Achieving success in the digital advertising industry is no small feat. When consumers have seen the rise and fall of many streaming services and publications over the years, it begs the question, how does one stay on top?
Speediness to market can often overshadow building the best-in-class technological solutions. Engineers are often faced with business pressure to produce features as fast as possible, but balance is imperative.
Approaching a decade in the industry, Nikolay Lebedev has adapted to the fast pace by building now and optimizing later at Paramount Streaming. Joining Pluto TV as one of the first ad tech engineers and now leading his own team, the company's Emmy Award-winning ad platform is one of the many successes Lebedev has to his name.
Nikolay, having the early part of your career coincided with the birth of streaming ad tech, how did you know which solutions and paths forward were going to be successful?
In any developing industry and within a specified domain like digital ad tech, it's challenging to see a path forward when nothing has been paved yet. Navigating the unknown requires creativity and innovation, especially with evolving business needs. One day, the focus may be speed, and the next day, it may be quality.
It is important to experiment and fail fast. You must be brave, take risks, and build quickly. Your decisions and solutions do not have to be perfect. What is critical is that you are moving forward. Eventually you will hit your stride and find others are learning from you.
You will know you are successful when you have set a standard and a best practice for others to follow. Decisions that are valuable to your business will likely be valuable to your competitors.
What is essential to building an effective digital advertising technology solution?
Data is king—measure everything! This is essential for all ad platforms because the effectiveness of your system is based on how well you understand your audience and your product.
Building proper A/B testing mechanisms, data pipelines, and telemetry into the system equips you with visibility on performance. This is a crucial long-term investment that will pay off as it will allow you to make quick, informed decisions on every feature moving forward.
From my experience, there is no way to achieve a perfect product at launch, you can only target perfection. Having data and deriving insights will provide direction getting you closer to that target and help convince others to continue investing in your vision.
What do you think is the biggest inhibitor to growth in the advertising technology industry?
Growing pains are a fact of life in this business, but not prioritizing scaling your solutions can be the death of you. This is relevant given the ever-changing ad tech industry with mergers, acquisitions, and if you are lucky sometimes overnight success.
Balancing the system's performance and reliability with business growth presents a complex challenge for engineering to solve. Scaling involves not only expanding the infrastructure and resources to accommodate growth and ad volumes but also ensuring that the technology remains robust, efficient, and adaptable to diverse advertising needs.
As we know, speed is crucial to ad tech, and not being ready for when the opportunity presents itself can be detrimental to growth. Failing to address scaling impacts your business's ability to capitalize on revenue and deliver value to advertisers.
How do you approach seemingly insurmountable challenges in the realm of digital advertising?
In general, the right engineering solution is often the simplest one. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. For example, streaming is just a new way to watch television. It's an evolution of an original solution, made simpler with technology.
My advice is to try not to create a new solution, a completely new idea is very hard to come across. Look around and apply a common solution to the problem you are trying to solve. Then, adjust it to meet your business needs.
I always remind myself that no problem is too hard to solve. Breaking it down into smaller pieces can catalyze creativity when seeking a solution.
Besides your expertise and skill set, what has been a superpower for you in your ad tech career?
Joining forces with problem solvers is key. After building several engineering teams, I have found the best work is produced when the team is solution-oriented.
Rather than solely focusing on individual skills or expertise, the emphasis should be placed on collective problem-solving abilities, adaptability, and willingness to iterate and innovate. It involves fostering an environment where team members are encouraged to share ideas, tackle challenges together, and feel safe to do so.
In addition to building an effective team, close collaboration with your partners and stakeholders cultivates strong working relationships that pay dividends. While this may sound unoriginal, it truly works in the advertising industry as both parties succeed together.
A common ad tech application of this is ad exchanges. I have seen multiple examples when both parties, supply and demand, grow together. Combining powers allows each other to focus on what they do best.
