Theoretical Physics Prepared Jonathan Roberts for a Career in Ad Tech

Thanks to his background in theoretical physics, Jonathan Roberts may be one of the few people alive who can credibly claim to understand ad tech. Before joining About.com in 2013, the University of Oxford academic spent more than a decade as a researcher, making dark matter predictions for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and cosmic ray predictions for the AMS particle physics detector on the International Space Station. He now serves as the chief innovation officer for Dotdash Meredith, overseeing research, data science and open-market revenue operations. Over the past year, he has played an instrumental role in spearheading the development of D/Cipher, the sophisticated contextual advertising product that helped the behemoth media company grow its digital ad revenue nearly 10% last quarter. Roberts has taken an unorthodox route to digital advertising, but his work as a theoretical physicist and his career as a media executive share a number of key through lines. Find your common denominator When Roberts left academia for the private sector, his main concern was that he would not find the work stimulating. In theoretical physics, the sheer volume of the unknown meant there were always sweeping, challenging problems to solve. But when he joined About.com as a data scientist, he quickly discovered that the magnitude of the internet meant that its findings doubled as a trove of deep, unfiltered insights into human behavior. The two lines of work might differ in their material form, but both theoretical physics and advertising data science involve sorting through vast stores of information to make actionable predictions about how things behave. For Roberts, both fields called for a similar set of skills: curiosity, mathematics and creativity. “As an academic, the untapped dataset of the open web was pretty irresistible,” Roberts said. “The questions are different, but the skills are the same.” Aim to be wrong Roberts has imported a number of academic practices into his work as a media executive, including an appreciation for the scientific method. In particular, researchers work to design experiments that can prove their hypotheses wrong, as you learn far more from such results. The business world often operates in the reverse, looking to validate its assumptions rather than find the points of stress. This logic arises naturally from the risk aversion that governs the industry, but it leaves companies vulnerable to disruption, as it rewards insular thinking. In his near decade at Dotdash Meredith, Roberts has sought to balance those two impulses, minimizing commercial risk while also designing tests that expose false assumptions and allow him to learn from them. “If you try something and figure out you’re wrong, you learn something, which is different from what you see in business,” Roberts said. “You have to build hypothesis testing into your work so you can ask yourself, ‘What decision would I make differently if I knew the answer to this?’” The power of persuasion In theoretical physics, many of the predictions Roberts made will take 20 to 30 years before they can be tested, a timeline that is common in certain fields of academia. As a result, this space rewards academics who are not just competent but also persuasive—a lesson Roberts learned early on. He has since channeled this skill in his work at Dotdash Meredith, even though the duration for testing commercial hypotheses often plays out in a matter of weeks, rather than decades. But even the most compelling ideas need an equally compelling advocate, and Roberts’ ability to pitch peers effectively on his ideas has been critical to his career. “If it works for the business, that is a clear way to break ties,” Roberts said. “But sometimes, it just comes down to your ability to persuade other people that you’re right.” Work History Jonathan Roberts is chief innovation officer at Dotdash Meredith. Prior to Dotdash, Roberts worked as a data scientist for About.com for over three years. Before joining the private sector, the University of Oxford academic spent more than a decade as a theoretical physics researcher.