Ad veteran Peter Naylor joins Kochava board, and sees opportunity in market flux

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

How did your time away from an operating role shift your perspective on where the ad industry is headed?

The benefit of not being in a full-time operating role is that my aperture has opened much wider than it’s ever been. I currently have a portfolio career, if you will. It includes angel investing and advising startups. I see small idea-driven, founder-led companies, talking about all parts of the ecosystem. I talk to clients in their agencies all the time because I’ve developed relationships over decades. I continue to work with the trade associations like the IAB, the MMA, She Runs It, IRTS. Meeting with those organizations, listening to their leadership, talking with their membership, informs my world view in a really interesting way. And I’m a senior advisor at McKinsey, and I see different clients and their needs.

Why is now the right time to step back into the industry — and why through a board role?

As an executive, I want to be where the action is, and I think Kochava is in the right place at the right time with both advertisers, and publishers. They’ve got this complete view, and that’s what I appreciate, because I start with the trends, because they inform everything.

I’m all about external focus, listening and paying attention to market, making it easy for customers to use our products and services. And then tactically, looking forward to helping Kochava’s Salesforce with all their efforts, either publisher side or advertiser side. So it all has come together for me and Kochava. I think they’re poised for more growth.

How would you describe the state of transparency in ad tech today?

I think transparency is a meaningful topic of conversation, particularly during the Upfront where people are negotiating for big dollars. And one of the things buyers are asking for is more transparency.  In exchange for more transparency, you might get a bigger investment.

It also contributes to optionality. The more the buyer knows, the more they can flex and pivot to things that work for them.

Where are the most interesting new growth areas in advertising?

I think that the biggest areas of growth are probably threefold: retail media networks, connected TV, streaming TV. And then I mentioned it earlier, I think people should pay attention to digital out of home in particular.

How do you see measurement and attribution evolving, especially at a time when third-party mechanisms appear to be on notice given regulation and the platforms’ response to it?

Optionality is the word I use all the time. You’ve got to have a really good handle on your signal and all the signals available to you. It may be an overused word, but omnichannel is really important, because with all these signals that may or may not stay, you’ve got to be able to have a complete view. So if the signal goes away, it’s not the end of the world, because you have multiple signals. So if you’re well positioned for the future, it means as these things come and go it’s important, but it almost doesn’t matter, providing you have a complete view. So I think there will continue to be changes.

You’ve seen this industry shift dramatically over the last two decades. What’s the most misunderstood trend right now?

There’s a range of ad acceptance with consumers. One thing we all intuitively know, but maybe it’s not top of mind, now more than ever consumers have the ability to avoid ads if they want to. You have ad-free versions of TV and streaming audio. There’s still ad blockers on browsers. The people who actively pay money to avoid ads are the consumers marketers want the most. They represent true incremental reach and growth. So something that might be under-appreciated are avenues that can reach those folks.

I was just down at Possible, and I heard lots of marketers talking about the movable middle. So let’s say you’re selling Nike, for example. You have loyalists. Then you have people who will never, ever be in the market for Nike. But then there’s the people who are totally into footwear, and they’re total athletes or fashion, maybe it’s Adidas or Puma or Nike or Converse or any brand.

I think this area is gaining in topicality. Marketers still want broad reach, but with the rise of addressability and the ability to eliminate audiences you don’t need either they’ll never consider you, or they’re already with you, to focus in on the most valuable movable customers.

You’ve seen platforms go from scrappy to scaled — what do second-tier players need to do differently to break out of the cycle of limited scale and constant reinvention?

Constant reinvention is fine, you’ve got to evolve with the times. I look at Kochava; they started as mobile, and now they’re omnichannel and working with both buy side and sell side, or advertisers and publishers.

You need to really differentiate through your actions. There’s a sea of sameness when it comes to the language people use, but the products and services really have to deliver.

Is there still room for a platform to carve out meaningful ad business outside of the big five — or is the bar just too high now?

With the rise of AI combined with economic uncertainty, with marketers’ needs evolving, I think it’s wide open. I don’t think the big guys are ever immovable.

I remember a time when the big three were AOL, MSN and Yahoo. And we thought they were immovable, what could we ever do to take share. Now, the big three are Meta, Alphabet and Amazon, and you ask yourself, what is anybody ever going to do to these immovable giants? But all things must pass.

The opportunity always exists for companies that are meeting the market with superior solutions that are timely and provide indispensable services.

You’ve worked inside the walled gardens and watched the open web evolve from the outside. How do you view the health of the open internet right now from a monetization standpoint? Do you think the open web still has a fighting chance, or is it a losing game as long as ad dollars keep flowing into closed ecosystems?

I think it’s a huge opportunity with so much change going on in the market. When it’s a buyer’s market, and I think this is the third year now it’s a buyer’s market, it’s interesting to see how aggressively they’ll behave when it comes to securing and winning deals, and when buyers have more choices and they don’t feel painted into a corner, that’s when there’s an opportunity to share shift.

So I think the open web is going to be fine in the long run, because buyers have choice, so superior choices will get attention.