Mediaocean covers a lot of ground in the ad industry. Its ad infrastructure covers planning, buying and measurement for all media. Its adtech serves all digital channels, and it works with every major ad group and almost every Fortune 500 company (or at least it claims to).
So who better to answer a broad barrage of questions about the state of the digital media ecosystem than Mediaocean’s chief marketing officer, Aaron Goldman?
What follows is an edited account of a conversation with MediaCat UK, in which Goldman gamely fields questions about everything from the regulators’ increased scrutiny on walled gardens, to the future of media agencies. And AI. Obviously.
The online advertising ecosystem has had plenty of time to mature and consolidate. Why do you think it is still so complex and unwieldy?
The problem is largely the walled gardens, whether we’re talking about social or retail media, or even now in CTV. Each new platform that emerges is putting up walls to keep the data inside, and so it gets harder and harder for marketers to work across them. If you’re only working inside one place, it’s fairly easy. Within Google’s walled garden, you can just turn over your ad budget and let them run Pmax, and it’ll just move all the money around and do the ads for you. Same thing over in Meta, except they call it Advantage+. But if you want to use both and take what’s working on one and apply it to the other, then you need another solution.
And then you add in TikTok and Snap and Pinterest and LinkedIn and X, and all the different retailers are building their own networks now, and we’re starting to see it in CTV as well.
They’ve each learned from their predecessors in recent history that, when you have an engaged audience, the idea is to create some sort of wall garden, and that creates the kind of mess that you were alluding to.
And so, what happens is you have this whole ecosystem of adtech solutions that are meant to help you with your audience, creative and measurement.
That’s what we’re trying to solve with Mediaocean: to be that kind of partner that can help with integrated products to connect across that supply chain.
What do you think will be the effect of regulators’ increased scrutiny of walled gardens?
Let’s separate Google and Meta because I think how the regulators are coming after them is a little different. In the case of Google…there’s talk of some of the remedies [of the adtech action] being having to spin off some of what were Doubleclick and AdMeld. So that means they’re not going to be able to co-mingle the data across all their properties anymore. And they can’t offer pricing incentives for you to use their different pieces of their technology. So ultimately, what that means is they’re going to have to open up the walled gardens, like YouTube, so that other ad tech companies can buy in. Right now they’ve been able to preference Google’s adtech. As those walls open up, and as Google needs to spin out some of these adtech properties, there’s going to be more of a level playing field for independent solutions.
We’re starting to see a lot more interest in some of our solutions because you can no longer rely on getting Google ad serving for free like you were. They could give it to you for free, as long as you bought enough media from them. But when it becomes an independent company, they can’t give it away because they have to make money all of a sudden.
And Meta?
Meta’s antitrust issue is less focused on adtech. Meta actually saw the writing on the wall and got out of the adtech space 5-10 years ago. Their antitrust issues are around competition in the social network market. The challenges there [if Meta is forced to sell Instagram], again, would be around the data co-mingling.
The more relevant regulation, as far as Meta is concerned, is the DMA [Digital Markets Act] and DSA [Digital Services Act], which limit what they can do in terms of co-mingling that data and creating that element of lock-in. Once that becomes unbundled, you’re going to be able to have advertisers and publishers more transparently transact, in terms of what data is being used how decisions are being made. And there’ll be a little more control I think in the hands of the buyers.
Will the result of this regulation be that advertising becomes more transparent but less effective?
For a time, and then we’ll figure out the ways to compensate for it.
Meta has adjusted very well to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency intervention, but from what I understand its ads are still not quite as effective as they were before. Is that fair?
I think that’s fair. It was never going to be as good as it was when they had more data and signals. But if you went from a return on ad spend of 4:1 to 3:1, that’s still pretty good, and better than you would get off of other forms of non-targeted advertising.
Is the open web going to benefit from the increased regulation of the walled gardens?
I think what it does is it gives [it] a fighting chance. The largest walled gardens have amassed these huge audiences and they definitely have dominant positions, but as regulation starts to level the playing field, it creates opportunities for innovation.
You know, a question like the one you just framed has a lot to do with the way that the web is currently constructed. In a world of AI, there’s a whole new roadmap that’s going to be written for how consumers connect with brands. A lot will depend on how the leading AI agents source their information. If they’re not able to pull it out of walled gardens, where are they going to go to pull information? It’s going to come from the open web.
At the moment, if a publisher has a good product, it’s incentivised to build a walled garden. Are you saying that AI could change that?
Yes because you’ll have new sources of traffic and, ultimately, customers that you wouldn’t have had before.
What kind of inventory or formats are you seeing the most demand for?
Paid social is still top in terms of growth, especially with video being the primary format in the social feed. You get the best of both worlds: You have the great targeting that happens within a social network, plus the high impact of sight, sound, and motion. That’s the rosy picture. Said not so nicely, people have just gotten sucked into the algos and brain rot — I think that’s what they’re calling it. So, you can just keep hammering them with messages, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Close behind is CTV. Maybe for the longer attention span, but that’s how more and more people are consuming premium long-form content. It’s just the new access point for television for a lot of people, so a lot of budgets are going there. It still hasn’t fully caught up to consumer usage, though. Depending on whose stats you look at and what country we’re talking about, [time spent with CTV] is 15-20% but ad spend is closer to 5-10%.
Retail media is resilient in terms of budgets and demand, and I think that is owed to how close it is to the point of purchase.
Do you get the sense that those budgets for retail media are still coming out of shopper marketing budgets?
It started as shopper marketing, and that was partly because the people who controlled those budgets found a way to expand them, but now that that has settled, I think those budgets are coming from other channels. Against the macroeconomic uncertainty, if you’re looking for places that are going to keep showing a high return on ad spend, that’s going to be in retail media.
What do you think is holding back CTV, in terms of its popularity as an advertising channel?
It’s just harder to buy, frankly. Linear television, you can spend millions of dollars very quickly. With CTV, it’s a more precise audience target with a number of behavioural characteristics and other targeting variables. Then there’s the pricing. We don’t just negotiate a flat CPM. You’ve got the interactive creative, so there are a lot more formats. You’re not just saying, ‘Hey, here’s my 30-second spot that’s going to run for however long the flight is’. You’re building an ad that’s presumably also dynamic based on the audience, the time of day and where it’s being delivered. And then there’s the measurement. There are things like we’re doing with Innovid, where we have a QR-code generator, so every ad can have a unique QR code, and that makes it interactive for the consumer and trackable for the marketer. You could do that on linear TV but everyone would see the same QR code.
So it’s just harder to do in CTV. And any time things are harder to do, it takes longer for brands and marketers to adopt them. But the payoff is worth it in the end.
More media platforms are trying to cultivate a long tail of small advertisers. What impact, if any, do you think this has on the industry?
I think you don’t have to be a huge brand anymore to get access to the best inventory.
The reason the media agencies were formed was because there was a time when, in order to get the best prices, you had to have the most volume, the biggest clout. Now, when you’re buying on Google or Meta, you’re competing with the other millions of advertisers that they have. And even if the bigger brands are willing to pay more, if the smaller advertiser has a more relevant ad that’s more likely to get clicked on by a consumer, and if the campaign is bought on cost per click, then [Google or Meta] are going to prioritise the smaller advertiser.
The first quarter of 2025 was not as bad as many people feared, in terms of industry financials. What’s your outlook for the rest of the year? Do you think the effects of macro-economic instability are yet to be felt?
From an aggregate, high-level perspective, we have not yet seen any major impact from the uncertainty. So I think the term we’re using is that we remain ‘cautiously optimistic’.
How is Mediaocean using AI? What do you think you’ll do with it in the future?
There’s a few different ways that we’re using AI. One is with the creative: being able to help marketers use those natural language prompts to build their ads or create thousands of different versions. That’s already a real thing today but is only going to get better as the tech gets better and, frankly, as the marketers get more comfortable with using it. There’s understandably a little bit of caution, especially for large brands in industries where there’s regulation. So we’ve built a lot of guard rails to make sure that in those highly regulated industries, especially, there’s certain templates and everything has to fit within them.
Another is analytics: using AI to understand which of the thousands of different variations are working best and using natural language prompts to interrogate the data and ask what’s working. And pulling the reports and having AI write the summary, so that you don’t have to do pivot tables and things like that to draw out the insights. That’s being built into the software, which is super helpful for agencies that have lots of different clients, or if you’re a marketing team responsible for a number of different stakeholders: you can now use our platform to surface a lot of that without having to go in and run your own reports.
Another one is around bidding and optimisation. AI is helping with pattern detection. If we’re seeing questionable traffic and things like that, we can identify that a lot quicker.
One last thought is that we’re being thoughtful about not just how we use the AI, but how it’s connected to the places where it actually makes it useful. A lot of the things I described — like building the ads and analysing them — that’s all great. But if the only output is the ad itself or a report, that still means you have to go and do something with the information.
What we’re really focused on is making sure we’re connected to all the places where you would execute on the outputs. So, once the thousands of [ad] versions come out, we’re automatically plugged in to Meta, to Google, to the CTV platforms, to be able to put those in-market, and then make the changes based on what’s working.
From your vantage point, what does the future of media agencies look like?
If the idea of having a separate media firm to aggregate spend and really focus on the placement was important previously, it’s less so now because so much of ad spend is transacted programmatically or through walled gardens. We talked about how the smallest advertiser has a chance to bid for the same piece of inventory that the largest advertiser does. So, now creative is becoming more of a variable that you need to control to get the best placement. Audience targeting or bidding were the key variables that the media agency would control to figure out how to get the best placement. Now, the creative is one of those key elements because, if you have really strong creative, that’s going to help you get the better placement, which is all just a long way of saying that you need to have creative and media back together.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be the same team or the same agency, but they have to be using the same tools so that when an ad gets placed and the creative gets made, it’s done in concert, and each new version [of the ad] or each new campaign gets built on what was working.
In November, we announced that Mediaocean had taken investment capital from three of the large holding companies: Omnicom, WPP and InterPublic Group [IPG]. Part of that was this idea of making sure that there was independent ad tech that they could leverage as they rethink their systems, especially in the case of IPG and Omnicom. As they come together, they have a chance to rethink the agency of the future. And it was important to all parties that there be an independent system of record for the industry to built on.
We’ve noticed you’ve got a YouTube trick-shot channel. How’s that going?
Thank you for asking! That’s my favorite topic to talk about. It’s been probably five years now. I call it Jude Perfect — I joke that I’m the Jewish Dude Perfect. It started as something fun to do on the weekends, and then it started to evolve. I started using props, different kinds of balls, multiple balls at once, and then I started setting up multiple cameras.
It’s something the whole family gets involved with. Every now and then, I’ll stack up the kids and see if I can jump over them.
Main image by Nick Romanov on Unsplash