Freestar’s tenth-anniversary blog series is all about the inflection points that turned ‘publisher-first tech’ into ‘people-first tech’. As Freestar’s first Chief Revenue Officer, I work at the crossroads between publisher development, demand partnerships, and customer success, which means empowering a broad range of teams to do their best work.
In this article, I’ll talk about how AI benefits the ecosystem, how offloading expertise benefits publishers, and why transparent leadership drives company excellence.
Why Freestar, and Why Now?
I joined Freestar in 2023 after a decade at Rubicon (now Magnite) and a stint at Amazon Ads. Having worked on both the supply side and demand side, it’s obvious that independence matters. Publishers deserve to work with an unconflicted partner, and Freestar’s neutral tech stack is that partner. Because we don’t own demand, we’re fully aligned with publisher outcomes. Our only incentive is maximizing yield, not directing spend to preferred pipes.
Meanwhile, on the buy side, we take a curated approach to demand: prioritizing direct DSP/SSP relationships, enriching paths for identity and context, and minimizing low-value resellers to preserve transparency and efficiency.
Looking forward, our publisher priorities tee up with our broad anniversary themes, which are to:
- Automate the manual: add more machine-learning horsepower to internal processes (e.g. our brand-new customer success ticketing system) as well as external processes (e.g. smart bid-request throttling) so teams can focus on strategic activities
- Divide expertise: do what we do best (the adtech), to free up publishers to focus on content and community
- Deepen curated marketplaces: expand signal-rich packages that let buyers move from bazooka buys to sniper precision – more on this in my next article on curation
AI and Machine Learning – Purposeful, not Performative
Anyone who knows us will know that Freestar Intelligence, our AI/ML engine, sits at the heart of the stack. It handles dynamic floor pricing, bidder time-outs, and partner selection in real time, ingesting huge volumes of auction data that no human could parse quickly enough. That automation is what first caught my eye when I joined; the wrapper isn’t people flipping switches, but a layer of thoughtful machine learning that continuously optimizes every impression.
Outside the auction, we use generative tools to eliminate busywork. For instance, if we want to compile an off-site budget outline, or pull together hundreds of vendor T&C files into one searchable index, we can simply drop the prompt into a friendly AI chatbot, get a solid first draft in seconds, and spend the hours saved on refining instead of starting from scratch.
We also run our BD emails through an AI checker that flags missing personalization or typos before anyone hits ‘send’. It’s that balance of “personal touch meets efficiency” that our customers know and love.
To help maintain that mindset across the organization, we’re funding a series of workshops to show teams how to weave AI into day-to-day workflows so the technology becomes an efficiency multiplier, not a threat.
Experts Empowering Experts
Publishers rarely have adops teams that can be available to adjust header-bidding settings on the fly, run A/B tests, or swap demand partners on demand. As busy developers juggle CMS changes and other site priorities, adtech tickets sit in the sprint backlog, limiting speed and control.
Freestar’s 60-person team fills that gap – evaluating new identity providers, testing ad-block recovery tools like AdShield versus Blockthrough, and evaluating which SSPs to add or drop. And so as CRO, my remit actually stretches across various teams:
- New Publisher Development: onboarding digital media brands that lack the vast adtech engineering bench Freestar provides
- Customer Success: offering proactive yield consulting long after the ink dries.
- Demand & SSP Relations: nurturing partnerships with platform sellers that move more than 350 billion impressions each month
- Business Development: stitching in best-of-breed tools for ad-block recovery, identity, and site-speed improvements.
- Audience Strategy: testing alternative IDs and distribution channels so publishers can monetize beyond the cookie
We handle the heavy lifting so publishers can stay laser-focused on what they do best: creating content, expanding subscriptions, launching events, or driving traffic through aggregated news channels.
We’re especially proud of our work supporting quality news publishers, including our collaboration with The Trade Desk’s News Navigator and Ad Fontes Media. By helping classify and elevate trustworthy content, we not only unlock brand-safe monetization but also reinforce journalism as a business, not charity.
Leading with Transparency in a Remote-First Culture
Freestar operates across 15 countries, which means trust and transparency are table stakes, and are embedded right across our company culture. For example, my personal calendar is public – the “3 pm school run” isn’t hidden behind a generic busy flag. That level of openness keeps expectations clear and prevents burnout across time zones.
But transparency scales beyond calendars – we like to tell our teams why we’re making our decisions. Each month I host an all-hands with open Q&A, and every quarter I share our OKRs along with the reasons behind them. Anonymous pulse surveys let teammates flag concerns early, while skip-level chats ensure voices two or three layers down still reach the C-suite. When people feel heard, they move faster and innovate more boldly.
We also fund external mentorship through platforms like OhHello, as well as coaching for presentation skills, because if our people grow, revenue follows. It’s that simple.
Ten years in, Freestar continues to prove that great technology is only as strong as the people behind it. By combining purposeful automation, a refreshingly transparent culture, and industry collaboration including leadership-tier membership and board seat with Prebid.org, we’re helping shape the next decade of adtech.
