• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 5, 2023

Aditude, a sell-side ad-technology company, is solving a unique challenge with a suite of publisher products that range from a cloud-based header bidding solution to a content management system (CMS) used for site hosting, and a control center that allows ad-operations teams to update and push-out ad-related code with no development background necessary.

Jared Siegal, CEO and founder of Aditude, never set out to start a tech company. He was consulting at the time, acting as a middleman between publishers and ad-operations companies when he decided to quit consulting and build a better solution that eliminated all the confusion for publishers.

Aditude’s core thesis is that publishers can make more revenue with better technology and websites, not just through promises of the best advertiser relationships.  

Siegal has no coding experience and built the product's first iteration from scratch. He brought along a bunch of his consulting customers and then became a tech founder and hired a CTO who formerly ran all ad operations at Answers.com.

The company has been completely self-funded until now. Within the past week, Aditude announced its first external investment of $15 million from Volition Capital.

Aditude differentiates itself by its technology. The Legacy managed ad-ops solutions emphasize demand-side relationships and rely on revenue-share models. Data & Programmatic Insider (D&PI) caught up with Siegal to talk about the company’s future, and his future investment strategy.

Data & Programmatic Insider:  How will you spend the $15 million, and what types of new products and services will you launch?

Siegal:  There are three key areas we plan to invest in: growing the product team, marketing and acquisitions.

On the product front, we are full force on the development and rollout of Cloud Control, our front-facing UI for ad ops, content creation, and header bidding.

In beta now, this system has the potential to completely change the way ad ops and development teams approach a/b testing.

We plan to grow our development team over the next 12 months to build out more features here.

Our analytics platform is also underway, and will be a focus as we hire more data engineers. On top of this, we will continue to improve all our existing products and launch new features as fast as we can.

As it relates to marketing and branding, we recently brought on our first head of marketing and will be working hand in hand with Volition to solidify our brand reputation as a technology-focused ad operations company.

Finally, we have our eyes on a handful of companies as potential acquisition targets. Whether it will be smaller niche header-bidding companies that are fully focused on one piece of technology, or others in the space, we see this funding as a great way to quickly expand our reach.

D&PI:  What type of marketing will you invest in?

Siegal:  We plan to invest in our own paid media as well as lots of event sponsorships. We also plan to host more of our own events for clients and potential partners. In addition, we are reworking our entire brand, including a new website to better reflect our persona and increase awareness in our industry of who we are.

D&PI:  What department will you double the head count in from 16?

Siegal:  We are actively looking to hire several business development reps, several ad operations analysts and have budgeted for 12 more developers during the next 12 months.

D&PI:  Aditude is also evaluating opportunities for strategic acquisitions of managed ad ops players in the space to accelerate growth. What is a managed ad ops company?

Siegal:  There are a lot of smaller companies in the market that basically manage all ad serving, including advertising relationships for their publisher clients.

These companies rely on great relationships and sales -- something that will benefit Aditude.

We believe that with our technology we can take some of these smaller companies and fast track them to explosive growth the same way we have done with Aditude.

D&PI:  Is Aditude U.S. based, and does it have operations outside the U.S.?

Siegal:  Aditude is headquartered in New York. We have employees all over the country, and support clients all over the globe.