Interview with Aditude CEO Jared Siegal

The interview with Aditude CEO, Jared Siegal (pictured) was conducted by Volition Content Associate Alan Soclof

Alan Soclof: Hey Jared. Thanks for the time this morning. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about Aditude and what makes you a differentiated offering in the market? 

Jared Siegal: Certainly. We’re an advertising operations technology company which means that we build out proprietary technology to facilitate all different aspects of ad operations. Simply put, if you’re serving ads across your website, working with us would make your life infinitely easier. We built tech that allows us to run a cloud-based auction designed to select the highest bid for your website in real time. 

Additionally, we’ve built a cloud-hosted layout system that allows ad operations managers to efficiently make changes to their website that previously only developers could do with ease at a fraction of the cost. These two key solutions are complemented by an array of services and support. These extend to both ad operations and development which positions us in a truly unique way catering to publishers within the space. 

Alan Soclof: What would you say really differentiates Aditude from its competitors?

Jared Siegal: So we’re definitely differentiated for a handful of reasons, but the key way we separate ourselves from many of our competitors is that we’re way more focused on the development side of things. Most companies in our space center their attention on the relationships they have with advertisers whether it be programmatic or direct deals. Of course, we value those relationships greatly as well, but our key focus is on improving performance through faster technology and custom integrations with advertisers. 

In essence, having the best technology is what ultimately is the most impactful for our partners and therefore is our north star. What these technological capabilities allow us to do is help a wide variety of publishers on any platform, including web, desktop app, AMP, across any CMS and so on. While our market is focused on one size fits all solutions, we are hyper focused on the technology solutions for each customer.

Alan Soclof: Looking at the early days of your career, what would you say helped you really give the unique perspective to the ad operations space that helped establish Aditude as the force that it is today?

Jared Siegal: My first job was with Answers.com, and I was really fortunate to be at the right place at the right time. I was the first or second revenue operations hire for the company which was exploding in growth when I joined. What was unique about the position was that they entrusted the ad operations department with a lot of development and product work. So as someone that had no experience in ad tech and certainly had no idea how to code, I began picking up bug tickets and teaching myself. 

I specifically remember one situation where my entire department went on vacation except for me and of course, things hit the fan. I stayed up for three days straight over the weekend with one developer. Together, we more or less re-did the entire website which helped us generate a lot more in revenue. This was my aha moment, and I knew this is what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my career. 

Alan Soclof: How would you say customers have liked the platform’s capabilities? How’s the traction been? 

Jared Siegal: We’re seeing explosive growth currently. The first version of our tech, which I built, grew to a seven figure business in just a few short months. It was when we released our “cloud wrapper,” our cloud based solutions, that things started to shift to a whole other level. 

We only released our first version of our current tech stack in November 2021, so in a year and a half we’ve become bigger than basically the three next companies combined in terms of ads served. We feel like we are just at the start and with Volition’s investment, it will really help us propel forward and offer more to our partners. 

Also, some of the specific feedback that we get from publishers is just how fast we move on the tech side. Not only do we code faster, but we are able to iterate and improve things way faster than the competition. We are also one of the only ad companies that provides resources on the service side as well as it is included in our contract. 

The final thing I want to highlight is that even though we’re a rapidly scaling tech company, every one of our customers has a direct line of communication to us through a private Slack channel. They get to talk to the developers working on their project or even the CEO, CTO, or CFO of our company. This aspect of our business is very unique. 

Alan Soclof: What would you say your aspirations are for Aditude?

Jared Siegal: Simply put, we want to be the biggest ad tech company on the planet. We are not going to stop until we reach that goal. As I said earlier, we only launched our first product a year and a half ago. We have a deep pipeline of tools and solutions that we are working hard on that we believe will revolutionize the space. I can’t go into more detail on what they are right now, but will definitely keep you in the loop. 

From a financial side as well, we had a huge year last year and we are tracking to grow by 150% again this year. And then next year we’re projecting to do another 250% growth. We think the sky is really the limit for us. 

Alan Soclof: I love the energy and attitude! Best of luck Jared, and I can’t wait to connect soon. 

Jared Siegal: You got it Alan. Thank you. 

-The Volition Press

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