Episode 154: CTV Meets the Creator Economy with Nicole Scaglione of PubMatic

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Again, go to swivel.ai/atg for more information. Welcome to the AdTechGodPod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to another episode of the AdTechGodPod, where we speak to the female leaders of the CTV space. With me today is Nicole Scaglione. She's the vice president of CTV at PubMatic. She's spent more than a decade across programmatic, video and advanced TV, having worked at companies like Goodway Group, OpenX, Tellaria and Hulu.

She's been at PubMatic for nearly five years and she's contributed quite a bit to their growth and their success. I'm really excited to have her with us today and hearing about her background and what PubMatic is doing in the agentic and now creator space. So, Nicole, thank you for joining me and thanks for taking time out of your day.

Nicole Scaglione (1:23)

Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for inviting me and giving me an opportunity to speak with you today. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_1 (1:32)

Thank you, Nicole. We have mutual friends in the space and I've honestly heard nothing but good things. So thank you for joining.

Nicole Scaglione (1:39)

I do pay people to say nice things about me, so I'm glad to see it's working. Venmo is a favorite tool of mine, so that's great.

SPEAKER_1 (1:49)

Yeah, very visible too, so I can see everybody. So I spot check. I spot check them all.

Nicole, you've worked at some amazing places, so like GoodWay Group, OpenX, you have a great background in the connected television space and the ad tech space. I'd love for you to take our listeners back to how you got into the industry and how you eventually landed at PubMatic as Vice President.

Nicole Scaglione (2:10)

Yeah. So I got into this industry starting on the agency side in Detroit, kind of by accident. I had friends who were studying marketing out of college, and it seemed like a good place to start a career. And living in Detroit, working in the auto industry, it was a very exciting opportunity to be a media planner for the big three auto.

I spent a lot of time in that space for a good five, seven years, and then I moved into digital. And I never went back. Digital was kind of like the exciting new space. When I was working in automotive, one day we were starting to pitch search to these dealer associations. And it was just like, everybody's just staring at us like, wow, what is this thing that you're bringing to us? Fast forward, and I started to spend a lot of time with streaming CTV OTT online video and learning that there are a lot of really exciting kind of similarities too. This is the next thing. It seems like something we sort of understand. It's like television, but it also has this digital component to it that is exciting. We need your help understanding what that is. So I got into this industry because I love marketing, I love media, I love working with different brands and helping them get the best out of the technology that's available to them. I also got into a lot of this because I am really bad at saying no to ridiculous opportunities that have really no kind of foundation or background, no one's actually done it before. And they need somebody to come in and be kind of crazy enough to say, yeah, I would love to start that team. I would love to build that business. I would love to take this really complicated thing and explain it to people who don't know yet how amazing it is, but really want to learn. And I'm, you know, I raised my hand. I moved across the country from the Detroit area to the West Coast without any real experience working with West Coast brands. And it's been my home for the last, gosh, 15 years, I think. And just diving into this makes sense for you. Let me help you get the most out of it, even though you don't know yet.

How great it is for you.

SPEAKER_1 (4:48)

And Nicole, I think there's a personality type too. I don't think everybody raises their hands for those opportunities and wants to take on those challenges also of building or educating a market or a team on something that's new. And I think it's a personality type that wants to take on those types of, really those challenges. I think it's like a win when it works really well.