The Hardest KPI In Advertising

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.

Allison Schiff (0:29)

I'm Allison Schiff, Editor-in-Chief of AdExchanger, and my guest this week is Mark Jablonowski, CEO of the very appropriately named DSPolitical, which is a DSP and ad platform for political campaigns specifically for Democratic candidates and progressive causes. Mark went from running tech for the Obama campaign to building a meta DSP that's optimized to try and meet what might be the toughest KPI in marketing, a secret ballot every other year.

If you think selling consumer products is hard, just try selling a candidate in a hyper-polarized 24-hour news cycle environment where outrage never sleeps. We'll talk about why political campaigns have basically been living in a post-cookie world for years, what lessons brands can learn from political targeting and measurement, the explosion of CTV and political advertising, and also the uncomfortable but very important stuff like AI, deepfakes, and the spread of disinformation. But before we dive in, Programmatic IO New York is coming up on September 28th and 29th at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square. It's time to unleash growth across the open web. And to do that, we've got a seriously good agenda lined up for you with excellent speakers, including Chris Kane and folks from Horizon Media, PMG, Hey Dude, Dentsu X, Razorfish, Goodway Group, and more. Podcast listeners get 10% off with the promo code POD10. So what are you waiting for? Get your ticket and see you there.

Hey Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Mark Jablonowski (1:58)

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Allison Schiff (2:00)

So what is one thing about you that not a lot of other people, what they wouldn't already know and feel free to get weird with it?

Mark Jablonowski (2:08)

Well, I think one thing you can find out is I'm a data nerd and really like to track things and optimize things, but I've been keeping track of every flight I've been on since 2008, and I am about to cross the 1,000 flight marker sometime in the next couple of months.

Allison Schiff (2:30)

That's crazy. Where's the farthest place you've been?

Mark Jablonowski (2:37)

Ooh, that's a great question. And now I have to think analytically, what is actually the furthest away. But I took a very nice trip with my wife for our honeymoon, where we went to Australia and New Zealand, amongst many other far-fledged places like South Africa. And so we definitely spent a lot of time as far away as possible.

Allison Schiff (3:03)

That is a version of the quantified life. People often track their body metrics, but you've been tracking your flights, so that's interesting.

And then something I think a lot of people would know about you, because it's very obvious, is that you're a politics junkie, and you've been at the intersection of tech and democratic politics for pretty much your whole career. What got you interested way back when? I know you studied political science in college, but I'm sure the passion goes way back further than that.

Mark Jablonowski (3:33)

Yeah, it's funny. I studied political science very briefly, and I'm sure we'll get to it, but I did end up dropping out of college after one year. So my interest in politics started back when I was in high school growing up in Alaska, and Senator Frank Murkowski resigned his Senate seat to run for governor and appointed his daughter to fill out the remainder of his term. And I felt like this was just the most flagrant form of apathism you could possibly imagine.

Allison Schiff (4:03)

It feels monarchic.

Mark Jablonowski (4:05)

Yeah, regardless of what side of the political aisle you're on, this is just a terrible, terrible thing for democracy, and for the country, and for the state. And so I wanted to have a little bit of help trying to change that course and ended up going into Tony Knowles. He was a two-term mayor of Anchorage, two-term governor of Alaska, ran to unseat Lisa Murkowski in 2004, which was the first year she was up for proper election. And I was just a sophomore in high school, but wanted to see if I could help out. So they ended up finding out that I had some technical capabilities and offered me a job helping to run the tech there, and ended up going from school from 7.3 in the morning to 2 PM, and then sort of working on the campaign from 2.3 to 10 PM. But that's where I got interested in how we can use tech to effect social change.

We didn't win the race, obviously, but it's where I figured out that, you know, you can use these skills for shaping the world around you.