MarTech Interview with Sonja Kristiansen, Chief Business Officer at TripleLift

Sonja Kristiansen, Chief Business Officer at TripleLift chats about the modern state of adtech in this catch-up with MarTechSeries:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Sonja, tell us about yourself and more about your time at TripleLift.

I’m originally from Vancouver, Canada and after spending the first six years of my career working in pro sports (for the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks), I moved to San Francisco and shifted into tech and digital media. I started at TripleLift in 2016 when we had about 75  employees, working with demand-side platform (DSP) partners to build a marketplace for programmatic native. Today, we have over 80 DSPs and audience networks plugged into our exchange, across video, display, CTV, and of course – native.

In December, I stepped into a new role as Chief Business Officer, which expanded my aperture to work horizontally across the leadership team (and the whole company) to ensure that we are focused and executing on our plan. This includes steering our cross-functional operating plan, along with leading strategic initiatives, partnerships, corporate development, and overall business operations.

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How have you seen adtech evolve over the years and what predictions do you have for this segment for 2023?

Since entering ad tech in 2014, this is the first year that I’ve seen the duopoly (Google and Meta) loosening their stranglehold on the ecosystem. I have a ton of respect for those ad businesses, but it’s always interesting to see new dominant players like Amazon, Walmart and even Apple enter the ring to keep things interesting.

My predictions for 2023:

1. Retail media will eat the world: With 45% growth in 2022 and total spend already 50% more than CTV, this space is the third wave of digital, and it’s just getting started.
2. Changing of the guards: Share will shift away from the duopoly into platforms with the strongest attribution. Companies like Amazon, Walmart and Apple are well-positioned to steal share, because of solid identity resolution and closed-loop measurement. This will only accelerate if a softer ad market persists, due to a focus on performance and lower-funnel conversions.

Can you talk about the state of adtech in modern-day advertising and how advertisers can make better use of adtech to drive impactful digital experiences in 2023?

I can’t answer this question without giving a nod to generative AI. While it’s not inherently “ad tech,” the use case is obvious. Having superior creative is key to engaging your users and delivering performance, and there’s a lot of bad creative out there.

After seeing how quickly ChatGPT reached critical mass, I can see a world where using generative AI to both generate and optimize ad creative is commonplace as early as 2024.

When it comes to your own role; how do you drive growth for your brand: we’d love to know about some key strategies, best practices and of course the martech you rely on here to do this?

I’m fortunate to work with a comms team at TripleLift that makes this easy by lining up panels, presentations and articles, and amplifying my voice.

Whether you have a team supporting you or you’re hustling as your own PR agency, when you do get these opportunities, I think it’s important to write your own content and be opinionated. As humans, we gravitate towards candor and frankness – so don’t be afraid to deliver some hot takes. That’s what people will remember.

What are some of the common adtech misconceptions you’d like to dispel within the industry?

The most common misconception is that ad tech is incredibly (and increasingly) complex. I think that’s a concept we’ve self-created to make us feel smart. At the end of the day, the fundamentals are still simple: build an ad that’s aesthetically compelling, and deliver it somewhere relevant to my interests, and I’ll convert.

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