The advertising industry is continuously evolving.

From billboards to newspapers, from radios to television, and from desktops to Smartphones, technology has been changing the way that companies appeal to prospective consumers for decades. And efficiency has always been at the very heart of advertising. Businesses are looking to grow their top line at the most optimal return on investment possible.

The internet introduced new ways for companies to maximize that ROI of their ad spend. Search engines like Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL) and social networks like Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) have become massive platforms with billions of users. Together, they accounted for nearly 70% of the $370 billion the world spent on digital advertising last year.

But these walled gardens have their limitations, and there’s a fast-growing ad tech industry that is leveraging technology to provide new ways to connect advertisers with content publishers. It’s growing quickly, yet it is still highly fragmented and is undergoing a wave of consolidation.

How should growth-style investors, intrigued by the rapid pace of innovation in this gargantuan market, get exposure to the changes taking shape in this digital advertising space?

[su_button url=”https://7investing.com/subscribe/?marketing_id=18024″ target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#96C832″ color=”#000000″ size=”6″ center=”yes” radius=”0″ icon=”https://7investing.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/7Investing-3.png” icon_color=”#000000″]Sign up with 7investing today to get access to our 7 top stock market recommendations every month![/su_button]

To help us answer that question, 7investing founder and CEO Simon Erickson recently spoke with PubMatic co-founder and CEO Rajeev Goel. PubMatic is a publicly-traded company based in San Francisco, whose mission is to fuel the potential of internet content creators. It trades with the ticker “PUBM.”

In this exclusive interview with 7investing, Rajeev describes two of the most important innovations that have taken place in digital advertising during the past 15 years. The first was real-time bidding, which transformed the ad industry’s transactions from static interactions to instantaneous online auctions. The second was a transition from desktop to mobile, which brought ads into apps and required them to be placed in different ways.

But importantly, Rajeev also believes there is a third important innovation taking shape in the digital ad industry today: the intense focus on consumer privacy. Several companies are transitioning away from third-party cookies, and consumers are demanding for prompts to opt-in before their data is tracked or shared.

Rajeev believes this trend could unlock a new wave of opportunities. Content publishers are increasingly looking to programmatic as a convenient and highly profitable way to generate revenue. As one of the clear innovators in the ad tech space, PubMatic is developing creative strategies to gain market share and to differentiate itself from competitors.

This interview is a must-watch for any forward-thinking investors interested in the future of advertising!

Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE), Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL), Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY), IPG (NYSE: IPG), NewsCorp (Nasdaq: NWS), Proctor and Gamble, PubMatic, The Trade Desk (Nasdaq: TTD), Zynga. 7investing’s advisors or its guests may have positions in the companies mentioned.

[su_button url="/subscribe/" style="flat" background="#84c136" color="#ffffff" size="6" center="yes" radius="0" icon="" icon_color="#ffffff" desc="Get full access to our 7 best ideas in the stock market for only $49 a month."]Sign Up Today! [/su_button]

Timestamps

00:00 –  Overview of PubMatic and Rajeev’s background

01:54 –  How has digital advertising changed in the past 15 years and where do we stand today?

03:55 – Which industries are recently embracing programmatic?

07:32 – How does PubMatic differentiate from other SSPs?

10:35 – The ad tech ecosystem is quite complex. How do you determine which other companies you want to partner with?

12:21 – Thoughts about industry fragmentation

14:14 – The focus on data privacy and the role of identity

19:25 – How important is Connected TV to the future of advertising?

24:09 – What’s in store for the future of advertising?

Transcript

Simon Erickson  00:00

Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of our 7investing podcast. I’m 7investing founder and CEO Simon Erickson. You’ve probably heard quite a bit about the ad tech market lately. This is an industry that’s been growing on fire. It’s taking off exponential growth rates. And it’s extremely exciting to speak with one of the innovators in the field. I’m joined this afternoon by Rajeev Goel. He is the co founder and CEO of Pubmatic. That is PUBM (NASDAQ:PUBM) is the ticker on that company – publicly traded company. Rajeev I’m really excited to chat with you about AD tech. Thanks for joining me on the seven investing podcast today.

Rajeev Goel  00:33

Thanks, Simon. Great to be here with you and excited to be here with your viewers, your audience.

Simon Erickson  00:37

Rajeev, I know you’re joining me from Silicon Valley this morning. That’s home sweet home for you. And I know a little bit about your backstory that you grew up talking about technology around the dinner table. What led you to start Pubmatic in the first place? And what are your goals for the company?

Rajeev Goel  00:51

Yeah, you’re exactly right. So you know, I grew up here in Silicon Valley, both of my parents worked in tech there, they’re now retired. And so that was the dinner table conversation. And in fact, when I was in college, I started my first company, along with one of my co founders here at Pubmatic, my brother, and that was an e-commerce focus company in the golf space. And it was a great business, had a lot of fun. And then we ran into the 2000-2001, you know maelstrom, and we got blown out of the water. But we learned a lot of valuable lessons in that process. And I knew at that point that, you know, running my own company was was kind of the thing for me. But I spent about another five years working at other large companies. SAP consulting at Allstate, Kraft Foods, just to try to learn as much as I could. So I spent a lot of time in product and engineering and sales and marketing. And then in 2005-2006, I decided, Okay, it’s time to get back into into into the startup world. And I started Pubmatic.

Simon Erickson  01:54

That’s fantastical 2006? So you’re a 15 year old, you’re a teenager as a company right now, that’s young for a lot of companies. But in Silicon Valley, you’ve been around, you’ve seen some horror stories and got some experience out there. And I know that you’ve kind of seen this advertising industry change quite a bit over the last decade and a half. Where have you seen this evolve in the last 15 years? And then where do we stand in in digital advertising today?

Rajeev Goel  02:17

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, we’re in some ways, I feel old, to your point, in terms of the company’s age. But, you know, we’ve seen, I think, a significant number of innovations and really changes in what I would characterize as a pretty dynamic industry, the digital advertising industry. So the first is the advent of real time bidding, right. And so real time bidding, obviously, is the primary way that digital ads are transacted now, and we were really a pioneer and innovator in this, we did some of the first real time bidding transactions back in 2009, with the startup that was called Invite Media, which was acquired by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and is the foundation of their very large now demand side platform.

Rajeev Goel  03:01

So the shift from kind of static methods of buying to bidded media, right, 100 millisecond 150 millisecond auctions. So that was one big shift. I think the second big shift that we’ve seen is from desktop devices to mobile devices, right. So today, obviously, consumers consume the vast majority of media content, and therefore advertising on mobile devices. And you know, that’s a huge technological shift. And I think now we’re in the midst really of the next big shift on that level, which is around audience addressability and consumer privacy. So we’re moving away from anonymous data, third party cookie, the Apple ID for advertising, or IDFA. And towards known user, and consumer opt in. No user targeting and consumer opt in. And I think that’s just a huge sea change, and great opportunity for us.

Simon Erickson  03:55

Let’s double click on that identity in a minute here Rajeev, I’d like to get back to that a little later on. But here’s to kind of start at the higher level and talk a little bit more about the market. You just reported your results, revenue was up 54%. And the number of impressions of 106%. By the way, fantastic job on that, you know, for a 15 year old company that still kind of startup growth numbers. Are we still in the earliest innings of programmatic advertising? And if so, what kind of industries who are customers of yours are just now starting to embrace this?

Rajeev Goel  04:24

Yeah, I think in many ways, as large as the industry is, it’s still it’s still fairly early and dynamic. So we think about, you know, what, what the industry looks like, there’s about a three quarters of a trillion dollars of total global ad spend, right? And so that’s digital as well as non digital. Digital is about two thirds of that if we go out a couple of years, and then the programmatic portion, right. So that’s using automation, that’s data, real time bidding – that is itself, the majority of that digital ad spend. So we operate in about 250 billion $300 billion market. It’s growing 10 to 12% a year. Some parts of it are certainly growing faster.

Rajeev Goel  05:08

If we look at it from a kind of a format or device perspective, we’ve seen a steady progression, first desktop conversion to digital and programmatic then mobile web, mobile app, online video. And now, you know, the single the one of the fastest growing categories is over the top streaming and connected TV devices. From an advertiser vertical perspective. You know, I would say all verticals are major programmatic advertisers. But we absolutely are seeing in our business reopening strength and recovery across a number of different verticals like food and drink, style and fashion, automotive, you know these are verticals that were obviously hit hard in the last 12 months around the pandemic, but we started to see significant growth in spend on our platform in in Q1.

Simon Erickson  05:55

And you all represent the supply side of this ad tech industry, right? You’re working with the publishers, people that want to publish content on their site, or wherever they have it. So they get the highest rates, from advertisers that want to place those based on the audience. Is it ROI that’s the driver of business for you all? What is the real key for why people want to go programmatic?

Rajeev Goel  06:14

Yeah, so you’re absolutely right, that we operate on the sell side, and maybe I’ll just spend, you know, a couple of seconds on that. Our mission is really to fuel the endless potential of internet content creators. And we do that by delivering to content creators a more profitable digital advertising business, so that they can reinvest back into all of the great content experiences, journalism, entertainment, TV, etc, that that we all love on the internet. And so our content creator customers are companies like News Corp, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA), and we help them connect in with the largest media buyers like Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), PP and IPG (NASDAQ:I PG) and Procter and Gamble (NYSE: PG).

Rajeev Goel  06:55

And so the buyers of advertising the agencies and the advertisers, they absolutely are looking for really ROI, or return on adspend. So they want to put $1 of ad budget to work. And they want to know that they’re getting, you know, measurable return around that. And that’s typically conversion, you know, maybe you sign up for a credit card offer or something like that, or it could be brand impact, you know, you discover a new brand that perhaps you didn’t know before. And then obviously on the publisher side, again, it all comes down to generating more revenue from that ad space that they have in their apps and in their websites, so that they can reinvest back into content creation.

Simon Erickson  07:32

Or another Pubmatic when you started it –  publisher and automatic, right, you want to make this as automated as possible out there. It’s a very fragmented industry, at least from what I’ve seen, how do you differentiate yourself from other sell side platforms that are available?

Rajeev Goel  07:45

Yeah, absolutely. There is a level of fragmentation. I think we’re at a point in the industry now where we’re seeing significant consolidation happening. Just as you know, there’s been consolidation on the buy side of the ecosystem with demand side platforms. So that the primary way that we differentiate is that number one, we own and operate all of our own ad serving infrastructure around the world. So we’re processing on the level of about 200 billion ad impressions per day. So just in the short time that we’ve been talking, you know, we probably processed somewhere around a billion ads, if you can believe that. And by owning our own infrastructure, which means the networking infrastructure, the hardware and the software, we’re able to generate superior customer outcomes.

Rajeev Goel  08:30

But the alternative is that you use public cloud providers, right. And there’s obviously many, many large or a handful of large cloud providers. But the challenge with that is that then you only own the software, right, you’re sitting in their network environment, you’re sitting in their hardware environment, right, and you don’t have control over that. And because programmatic advertising is real time, and it’s data intensive, we think it’s really important to own that full set of infrastructure capabilities. Now, what we’re also able to do, in addition to generate better customer outcomes, is that we can be much more efficient, right, we can leverage that network investment, that hardware investment to really bring efficiency to the market. And that allows us to be very transparent, and also to innovate at a faster pace.

Rajeev Goel  09:13

And transparency is important, because the industry has has had a history of opacity. And so buyers and publishers alike, they want to know, Hey, what are you doing with my media inventory? And what are you doing with my ad budgets on the buy side? And so we’re able to be very transparent, and that generates a level of profitability that then we can reinvest back into innovation, right. And innovation is important, because the industry is so dynamic. And I think you see this in our results. You know, the growth rate that we’re putting up, over 30% is our forecast for this year. You know, terrific I think adjusted EBITDA margins, you know, also around 30%. But also, you know, if you look below that, strong net income and cash flow, and so we are growing significantly faster than others in the market, and we’re significantly more profitable.

Simon Erickson  09:58

Yeah, it sounds like you have a level of control over your infrastructure too that perhaps others that are using those public cloud providers don’t quite have.

Rajeev Goel  10:04

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And again, that is key to driving great customer outcomes, right. And if you can, obviously drive better customer outcomes, then you can generate more benefit, more value for your customers, and capture a portion of that. And I think a great metric that captures that for us is in the trailing 12 months through the end of the last quarter, we had 130%, net dollar based retention, right. And so that’s a, I think, just a phenomenal stat in terms of how much value our customers are getting from our platform.

Simon Erickson  10:35

That’s very, very high. That’s an excellent metric for anyone not familiar to that, listen to this podcast, that’s kind of explains that a customer that spent $100, previously with Pubmatic, was spending $130 today, great upsell opportunity, great retention with your customers Can you talk a little bit about the relationship with the demand side with the platforms that are kind of being built out. How do you choose who to partner with on the DSPs?

Rajeev Goel  10:57

Yeah, absolutely. So we think on the buy side, we think about it in terms of, of course, DSPs, right. They’re the kind of the counterparty that’s integrated into our platform and bidding, but also advertisers and agencies. So from a DSP perspective, you know, we we are integrated with something like 100 demand side platforms. And so we’re really focused on any demand side platform that has high quality ends. And that are, you know, I would say long term viable, right. And so we have some global omni channel, demand side platform partners, like The Trade Desk (NASDAQ:TTD) and Google, we have geographic specific DSPs, you know, maybe Japan only, or Central Europe only. And then we have some ad format, or device specific DSP partners, you know, maybe they’re buying only mobile app inventory.

Rajeev Goel  11:44

So there may be a specialist there or in CTV. And then I think one of the key things that that we innovated in and really pioneered is this concept of supply path optimization, for helping advertisers and agencies really consolidate to a more efficient and effective digital advertising supply chain. And I talked about transparency earlier. But you know, we also sit on top of a lot of data, you know, through our auction platform. And so there’s a number of things that we can do to help the advertisers and the agencies in conjunction with their DSP partner, to generate more return on ad spend.

Simon Erickson  12:21

So Rajeev, is it a fair statement to say that the industry was so fragmented at the beginning, because so much of this was specific on a customer by customer basis, right? You had publishers that wanted to advertise on even certain devices, or certain channels, or wherever it was, but then as they kind of get larger and larger and omni channel over time, you’re able to provide them more information from the data you’re collecting to make it more efficient on how their overall spending their ads. I mean, sorry, how they’re making their their sites available for advertisement from agencies.

Rajeev Goel  12:50

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. So when I think about our customer base, so I mentioned a couple of the publisher customers, right, News Corp, eBay, Zynga, these are global companies. And they’re also multi platform companies, right. So you might interact with News Corp content, you know, Wall Street Journal, or you know, Barron’s, etc. On a mobile device, you might watch TV shows that they have, streaming content, you might do it on your laptop, you know, in the office or at home. And so a company like that they want, you know, that global omni channel platform that can help them monetize their audience and their inventory around the world. And across all of those ad formats.

Rajeev Goel  13:29

In a similar fashion on the buy side. And we might be working with Dell VPP or Procter and Gamble, in addition to or via, you know, our DSP partner, like The Trade Desk or Google. And those brands. And those agencies are, of course, global as well, right? They have products that they’re advertising and, you know, hundreds of markets around the world. And so they also want global omni channel platforms. And so I think we are quite unique in terms of the the breadth and the scale that we have. We have eight data centers around the world, we have offices around the world, we do business in dozens of countries. So I think we’re pretty unique in our ability to really help these customers be more efficient and do that at scale. And that is a key driver of consolidation that we see in the market.

Simon Erickson  14:14

Makes a ton of sense to me, Rajeev, I didn’t want to follow up with something that you mentioned earlier about kind of data privacy is such a hot topic these days, right? It’s always in the headlines. We know that a lot of these publishers are international. But we’ve also seen huge differences in how different regions across the world approach and think about privacy, right? China’s internet is very different than Europe’s internet, which is very different than America’s internet. We saw GDPR in Europe, you know, there’s kind of a lot of discussion about data privacy in the United States as well. Do you think that advertising is regional, first of all, in kind of how different areas of the globe approach it? And then how does that kind of impact how you approach customers or think about scaling, this programmatic advertising opportunity?

Rajeev Goel  14:57

Yeah, so I think the common thread or the goal thread maybe is that consumers are much more aware of how their data is being used on the internet now, then, you know, they were aware, maybe three or four years ago, right. And obviously, there’s been a lot of things that have happened – elections in the past, you know, data leaks, things like that. And that has led to, I think, a much higher degree of awareness on the part of the consumer. Now, to your point, obviously, regulations are quite different around the world, right. In Europe, we have the general data protection, regulation GDPR, you know here in the US, there’s a lot of fragmentation in California, where I am has the CCPA  you know, bothered to spell it out, you know, there’s legislation pending, and, you know, Virginia, and Rhode Island and other states, and then Australia, other parts of Asia have taken, you know, totally different approaches.

Rajeev Goel  15:49

But I think what’s common across that is the targeting that’s happened anonymously in the background, without the consumer being aware that it was happening, is now shifting towards giving the consumer voice in that decision. But so consumers now have have a role to play in this, which is to say, Hey, I’m okay to get targeted ads. And my data will be used to provide targeted ads, or I’m not okay with that, right. And the consumer now is also being reminded that, hey, you’re getting free media, you’re getting free content. And the services, you know, there’s a cost, right, you might like a weather app, for instance, or, you know, news articles, or a TV show, obviously, all of those things, you know, cost money to produce, and to put on your phone or on your laptop. And so if you don’t want to participate in it, then you know, maybe you won’t get the content. But again, it’s great that it’s a conscious decision for the consumer.

Rajeev Goel  16:44

So I think this is a big change. And the key part when it comes to advertisers and publishers now is that advertisers will have the ability in the future to combine great quality content. So think about, again, content from a new score for Zynga, along with the ability to know who the consumer is and deliver a targeted relevant ad for the consumer has said I’m open to doing them. And that has not existed in the past, right? In the past, what advertisers have had is they’ve had the ability to target the consumer, but it’s typically been in a user generated environment, you know, like, Facebook or YouTube. So they have not had advertisers have not had that great combination of: I can deliver a targeted ad, but do it alongside relevant content, you know, professional brand safe content. So I think that’s going to create a huge opportunity for Pubmatic. And for the open Internet.

Simon Erickson  17:36

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We’ve also seen kind of some transitions and kind of how tracking has worked for programmatic advertising, right, used to be kind of all about third party cookies. And we see now that Google is blocking third party cookies. Apple’s what has iOS 14.5 is saying is only gonna be at a certain amount of time that will remain on their devices. How do you see this transitioning? I know that you said that you work with The Trade Desk, and we’ve seen their universal ID 2.0, kind of gaining a lot of traction, do you think there’s a new way that the internet’s going to track user behavior?

Rajeev Goel  18:06

Yeah, I think there are going to be several new mechanisms. And you’re absolutely right, we work closely with with the trade desk, I think the the headline is, there’s not going to be a single replacement to the third party cookie, or to the, you know, Apple, you know, changing the the availability of their ID. I think it’s going to be a portfolio of solutions. And we’ve been investing, you know, for several years now, behind the portfolio. So we have an Identity Hub software that connects in with Trade Desk, and their Unified ID 2.0. also connects in with LiveRamp, and several other, you know, leading identity solutions.

Rajeev Goel  18:41

We have first party audience data solutions. So if you’ve been surfing, you know, car, buying websites, for instance, and maybe you’re in market for an SUV, we can target you with you know, with an SUV ad. We have contextual solutions. We’re also working with Google on their privacy, sandbox, or FLOC (federated learning of cohorts). So we don’t think it’s going to be one solution that replaces the cookie, it’s going to be a portfolio. And we’ve been investing quite heavily in this area. And so again, you know, as I started at the outset, I think this is an area of huge change, and really opportunity. And it’s our goal to lead the transition towards this new set of solutions that is emerging as we speak.

Simon Erickson  19:25

Yeah, what an exciting opportunity right now, as the industry is changing, changing directions. One more that I want to keep up with is connected television. And we’re seeing a lot of people now actually having internet connected TVs, of course, that’s allowing for over the top content to be served to them over a connected television. It’s not just linear programmed TV. I know that Pubmatic you know, as reported this as part of your, I guess, mobile and omni channel segment, which experienced an 83% growth rate over last year sell 63% of revenue. I know that mobile has been really important for you guys in several years, but can you talk a little bit about about connected TV? Is this really kind of a really fast growing division of programmatic? How important is CTV to your company?

Rajeev Goel  20:07

Yeah, absolutely. So CTV is I would say, kind of the next frontier, right, of where the consumer behavior shift is happening the fastest. So it’s absolutely an important area of our business is a very high growth area for us. And we’re really excited about this opportunity. You know, we started building technology here a couple of years ago, we brought that technology to market last summer. And we’ve been really ramping it up quite quickly. So q4 of last year, for instance, we are working with 50 publishers in the CTV arena, fast forward to the end of q1. So just three months, we expanded that to 80 publishers, over 80 publishers. The growth rate for us sequentially from q4 to q1 was 55%. So you know, it’s it’s a really an exciting area.

Rajeev Goel  20:54

And I would characterize kind of our approach has really been focused on where the market is growing the fastest and we think ultimately will converge, which is around biddable deals, and auction environments, the vast majority of what’s traded today, and again, we’re still very early in the CTV transition, the vast majority of transactions today are fixed price deals. And we’ve seen this transition play out in basically in all other ad formats display mobile web, mobile app, online video or short form video, where the first step in the transition is to go from insertion orders, you know, analog deals to fixed price deals, and then to move from fixed price to bidding. And the reason is that you have a bidded environment, advertisers tend to pay more because they can bid up to the true value of the inventory. And then publishers generate more revenue. As a result, it’s uh, it’s, you know, it’s great for both the key stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Rajeev Goel  21:53

 And I think in the last kind of earning cycle, we heard from Roku, we heard from Disney, we heard from a couple of agencies all talking about, you know, that that shift that’s coming. But I think it’s also important to keep in mind that as exciting as CTV is, it’s one part of our addressable market. So just as an example, you know, online video, so this is, you know, short form video, not the 30 minute or kind of, you know, two hour movie, CTV kind of experience. But short form video is three times the size in terms of addressable market as CTV, and it’s growing at a similar rate. And that’s already a significant portion of our business and growing rapidly. So I think it’s important to, you know, put CTV in context of the overall addressable opportunity.

Simon Erickson  22:36

That’s a great point. It’s very lucrative, but still a small piece of the larger pie. If I can ask one more question about CTV – it’s kind of related to how Google has changed the format of the ad auctions that they have at least on desktop and mobile computers, right? We saw Google for years, it’s just doing cost per 1000 impressions, with impressions being the metric shifted that to cost per click, and then all of a sudden, you get an order of magnitude and the pricing that people will pay because a click is so much more valuable than just an impression. TV is not, at least in my opinion, doesn’t seem like it’s there yet. It seems like we’re still just watching shows or spacing out on a couch and watching things for a couple of hours. But do you see more interactive ads being placed for connected television in the coming years?

Rajeev Goel  23:18

I think if we look forward several years, I think that’s a possibility, particularly driven by 5g transition, which always seems to be kind of 12 months away, right? So maybe it’s in fact, 12 months away, but maybe we’ll be talking again next year, and it’ll still be 12 months out. But I think as bandwidth increases, obviously, computing power on mobile devices, and things like that increases as well, I think we absolutely will see, you know, more forms of interactive ads, consumers can engage directly in the app, you see that in, in some gaming environments already today. So I think we’re definitely moving into, you know, richer ad experiences. But today, a lot of the way CTV is transacted is on, you know, viewable ad impressions. It’s on the demographics of the audience. And it’s on airtime related to what what the show is.

Simon Erickson  24:09

Rajeev, our audience at 7investing here is individual investors really, really interested in how markets are changing over time. It’s such a unique opportunity to hear directly from your perspective as one of the innovators in this space. I mean, my crystal ball is kind of cloudy. So I’m going to ask you to look into yours. Where do you see connected TV, programmatic advertising, advertising just digitally in general, where so you see this going in the next three or five years?

Rajeev Goel  24:33

But I think that’s, you know, always a topic of discussion inside of Pubmatic. Right? We’re always trying to define the future and figure out where it’s going. But where you know, where I think we’re headed is to an environment where digital advertising will continue to be more ubiquitous, right. So one of the things that clearly happens is as the digital canvases evolve, right, consumer behavior changes, right consumers shift their attention mobile devices. CTV you know, in part due to the pandemic, if I look ahead, you know, maybe there’ll be self driving cars in five years or 10 years, and guess what, I think the outside of those self driving cars will be wrapped in digital ads. And that’ll be a great way to subsidize your ride when you’re going out to dinner.

Rajeev Goel  25:17

And we’re seeing you know, more in billboards when you know, if you’ve been to the airport recently, I have not yet been post pandemic, but will be soon. But there’s more and more digital billboards inside of airports or on the side of the freeway. So I think we’re seeing, more canvases, more digital canvases, we’re seeing more engagement by consumers online. And I think we’re also seeing a steady increase in the relevancy of ads. And I would argue that that’s a net positive because, you know, a great, highly relevant ad is like content, right? It’s timely, it’s appropriate, you know, it brings new information to you. And by the way, the more relevant the ads are, the fewer actually you need to see to make the economics of content work. And so that’s also I think, ultimately a positive for the consumer.

Simon Erickson  26:07

Well, it’s so nice to be joined by Rajeev Goel.  Rajeev, the CEO and co founder of Pubmatic, who’s really got a great opportunity, digital advertising is evolving quickly. They’ve got a ton of information and obviously very happy customers, Rajeev it was really nice to have you on the show here today. Thanks for joining 7investing.

Rajeev Goel  26:21

Thank you, Simon. Great to connect with you and with your audience. And  we’re excited about our future in that in that growing market.

Simon Erickson  26:28

Absolutely. PUBM is the ticker for Pubmatic – publicly traded company. I encourage excuse me, everyone to take a look at them. And thanks again for tuning into this episode of our 7investing podcast. We are here to empower you to invest in your future. We are 7investing.