Madtech Advisors is launching into an environment with an abundance of consultants who cut their teeth in programmatic, and these consultants are more flexible and collaborative than a major consultancy like McKinsey or Accenture, he said. So multiple independent consultancies might work together for a time on the same account.
The programmatic experience is valuable even when the goal isn’t to stand up a programmatic operation. One client Walczak worked for as an individual contract consultant in the past few years is a publisher that only ever monetized through open exchange programmatic, and is developing a direct sales business.
Often, a potential client needs help on product development immediately, but eventually would like to own the expertise and perhaps hire someone as head of data or privacy, Walczak said. Or the business wants to bring on a contract team to help for a project that won’t require full-time staff.
The data and compliance company Safeguard Privacy turned to the Madtech duo for help with programmatic product integrations, bringing a product to market in a fraction of the time it would have taken the business to hire talent and build the technology itself, said company co-founder and CEO Richy Glassberg.
“This is an area of expertise around programmatic that I don’t have, because that’s not what my platform does,” Glassberg said. Programmatic integrations aren’t part of the core business, he said, but are important integrations. And the Madtech team was able to do the engineering work and advise on the go-to market strategy.
Safeguard Privacy was founded three years ago, but even in the past year or two ad tech has been rocked by data privacy changes enforced by Google, Apple and government agencies.
“This ecosystem has gotten a thousand times more complicated,” Glassberg said. “And if you don’t have 10 or 15 years of experience and breadth of knowledge in programmatic, you’re going to hit this wall and will be roadkill.”