AdTech Confessions: Targeting Sins and ROAS Reality Checks with Aaron Goldman of Mediaocean

Aaron Goldman (0:07)

Nivo gets it done so you don't have to.

SPEAKER_2 (0:19)

Welcome to the AdTechGod Pod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to another episode of the AdTechGod Pod, where we discuss your confessions. We just wrapped up Marketecture Live, where the team at Nivo slash Innovid had a confession booth. We collected some incredible confessions, some that I probably can't release, all of which I will not disclose who actually made those confessions. We had an awesome time. We also are coming out of the tail end of advertising week. So with me today is Aaron Goldman. We have selected a few, some of these you've not heard, five confessions that we were able to record at Marketecture Live Chicago.

For you who do not know who Aaron is, he's actually the CMO of Mediaocean. He's been in the industry for over 25 years. He's worked at companies like Innovid, 4C, Kenshoo, Resolution Media. And I just found this out. He actually wrote a book called Everything I Know About Marketing and I Learned From Google. So I found that while I was searching him. Again, we're gonna run through some confessions. But before we start, Aaron, thanks for joining me today.

Aaron Goldman (1:47)

My pleasure. Yes, I did write a book. It was now been about 15 years. So I've learned a few things after Google, but it still holds up a lot of great lessons in there. And it's still available on Amazon.

SPEAKER_2 (1:59)

Have you read it since, you know, in the last few years to see how true the things you said are around now?

Aaron Goldman (2:05)

Yeah, I do go back every now and then, especially after kind of Gen. AI came out. And remember when Google released Bard, right? That was sort of their first take at like an agent type of application. And so I went back and looked at some of my predictions in the final chapter in the book, which was called Future Proofing. And I had talked about at the time, at some point in the future, we're going to go from search engines to like a search and act engine.

And the term at the time, again, 15 years ago, we had talked about these as app assistance. All right, so like assistance in apps. We didn't, of course, know what would turn out. But now here we are, whether it's Claude or Gemini, ChatGPT, like we are in the age of these. Even now Muse, right, is the hot search and act engine where it's actually taking proactive action for you. So yeah, I do like to go back and kind of see. And for those of us who've been in this industry or really in the world for some time, you see patterns repeat, cycles repeat, and you can learn a lot from the past to prepare you for the future.

SPEAKER_2 (3:07)

I totally agree. And speaking of the past, we had some awesome confessions. We had shared snippets of each of them that we used on a social post that we did on LinkedIn as part of our partnership.

Those top five, I think, that we had posted, but we're going to review them today. I want to ask you, what's your confession on the episode before we get started based on those top five that I had posted just a few days ago?

Aaron Goldman (3:29)

All right, ATG, I have to come clean to you and everyone at Marketecture. But one of the top five that were picked was actually mine. And I wanted to tell everybody, first of all, they didn't know when they came up with the top five that one of them was mine. But because it was anonymous, of course, you had no way of knowing. I don't believe AdTechGod is real. That came from me.

And I only put it in because I knew it would be fun for us to banter about when we did this recap episode. To be clear, I do believe in you. I will say though, I don't believe that you are just one person. So that's my spin on that confession. That's the real confession for me.

I believe in you, I believe in the power of ATG, I believe in the brand and the presence of ATG. But I don't believe that you're just one person. So I don't know if that makes me an AdTech polytheist. I'm definitely not an atheist because I do believe, but I'm a polytheist. I believe there's more than one. There's no way that you're everywhere. You're cranking out content, you're putting on events. It shows you're the voice in the confessional booth. You're on all the socials every minute of the day. So it's got to be some sort of tag team going on behind the scenes there at Marketecture. That's my confession and belief.