How Cadent Is Unifying Advertising Across TV, CTV, YouTube & AI with CEO Nick Troiano

Ari Paparo (0:09)

Welcome to Marketecture, where you can get smart, fast with in-depth interviews of leading technology executives. I'm Ari Paparo, and I'm joined today by Nick Troiano, who is the CEO of Cadent. Nick, good to see you again.

Nick Troiano (0:22)

Great to see you, Ari. Thanks for the time.

Ari Paparo (0:24)

Of course, we want to get updated on Cadent with lots been moving around and changing over the last couple of years. Want to start out by telling us what's Cadent about today?

Nick Troiano (0:34)

Quick snapshot. We're an independent advertising platform that focuses on audiences and outcomes. We've been in the space for a long time. Our focus is really about helping marketers identify audiences, reach them, activate against them across a portfolio of disciplines and channels from linear TV all the way down to YouTube, digital CTV. We do that in a way that leverages both an end-to-end ad stack from activation, identification all the way through measurement.

We do that from a basis of predictive capabilities. How do we actually leverage the data that we have within our ad stack to deliver those outcomes that matter to marketers?

Ari Paparo (1:12)

Yeah. That's exciting. Let's talk about this movement from single point to unified solution. You go back a couple of years and Cadent was known primarily for linear TV and regional TV. Is that the legacy? No, that's correct.

And now you're talking about all kinds of stuff. You're talking about YouTube. You're talking about video, cross channel. So take us through how you got here.

Nick Troiano (1:34)

No, sure. The premise of Cadent back even when I started 10 years ago was really around aggregation of fragmented audiences. We were taking local audiences across the United States on both cable and broadcast basis, stitching them together to create a national solution for advertisers. It was a complement to their national strategies with an NDC or Disney or anyone else. And it was really around performance. How do you find the same audience in the same content in a way that actually brings in a transparent way that brings better dollars in performance. So that was Cadent's heritage. And it started in video. As we continue to expand into the video ecosystem, into digital, we went down the path of recognizing we needed to resolve audiences to the household. So we brought an identity graph for info. And that allows us to marry audiences in a very compelling way back to the household so that an advertiser that was buying an audience across a suite of channels, linear TV, broadcast cable, local or national, and now digital and CETD, how do you make sense of it from a targeting and measurement perspective? And that was our first generation and our first real major acquisition. A few years later, as we continued to expand, we focused on getting closer to the publisher.

We bought a company, an SSP technology. It was really around reaching the consumers at the publisher site and what I'd consider removing the middleman. The linear business, Ari, back in the day, there was no such thing as DSPs and SSPs. It was just connecting the advertisers to the audience, basically a marketplace. So a lot of our strategy has been built around how do we actually create that seamless connection and that was a big step forward for us in 2023

And then subsequently, we bought AdTheorant, which we can talk about. That was bringing predictability and performance and outcome to a multi-channel world where we extended beyond just video into digital, performance digital, even out of home search display, etc. And then last but not least, to end the question, last December, we acquired Viewplanner, which is really a measurement and targeting capability for YouTube.

Ari Paparo (3:39)

Yeah, that's, it makes sense. You start with all the inventory, you add the data and then execution and the throw in YouTube for cherry on top, right?

Nick Troiano (3:50)

No, YouTube for us was, as you know, it's not just YouTube, it's creator.

Ari Paparo (3:55)

Yeah.

Nick Troiano (3:56)

It's that whole influencer, kind of influencer world where we just dollars are shifting to and how do you reach that hard to reach demo? So it made sense for us.

Ari Paparo (4:05)

Okay. So when you talk about moving from specialized solutions to kind of a unified solution, is that what customers want as well?

Nick Troiano (4:12)

Yeah. It's a great question. I think when I, as I look at the evolution of what we've accomplished over the last 10 years, one thing has been clear, specialization works when the solutions actually provide significant value.

What I do think has happened over the years, when you've had point solution is we've had amazing technologies that focus on historically, for example, retail media networks, or maybe specialized CTV, or even specialized linear, specialized measurement, specialized data sets. The challenge with all of that specialization is it meant that the marketer became middleware. The marketer was responsible for integrating not just one or two, but four, five, six, seven, ten different technologies to deliver what I'd argue from an advertiser or their client perspective, how do you deliver ads to the right consumer to deliver the right outcome and measure it efficiently?