Interview with Barry Adams, General Manager, BidSwitch

By Sudipto Ghosh On Sep 10, 2018

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Tell us about your role at BidSwitch and the team/technology you handle.

I’m the newly appointed General Manager of BidSwitch, overseeing a team of roughly 100 people encompassing a group of around 65 engineers, as well as product, client services, sales, marketing, finance, and operations.

BidSwitch was developed in 2013 by IPONWEB (the bespoke ‘behind the scenes’ technology that powers advanced advertising systems for publishers, advertisers, agencies and innovative technology companies) to solve the pain point that both buyers and sellers had when integrating with trading partners on the other side of the buying ecosystem. Today BidSwitch is a smart, integrated infrastructure that connects the global programmatic ecosystem. We facilitate more than 3,800 trading connections between 370+ demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs). Through those connections, we ingest and intelligently optimize the delivery of nearly 550 billion bid requests daily across all regions and media formats.

From day one, BidSwitch’s core proposition has always been to provide the infrastructure that connects programmatic supply and demand partners efficiently and at scale. As the industry evolves, so must we. Going forward, we want to place a sharper focus on the delivery of cutting-edge tools that help our partners navigate the complexities around fraud and traffic quality, evolving auction dynamics and the shift to first price auctions, private deals trading and management, and improved reporting and analytics – all aimed at delivering greater transparency and control.

What draws you to DMEXCO this year? What do you get out of events like DMEXCO?

DMEXCO is one of the marquee events of the year for us; it’s probably the punchiest in terms of getting the most done with the largest number of clients in the shortest time.

What do you think will be the topics to look out for?

In the programmatic space, some of the topics that will dominate discussions will be the ongoing topic of GDPR, auction dynamics and transparency, supply path optimization, fraud and ad quality, and fee transparency.

Who are you keen to meet at DMEXCO ’18?

The majority of our largest clients from around the world will attend, so we’ll be meeting with all of them, along with other potential customers who may be newer to the space.

Why is transparency so important to the programmatic advertising ecosystem?

Fundamentally, for the same reason that it’s important in almost any market; namely trust. Without it, buyers and sellers cannot act with confidence. The lack of transparency makes performance and ROI incredibly difficult to measure and growth difficult to achieve in any ongoing capacity.

What do you see as the most disruptive events re-shaping your industry?

GDPR has been the “disruption event” of 2018 and its effects will continue for the foreseeable future, and even extend to other markets and regions. Consolidation is the other disruptive trend that’s taking place, creating challenges as well as many compelling opportunities.

Thank you, Barry! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

About Barry
About BidSwitch

About Barry

Barry is an Online Marketing and Ad Tech executive whose career has developed at the intersection of media, marketing and technology. he has spent nearly two decades working in businesses ranging from tech startups to F500 data companies. Barry specializes in strategic partnership development, programmatic advertising, international team and business unit leadership and P&L management. He is a regular presenter/speaker at marketing and advertising technology events.

About BidSwitch

BidSwitch is focused on continually pushing the boundaries on what programmatic advertising can do. Engineered by IPONWEB, BidSwitch was created to help programmatic technology companies meet the challenges and redundancies produced by the rapidly expanding global real-time ecosystem. As a company, BidSwitch is completely neutral and never takes a position on media. We are focused on solving the underlying technical complexities and inefficiencies that hamper platform interconnectivity and trading at the infrastructure level. Today, BidSwitch facilitates more than 350 supply and demand technology partners globally to connect and trade media across the display, mobile, native, video, TV, DOOH and VR ecosystems — all via a single standardised integration. By integrating with BidSwitch, partners* can instantly access hundreds of platforms through normalised protocols. The unique myBidSwitch UI includes features that make maintaining, optimizing and customizing relationships between supply and demand fast and easy.

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The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.