• by Ray Schultz , August 7, 2023

The MediaMath bankruptcy has many people worried, but Benjamin Lanfry, chief supply officer at Ogury, is not one of them.  

Based on feedback from Ogury’s clients, “U.S. exposure is pretty limited in my opinion,” Lanfry says. “No major media company is having a major loss.” 

The real risk is to sell side platforms (SSPs), which up to now have not been liable. But that could change, and even without that, some SSPs are now trying to “claw back” revenue they paid to publishers via MediaMath. SSPs tend to operate on thin margins even with large revenue streams, Lanfry says. 

Lanfry is not worried about the large SSPs, but for the smaller ones the blow “might be fatal,” he says. 

Ogury is not an SSP—it’s a personified advertising company that helps brands reach users at scale without user ID. 

The firm has taken a $400,000 hit from the MediaMath disaster. But it has no plans to try to claw it back from publishers. 

For one thing it does not want to give its publishing partners, major firms like Penske Media and Insider, “a bad signal in terms of whether we are really true partners or just like everyone else.” 

Then there’s the operational difficulty. “You have to ask each of them the amount, negotiate, sign papers,” Landry says. “It’s complex and very time-consuming.”

In any event, Landry is “99.5% sure that none of this revenue for all exposed companies will be recovered.”

Ogury’s targeting is based on intent, reflecting interests, semantic and contextual analytics and factors such as the time of day. It does not identify individuals.

Founded eight years ago, the company has roughly 500 employees and close to 20 offices. 

In conclusion, Lanfry states that the MediaMath failure is a shame given that the firm was “one of first and one of leading DSPs (demand side platforms) in the market. It’s a promising technology, and there were a lot of bright people working there.”