Ep 150: Apps, Ops and OEM with Mike Brooks

AdTechGod (0:19)

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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 the AdTechGod Pod, where I speak to the leaders of our industry. Today's guest is Mike Brooks, someone who spent 15 years helping shape the advertising industry. Mike has held leadership roles across some of the industry's most recognizable companies, including LG Ad Solutions, Verve Group, Weatherbug, and now Brooks Industries, where he advises media and technology companies on product strategy, go-to-market partnerships, and more. Throughout my career, I've known Mike. Mike still hasn't figured out who I am, so I'm going to keep that secret throughout the episode. Mike, thank you for joining me and thanks for being my guest today.

Mike Brooks (1:43)

Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

AdTechGod (1:45)

Mike, I want to ask you, I start every podcast the same way. I believe in the people behind the technology. I think it's really important to hear people's story. That's why I created this pod in the first place. Take us back. How did you get into the industry and what are you doing today?

Mike Brooks (1:59)

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again, ATG, for having me. I am honored to be here and thrilled to talk to your audience. My journey, especially in ad tech, has really been apps, apps, ops, and OEM.

Four major stops that have built certain economies that have grown and scaled, and will lead to some of the things I think are the future. But when I started, I was an analyst at AOL with probably a hundred of the people listening to this, who started as delivery managers or BAs at advertising.com, and I was originally tapped to figure out the app install ecosystem.

This was early days of sitting down with folks like Uber and Candy Crush, and figuring out how to use media to grow these apps from scratch. It was a really nice place, great time building that business with AOL, and getting to be the front person when it came to all things mobile app. Then when Verizon acquired us, my team also took on responsibility for managing the preload business.

Verizon sells lots and lots of Android phones. On them, you can pre-install apps, and we took that business over 30x it and sold it out in the course of two years, and had a really good run in the big media app world just as it was taking off. That was my first run and that was apps part one, but it showed me how deep this app economy is. We'll talk about this in the future, but I'm spending a lot of time at this intersection of CTV and app, and in the app world, it's like $100 billion economy that's just completely separate from what's happening in the brand and maybe programmatic ecosystem as we know it.

Learning that space and understanding there was a whole world of app install that was different than modern media as we knew it, like there's something to it. I had a fabulous run there, and then after seven years with them and Verizon went over to Weatherbug to run marketing and the business side.

That was a fabulous time to be managing. It was the beginning of unified auctions in mobile apps, so we became experts in programmatic. We did growth marketing for the first time, and I was managing the growth marketers of my own, and I was able to really expand my learnings, but also understand what it takes to successfully grow an app. So we were able to double that business in two years with a fabulous crew of folks when we were underground truth. And again, it went to show me that there's, to quote Arrested Development, there's money in the banana stand, that there's this whole economy of apps that are wildly interesting and disconnected. So like app part one is an operator, app part two running the business side of Weatherbug. Then I went over to the app side and joined Verve Group, which is an ad tech holding company of SSPs and DSPs. So at the time, I went from managing a team of 12 at Weatherbug to a team of 230 at Verve. And we had to, you know, it was during the time when cookies were dying around us, device IDs were going away, and we had to be experts in the death of the IDFA. And that was an extraordinary time to be managing through a ton of change, which we did successfully, although, you know, still a pretty big part of my career was when Google decided not to pursue, you know, the death of cookies in earnest. And a lot of strategy that I thought was going to be the future didn't become that. But again, it taught me how huge markets work and how to manage, you know, $500 million plus P&Ls that were complicated and needed tuning up. So great operations experience. And then I took all that and tried the TV space. So I was the founding head of BD and Partnerships at LG Ad Solutions. And I was responsible for figuring out how to build infrastructure to manage the hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of partnerships that we had to keep the media business flowing and growing. So that was an absolute deep in the trenches of how to build new businesses, how to test integrations across measurement, identity, data, ACR, creative. So being able to look historically back and say, here's how the app world works. Here's how you can grow an app. And then here's how the economies work brought me to, okay, what is a TV other than just like a big app store? And with that, we're at the end of that journey where I left LG and now spending a ton of time helping folks right there at that intersection. One, in the world of TV data, and two, the convergence of CTV video and mobile app demand. So that's like the history that got me here. And it makes a ton of sense because right now, there's just a lot of broth around these worlds coming together and new businesses being built.