Paul Bannister Saw the Internet Grow Up. Now He's Developing New Web Standards

Paul Bannister grew up with the internet, surfing text-based browsers at the University of Pennsylvania in the early '90s. After college, he created—and eventually sold—a website to review video games, which was among the first of the era to have ads (after HotWired, the first online magazine). Back then, click-through rates were 2% to 3%, astronomical compared to today when publishers are lucky if one in a thousand visitors click on an ad. Bannister, the chief strategy officer of publisher CafeMedia, said competition in the early years of the internet was “fierce but even.” Now that's changed, as the web today is dominated by Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, concentrating so much “traffic and revenue toward a very small number of companies.” “There was definitely more of an open and decentralized feeling … that, over time, has consolidated and consolidated and consolidated, where now the big [companies] are orders of magnitude larger than even the next level down,” he said. CafeMedia sits in that next level, despite it being the 12th most trafficked publisher, with more than 166 million monthly visitors, according to Comscore. CafeMedia doesn’t own any websites; instead, it represents inventory from thousands of publishers for which it runs advertising and revenue operations. Bannister, who’s been at CafeMedia for more than 14 years, is now lending his experience to advertising trade bodies setting new standards for online advertising. At the beginning of January, he joined the board of the IAB Tech Lab. He’s also heavily involved in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where he and other publishers work with Google, Apple and other web browser operators to develop new approaches to online advertising based on the increased emphasis on digital privacy. His CafeMedia colleagues are also part of Prebid, a group looking to standardize programmatic monetization, and are planning to get involved in the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, a recently formed body trying to build new ways to target consumers online. “What we want is to try to get to a place where … any company, whether a startup or a massive global company, can compete fairly and the best idea wins, rather than these walled gardens ingesting more and more and more power into their own kind of domain,” he said. Big mistake Bannister left the video game world, a career path he thought “wasn’t serious enough,” for web consulting jobs during the dot-com era. Then gaming became big business as consoles became ubiquitous and esports blew up. Lesson learned Over the years, Bannister said understanding other people’s perspective and opinions helped him become a better decision-maker. How he got the gig Former Melrose Place actor and professional soccer player Andrew Shue founded CafeMom (which was eventually renamed CafeMedia) in 2006. He knew of Bannister through a mutual friend, left him a voicemail, and the rest is history. “He had gotten my name from somebody we both knew. And so Andrew called me and said, 'Hey, I heard you know a lot of this stuff. You want to come for a meeting?' I was kind of like, this is so random that Andrew Shue was calling my voicemail. I thought it was a prank. But then I called back, and it was really him,” Bannister said. Pro tip To get his teams working together, Bannister likes to use Amazon’s PR/FAQ approach: Write up a press release and customer FAQs before any work on a project is done. “Doing this forces you to really think through your plan and gets everyone else on board much more quickly. Projects move a ton faster this way,” he said.