A Year Out From Layoffs, OpenX Is Eyeing Growth and Identity Changes

If 2020 was about surviving the economic downturn of the pandemic, then 2021 is all about growth and identity for ad tech. Besieged by layoffs early in the pandemic after marketers turned off ad spend, ad tech is hot again as buyers have since been investing heavily in digital media. One company, supply-side platform OpenX, cut staff in April 2020 but is now on the upswing and rehiring in the face of new challenges around privacy. The newest big hire includes Tom Levesque as vp of product, who was formerly the president of Prebid and senior director of product management at Xandr. Based outside of Toronto, he’ll lead the company’s global product teams, specifically focusing on OpenX’s connected TV business and its data and identity platform. The ad-tech surge OpenX started hiring again in the fourth quarter of last year—"one of our best" quarters in a long time—and has been hiring since, CEO John Gentry said. “Because of Covid, we spent probably about a year and a half building out data and identity assets and also moving the entire company into the cloud," he added. "Now we're in the mode of actually executing against those.” Headcount stands at more than 200 employees, an OpenX spokesperson said, though they declined to give specific figures. LinkedIn puts headcount at around 280 employees. OpenX is seeing growth as the ad-tech industry continues to experience an overall surge, especially in public markets. DoubleVerify, PubMatic and Viant all had money-spinning IPOs over the last several months, while OpenX is reportedly exploring a sale, according to Business Insider—though Gentry declined to comment whether the company is looking for a buyer. “I think we're going to continue to see a lot of activity in the space, and I expect to see some more companies go public in the next couple of quarters in our category,” Gentry said. Changing privacy goalposts While investors circle ad-tech companies, so too are regulators and big tech platforms trying to implement privacy changes that would derail the status quo of targeted digital advertising. Chrome is set to replace third-party cookies in its Chrome browser with its FLoC proposal, which targets groups of people instead of individuals. Apple has put limitations around the use of its mobile ad ID and recently announced it will start hiding IP addresses on its devices, which are set to make targeting and attribution much more difficult. Levesque said the tech giants are slowly working to limit the availability of ubiquitous targeting signals that they see as privacy-unfriendly. “We're definitely seeing that the big gatekeepers ... are going through these things with a finetooth comb and picking things out one by one," Levesque said. "I'm sure that process will continue." OpenX isn’t alone in getting used to the changing privacy goalposts, nor is it the only SSP vying to win market share in the fast-growing CTV space. Magnite, for example, bought Telaria and SpotX to make serious inroads with CTV suppliers. Gentry said the company is taking a “buy-side approach” to CTV by helping marketers find and curate audiences in the ad-supported streaming space, partly because “it doesn’t make sense” to invest in sell-side capabilities like ad serving, given “the state of the current market.” What $1 Billion in Transactions Can Teach You About CTV Success