The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – AdHash – Martin Stroev, Co-Founder & CEO At Collision Conference 2022

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

AdHash - Martin Stroev, Co-Founder & CEO At Collision Conference 2022 adhash.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in uh today of course and yesterday we were mentioning we're doing a lot of coverage at Collision Conference 2022 in Toronto, Canada.

And so we've been profiling a lot of different companies over the last two days. And today, or now, I should say, we've done about two or three today. We have Martin Strohev on the show. He's the co-founder and CEO of AdHash. He is a serial entrepreneur built from scratch multiple businesses the earlier ones are focused on consumer businesses from weather forecasting algorithms to destructive virtual telecom the main contributions he's done has been in ad tech he built and bootstrapped ad trader to over 600 clients in 25 countries, got Google to refund $75 million to advertisers worldwide.

Welcome to the show, Martin. How are you? Very good, thank you. Thank you for having me. Good, good, good. And give me as much volume as you can, if you would, because we've got a little background in there. Give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, well, you can find out more about us on adhash.com. I think we've got a fairly informative site. We try to always keep updated with all the new features that we introduce,

which we do quite often. So hopefully that can provide all the information. So give us an overview of what adhash.com is. Yeah. Well, as you mentioned, we've been in the advertising technology space for a few years now, close to nine years. And we've really learned a lot, both from our mistakes and from the mistakes of others. We think there is a lot to be improved in the existing advertising infrastructure.

And that's what we've been trying to do with AdHash. We essentially re-engineered the protocol on which advertising is traded to make it much more, let's say, future-proof and much more ethical. Our thesis is that we can deliver efficient advertising in an efficient way for publishers to monetize their content without sacrificing user privacy and without turning internet users into products. Who are your main clients that use your product? Well, it's a mix of very large and very well-known as well as smaller advertisers

and I would say premium publishers. And by premium, I don't necessarily mean just very large and well-known ones, but the ones who create unique content, content that people find useful. Now, it appears like you really help them with targeting and also to avoid losses, like with ad blockers and loading times and stuff like that, high-impact ads. Talk to us a little bit about some of the different features of your services there. Sure. And I just want to make sure, because nowadays when you say targeting,

people always perceive targeting users and tracking users online, which is something that we try to fight against. So we have a very different hypothesis on what targeting should be like and what efficient targeting looks like. Instead of trying to follow users and trying to create models about their behavior based on what we know about them in the browser and infer their gender and age and political affiliation and medical conditions and whatever. We try to only use signals that are external and not personally identified. So it would be the context of the video you're watching or the image you're looking at or the text that you're reading, but it also would be real-world signals surrounding you, like the weather. If you're a food delivery app, your customers are a lot more likely to order

when the weather outside is bad because they're less likely to want to go out to dinner and vice versa. And there are hundreds and hundreds of such examples of how you can use real-world signals to influence advertising targeting. That also includes sports events or results or what happens on the stock markets

and so on and so forth. So basically, there is a lot more to targeting than what we have been taught to believe over the past decade. And not only is it more privacy-preserving and ethical, it's also a lot more accurate because those things are super deterministic. You can for sure say whether, you know,

the weather in a specific city is, whether it's snowing or not whether a specific sports team won or didn't win it's a lot more accurate than trying to infer whether they might be falling in love Now you have something called the AdHash

public marketplace, tell us a little bit about that and how it works Yeah, well, that's just our example to show that advertising trading doesn't have to be super complex and you don't need to require a team of a dozen people to manage advertising buying for you.

We've created a public marketplace of premium publishers where they can just list their prices and what sort of audiences that they offer, what sort of content they create. And, you know, other guys can just go there and launch their campaigns with a single click in a matter of minutes.

Wow. And it also says you save people money by bypassing the middleman. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, well, a typical ad campaign nowadays has to run through 20 to 25 different categories of middlemen and within each one of those categories there are dozens of different companies so you end you end up running your ad campaign and it goes through hundreds of different companies

until it actually reaches the publisher and it results in huge commissions on average uh it's widely acknowledged today that the average commission is about 70%. So 70% of the budget actually doesn't end up with the content creator. It ends up with the intermediaries. I would argue it's actually higher. It's very often above 80%. And when you do a more streamlined and more efficient protocol for communicating advertising, you can charge a much, much lower commission, which is 3% in our case,

which is 25 times better than what is considered the industry average now. It leaves a lot more money on the table for publishers and content creators and still allows advertisers to pay what they're usually paying or maybe even a little bit less. Yeah, that makes for a really good deal.

What are some other aspects of your service that we haven't talked about so far? Well, when you approach a problem like the advertising supply chain from the ground up, from the mistakes that other people have made before you, and you get to create a more streamlined and efficient process, and then the benefits sort of start appearing from all sorts of directions. It's not just the efficiency aspect. It's also the privacy aspect that I mentioned. But if you think about it from computational terms,

having a much more streamlined and simplified process means you're using far fewer computational resources. And removing middlemen from the equation means that far fewer databases and far fewer companies have to store those databases on their servers, which results in a great reduction in carbon footprint. So solving the complex supply chain solves up fraud, it solves inefficiencies, it solves data discrepancies, and it also solves the impact on the planet. It's quite a multifaceted engine from simplifying just one little protocol.

That definitely is. That seems to make all the difference in the world. Well, this sounds really interesting. Anything more you want to tease out before we go? No, I think this is a good enough intro into what we're building. We continue releasing new versions of the platforms every 45 to 50 days, so a lot of new features come up all the time. And as I mentioned at the beginning,

adhash.com is the place for users to follow up, reach out to us, and see what we can do for their marketing spend. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to check them out at Collision Conference 2022 and our dedicated coverage of companies who are there advertising in different booths. Thanks for coming by, Martin. Thanks for

tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.