IAB Creator Upfront: Why a half-built infrastructure is holding back CFO buy-in 

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) first Creatorfronts in New York City yesterday offered a rare, concentrated look at what’s still stopping big brands from unlocking bigger creator budgets.  

Until the creator economy’s plumbing is sorted out, getting big budget approval from CFOs will remain a sticking point. They want concrete answers on how results are measured, who owns what and what actually counts as a view before signing away millions to an Instagram celeb.

The inaugural IAB Creatorfronts, with speakers from Meta, Agentio, and YouTube, focused on how to build the tracks for the $44 billion creator train: standardized definitions, cleaner measurement and more proof of effectiveness across paid, owned and earned. 

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‘It’s hard to be a $7 billion company’: The investment banker’s diagnosis for ad tech’s public woes

Public ad tech is disappearing and an investment banker just explained why. 

According to Josh Wepman, managing director of technology investment banking at Houlihan Lokey, it isn’t a performance problem. It’s a size one. Most public ad tech companies, he said at Exchanewire’s ATS London conference yesterday, sit at market caps too small for the investors who move real money to bother with. 

“It’s hard to be a $7 billion company, right?,” he said in response to being asked whether all publicly-traded ad tech companies should be taken private. “You’re looking at trying to attract investment dollars from different indices or mutual funds, they often don’t. It’s hard to put real volume into a business that has an $800 million market cap.”

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