FreeWheel’s Gil Sommer on How Live Sports Are Changing CTV Advertising

AdTechGod (0:00)

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 product leaders of our industry. Today's guest is Gil Sommer, Vice President of Product Management at FreeWheel, and a product leader with more than 15 years of experience building across programmatic advertising. Before he joined FreeWheel, Gil led product at OpenX. He oversaw management, design, and marketplace quality. He has a great background, having worked at Kinetics and Fiverr. Fantastic product guy. So if you're in the product field, you're really going to enjoy this conversation. Again, FreeWheel, thank you for being the sponsor of this episode, and thank you for bringing this amazing guest to speak with me today. Gil, thanks for joining.

Gil Sommer (0:50)

I'm really happy to be here.

AdTechGod (0:51)

Thank you. We've had a lot of FreeWheelers on this pod. So I don't know if you knew, but I interviewed Doug Knopper, a lot of former FreeWheelers had been on the show.

So it's been great to just have this FreeWheel group coming back.

Gil Sommer (1:04)

Yeah, you know, we're like a sports team. There's a coaching tree, and you see a lot of people that either have been at FreeWheel or at FreeWheel kind of in the industry. So that's always great.

AdTechGod (1:16)

From my perspective, I think, because FreeWheel in particular was so early on into believing that connected television was a fantastic medium, monetization was required, and of course, the media rights management piece of it was very important. It still is important. So I think it created this spin up of a lot of really subject matter experts that went into the market. So whether they're there today or have gone elsewhere, they've just brought a great perspective to the CTV space.

Gil Sommer (1:42)

Absolutely.

AdTechGod (1:43)

I'd love to hear a little bit about you. I saw all the podcasts the same way. I want to hear about your background, what you did at Fiverr, OpenX, Kinetics, and now FreeWheel.

Then we'd love to hear more about the CTV space overall.

Gil Sommer (1:54)

Yeah, for sure. I didn't dream of being in AdTech when I was a little boy. That's for sure. I got into it a little bit by mistake. I met the founder of Kinetics in a social setting, and we really got along personally. At a certain point, the opportunity to join them appeared. I was really thinking, hey, I like the founder, I like the people that I met. It seems like an interesting problem that they're trying to solve, and I decided to jump in. What made me stay at AdTech, maybe not join AdTech, what made me stay at AdTech is really just how interesting and challenging this space is.

It's never mundane, it's always changing, there's always a new kink, there's always a technology that's coming in, there's always a new problem to solve, and it's also very increasingly competitive. So it really requires you to have a very strategic view on how you're developing product, because what you're building today is not going to help you win the day in two or three years from now.

And then lastly, it's just one of those industries where you can really see the impact of what you're doing. So you can have an idea or a problem that's coming from the market and you can solve it and really see the result on customers and on financials in a very immediate way. So it's just a cool industry to be in. So I might got into it by mistake, but I definitely stayed on purpose.

AdTechGod (3:15)

Yeah, I think everybody who gets into it, I've had a couple of people that left for a short period of time, tried to pivot out, said, I'm done with AdTech, I'm done with advertising. Then a year later, they're like, we're back. It is an addictive industry and like you said, it changes so much that it doesn't get boring, it doesn't get stale, it actually just gets more interesting the longer you're in it and the more you know about it. So it's a fun place to be.

Gil Sommer (3:38)

Yeah, for sure. That really resonates.

I was trying to start a company at a different space for a while. We can talk about that in a different day, but eventually all roads lead to Rome and I came back to AdTech.

AdTechGod (3:51)

You're not the first, Gil. You're not the first.

Trust me, I've spoken to probably at this point, 250, 300 people between all the shows I've had and I've heard it multiple times. It is fun and a lot of it has to do with all the change. And even in the CTV space, it's still so young having just really taken off maybe in the last seven years, eight years, six years really since COVID was the big spike. Even that's changed into live sports now. And now we're seeing live taking off, the users moving from linear into streaming. I'd love to hear from your perspective, Gil, what changes I guess in a video on demand format versus a live format, how do things change when it comes to content?