CTV ad-tech company Madhive has brought on Jon Kaplan as its new Chief Revenue Officer — marking the DSP’s third C-suite addition following its new CTO and sales SVP appointed in March and January of this year, respectively.
Kaplan is a former CRO from FalconX, and prior to that Pinterest, where he helped expand revenue from $125 million to nearly $3 billion. He was an early employee of Google, who initially oversaw a 100-person sales team and helped scale its Financial Services advertising from $50 million to $2 billion. His focus will now be on scaling adoption of Madhive’s ad infrastructure into national brands, DTC brands, and retail media networks.
“When mobile advertising was first getting started, there was a big disconnect between the consumer usage of mobile and the advertising dollars flowing to mobile,” Kaplan told Fierce via email. “That disconnect was due in part because it took a while for ad formats, targeting, and measurement to evolve to take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile. But eventually, the industry caught up and now mobile usage and advertising dollars are aligned.”
He explained that the same dynamic currently exists within streaming, with usage far exceeding advertising demand. “If you take advantage of all the things that are available on connected TV, advertisers have an amazing opportunity to buy television advertising in a more efficient and effective way,” Kaplan said.
In the announcement, Kaplan remarked on a similarity between Madhive and his experience at Google, teaching clients about Google’s DoubClick’s full-stack benefits “in the early days of programmatic advertising.
“What I [see] with Madhive, is that we are in the early stages of growing the connected TV business, and there really is this disconnect between the amount of time that's being spent by users in this space and the amount of money that's going into it from advertisers,” he explained in the interview with Fierce.
“That gap right now is what we have the opportunity to bridge. And it’s only going to grow. We can help guide advertisers to target their television advertising in a more effective and efficient way, a modern way,” he said.
Madhive was first founded as a solution for broadcasters like Fox and Scripps to bring streaming TV offerings to local advertisers in 2016. According to the company’s CEO Adam Helfgott in an interview with Digiday, the company was diligent to meet the evolution of television being consumed online — prompting it to become a DSP for local advertisers.
Its AI-powered platform offers full-stack, self-service tools for programmatic TV campaigns. The company touted in the release that the engine can help “optimize campaigns against full-funnel KPIs and accurately predict outcomes.