of Deputy, a workforce management software company based in the Bay Area he…

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29. Bill Urschel – the captain of Ad:ECN, the first exchange

11M ago

—

Bill Urshel was CEO and co-founder of Ad:ECN, an early ad exchange started in 2003 and acquired by Microsoft on the same day it acquired aQuantive, Razorfish and Atlas in 2007. Bill’s partner and third sales hire at Ad:ECN was none other than Jeff Green, then a recruit from the tiny L.A. agency 411 Interactive and now of course CEO of The Trade Des…

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28. Bill Wise – accounting for the rise of Right Media and more 38:14

11M ago38:14

38:14

Bill Wise is co-founder and CEO of Mediaocean — and a man who was at ground zero for pretty much the entire arc of ad tech. His picaresque journey begins in the mid-90’s in NYC when he left accounting to work for three days as an executive recruiter for accountants, succeeding only in placing himself in a job as a financial analyst at a start-up na…

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27. Rex Briggs – the theory of Marketing Evolution 30:50

11M ago30:50

30:50

Rex founded Marketing Evolution in 2000 to build on the cross-channel measurement and audience insight techniques he started to develop as a young researcher at Yankelovich and Wired in the mid-1990s. You can find a meticulous biography of Rex right here and his outfit Marketing Evolution continues to add value here. These days Rex is a speaker, au…

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26. Manu Mathew – raising the Visual IQ of ads 28:19

11M ago28:19

28:19

Manu was the co-founder and CEO of Visual IQ from 2006 to its sale to Nielsen in 2017. Visual IQ was a pioneer and dominant player in the space of multi-touch attribution (MTA), which is the application of rules and complex models to impression-level data to determine which elements of a campaign contributed how much to the desired outcome. In a ty…

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25. Jeremy Ring – We Were Yahoo! 30:23

11M ago30:23

30:23

Jeremy Ring was the first on-staff salesperson at Yahoo!, joining just before the IPO in 1996. He entered the Yahoo! rocket very early and rode it through its rise and rise until shortly after the dot-com bust of 2001, when he decided “it was time” and disembarked. Subsequently, Ring got into politics in the State of Florida as a State Senator, and…

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24. Tolman Geffs – banking on ad tech and media

11M ago

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Tolman is a long-time investment banker and advisor to luminaries in the ad tech, media and data-driven enterprise world. He’s the man who sold the mighty AdExchanger to Access Intelligence in 2017, almost 10 years after its founding, and he’s been an observer-participant in the #PaleoAdTech universe for more than twenty years. As he tells Marty [J…

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23. David Shen – inside Yahoo!’s ad revolution

11M ago

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David Shen was employee #17 at Yahoo!, hired by founders and Stanford classmates Jerry Yang and David Filo to shepherd the user experience — and eventually the ad experience — for the pioneering and absurdly successful directory and portal to the nascent internet. David is also the author of the best behind-the-scenes look at Yahoo!’s ad evolution,…

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22. Michael Provenzano – issuing an Invite (Media) to Google 32:25

11M ago32:25

32:25

Michael was one of the co-founders of Invite Media in 2007, with college classmates at the University of Pennsylvania. He and co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg met in an entrepreneur’s club in college, and Nat was inspired by a summer internship at pioneering video ad network VideoEgg to build a dynamic-creative ad platform. This morphed int…

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21. Mark Zagorski – eXelate, Telaria & DoubleVerify 32:54

11M ago32:54

32:54

Mark Zagorski is a tenured ad tech CEO, having led eXelate (acquired by Nielsen), Telaria (later Magnite) and currently DoubleVerify. But more than that, he’s a true ad tech O.G., joining pioneering agency Modem Media/Poppe Tyson as an A.E. in the mid-’90s right as digital ads were getting started. (For more on Poppe Tyson, check out this episode.)…

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20. Ari Lewine – going native with TripleLift

11M ago

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Ari is the co-founder, along with Eric Berry and Shaun Zacharia, of TripleLift, a programmatic ad platform that helps advertisers and publishers to do native advertising. And native of course is a space that was identified in 2011 in an OMMA keynote by investor Fred Wilson, inspired by in-stream social ad formats (particularly on mobile) that blend…

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19. Scott McCorkle – hitting the ExactTarget at MetaCX 27:00

11M ago27:00

27:00

Scott McCorkle was a long-time leader and visionary at ExactTarget, a pioneering ESP and mar-tech hub that was acquired by the mighty Salesforce in 2012. He’s currently the CEO and co-founder at MetaCX, an outcome-based collaboration tool for software buyers and suppliers. As Scott tells his former employee (full disclosure), Jill, and his former t…

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18. Kevin Ryan – up and down and up with DoubleClick 31:27

11M ago31:27

31:27

Kevin Ryan was part of the trio that led DoubleClick from its inception in the mid-1990s through its traumatic post-crash chapter and back toward health and the sale to private equity in 2005 — the critical years where it established its product and market dominance and was ready to be spruced up (by others) for its ultimate exit into Google and ad…

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