AdHash takes aim at ‘broken’ advertising supply chain
Partner Content
Marco Ricci has joined AdHash as chief revenue officer, a startup providing accurate first-party data with no ad tech “middlemen”.
The first banner ad was served on Wired magazine 28 years ago. It kickstarted a world in which information is distributed for free, globally.
But fast forward to 2022, and over a third of today’s digital advertising is being lost to ad fraud, publishers are losing 70% of their revenue to blind supply chains (the tech tax), and perhaps of most concern: digital advertising could be adding as much as 28% to the annual carbon footprint of every consumer.
The key question should be: did we get it right? And what have we learnt in these 28 years, if not that advertising is quite frankly, broken.
There have been trickles of hope and stabs at a resolution. In 2009 ad verification vendors emerged, designed to protect against fraud, brand safety, and viewability concerns.
Yet double-digit discrepancies in count and methodology still ensue, without industry agreement or rectification.
Buyers and sellers using different vendors and diverse ad servers has only increased the delta of data confusion, and with such a convoluted supply chain full of tax-taking middlemen, brands are buying blind and trusting less.
Advertising bodies like the ANA and ISBA (2014 & 2018 respectively) attempted to shine a research light on the lack of transparency and headlines of ‘the missing 15%’ adspend emerged.
But four years on there is still no fix, and still no resolution. The market has been crying out for change.
Enter AdHash — digital advertising reinvented.
AdHash was founded by two Cambridge Graduates with strong entrepreneurial experience in building adtech companies.
One of the pivotal points in their journey was in 2017 when at their previous company, AdTrader, they lead a (successful) class-action lawsuit against Google in California which led to eight-digit advertiser refunds.
The determination of Martin Stoev (CEO) and Adriana Taseva (COO) to leave a mark on the industry and the fact that they were unintimidated to lead a fight even against the biggest player in the industry, has resulted in the creation of a new protocol that’s an order of magnitude cheaper, faster, and more secure than the industry standard.
AdHash’s technology and reporting is truly innovative:
- All data is reported in five-second intervals, bringing “real-time” back into “real-time bidding advertising”.
- Any AI and ML optimisations are immediately visible to the client, making sure that AdHash is never a black box.
- Sophisticated NLP contextual targeting techniques are additionally enhanced by live signals, such as weather data, sports events, financial market signals, breaking news, political events, and custom APIs.
- Invalid traffic and ad fraud is (finally) prevented in real-time, meaning that advertisers never have to spend again on buying fraudulent, non-human inventory.
“After building for several years, the launch of the first campaigns with both publishers and advertisers was very stressful,” said Stoev.
“It was the moment of truth. All the hard work would have been in vain if a direct comparison against Google, Facebook, Xandr, and other DSPs didn’t show favourable results. This was the time to validate our basic hypothesis and to show product-market fit.”
AdHash outperformed all of them, and it didn’t take long for the first adopters to witness an “incredibly user-intuitive UI” and advanced targeting capabilities:
- Domino’s Pizza achieved 92.3% higher engagement with a streamlined supply path to premium publishers.
- Chris Hadfield (NY Times Bestseller & first Canadian in Space) drives 60% more website visitors with advanced contextual targeting.
- Neterra Telecommunications achieve 50% reduction in cost-per-click while signing their biggest CPA deals so far.
Early client confidence and successes have allowed the business to expand their C-level leadership team.
Just this month, adtech veteran Marco Ricci (pictured, left) joined as chief revenue officer, to accelerate partnerships and global revenue.
Marco has over 20 years of digital experience and recently joined from his post as CCO Europe for Condé Nast, where he was tasked with transforming their digital/programmatic business, after several years of audience decline.
After delivering record revenue growth across key markets such as the UK & Germany, and across globally-respected publications such as Vogue, GQ and CN Traveller, it shows the exciting pulling power of AdHash that Marco has chosen to join the Business.
Ricci commented: “I am delighted to help play an integral part in AdHash’s growth, and humbled to work alongside such intellectual entrepreneurs as Adriana and Martin. I’ve been a CEO of exciting start-ups and led successful commercial teams at the likes of Microsoft and Google in New York. But the intriguing opportunity to solve arguably the industry’s major headache and related challenges today, is hugely attractive.”
Marco added: “We’ve witnessed terms such as ‘transparency’ and supply path optimisation ‘SPO’ become table-stakes within buyer (and seller) businesses, but never before have we seen a technology connect brands to publishers with such speed, cost-reduction and still deliver incremental performance.
“Walled Gardens will soon stretch beyond the Metas and TikToks of this industry, and advertisers are relentlessly looking to circumnavigate these blind audiences whilst monetising their own unique, first party data sets. As a buyer, having full control on-premise, with live (for once truly) real-time targeting and zero-tolerance on invalid traffic stands to offer the most cost-efficient, carbon-neutral route to achieving their business goals.”
AdHash is offering advertisers and premium publishers the chance to participate in a cross-industry initiative pilot, launching on 15 November across the UK and Germany.
To find out more please contact hello@adhash.com.