MEDIAMATH

Founders: Joe Zawadzki
Key people: Joe Zawadzki (CEO)
Number of employees: ~1,000

MediaMath is the producer of the TerminalOne platform and the founder of the New Marketing Institute.

History

MediaMath was founded in 2007. The company was initially a bid manager through which agency holding companies and media buyers could access advertising exchanges to purchase leftover ad space available on online publications’ web sites. The company also developed financial instruments for use in the exchange market as it was first developing. Stephanie Clifford wrote of the company that, “With some Wall Street-like analysis, advertisers can find individual Web surfers, figure out how much to pay to show them an ad and analyze how those ads have performed. Firms like [MediaMath] are working on analyzing which of those users might be attractive, then tracking how advertisements served to them perform.”

In August 2009, MediaMath raised $12.5 million in venture capital funding, from sources including Safeguard Scientifics, QED Investors, and the Silicon Valley Bank. The funding was used in part to expand MediaMath’s own online exchange buying platform. The platform, TerminalOne, includ ed a user interface and data management layer that combined third-party data with information provided by the buyer. Algorithms and bid optimization processes were used to refine purchasing decisions for the buyer, through the industry’s first demand-side media trading platform. The platform initially served several billion targeted ads per month. In June 2014 MediaMath received $175 million in additional funding, with $73.5 coming from Spring Lake Equity Partners and the remainder from the Silicon Valley Bank.

In 2011 the firm released Private MarketPlaces, which allowed the use of TerminalOne across all inventory sources in the advertising exchange market. That year the firm was involved in about twenty billion impressions per day, with six billion per day coming in the Asian-Pacific region. The company runs data centers in North Bergen, New Jersey, Chicago, Palo Alto, Zurich, Paris, Hong Kong, and opened an additional offices in Tokyo and Singapore in 2014. In 2013 the firm created the OPEN portal, which connects buyers to partner services and technologies. The firm launched Adroit Digital in June 2013. In May 2014 the firm created an app that allowed the input of social media data into its algorithms, specifically from Twitter. The firm’s monthly offering of video impressions in 2014 was 60 billion.