During my tenure at Freestar, the only real constant I’ve seen in digital advertising is change. Specifically, one of the biggest disruptors for publishers has been the evolving patchwork of privacy laws. A year ago, there were only nine US state privacy laws. Today, there are 20, with more planned - not to mention the [...]
When I joined Freestar two years ago, my friends asked the predictable question: Why jump back into adtech? My answer was simple: Because I had finally found a place where ‘publisher-first’ is more than a slide in a pitch deck. Every conversation here, even behind closed doors, starts with the question: Will this help our [...]
AI is, unsurprisingly, a hot topic across the adtech industry. You’ve got your evangelists who believe AI will eventually replace large portions of the workplace, and your skeptics who believe it’s an overhyped fad. The reality is probably somewhere in between. At Freestar, we’re proud to be taking a human-first approach, and we have no [...]
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 [...]
In the programmatic world, data can be powerful, but only when it’s used responsibly. Recently, some publishers have received alarming outreach claiming that their monetization setup is underperforming due to a lack of bids from demand partners. These claims often come backed by screenshots from tools like Publift’s AdWizard, suggesting that SSPs are “blocking” impressions [...]
Just recently, Admonsters asked the question: what happens when the publisher builds the stack? The article highlighted the growing trend of publishers moving to adtech in a quest to build the tools they have long been asking for. Instead of waiting for better solutions to emerge, explains Lynne D. Johnson, “they wanted a hand in [...]
