The Aperiam Podcast

Daniel Saedi, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Minerva, explains how two former quants are building an AI-powered unified media platform for brands. Daniel joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to discuss bringing Bridgewater and Citadel discipline to marketing, Minerva's 250 million-record consumer file spanning consumer and professional data, the data-leakage problem that undermines mark...

Erik Hovanec, former Chief Strategy Officer of Magnite, on how header bidding pushed Rubicon Project into eight acquisitions and why integration is harder than the deal. Erik joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to explain the chief strategy officer role, how to tell a pan fire from a house fire, and how to build consensus by leading from behind. He walks through the SpotX and SpringServe deals,...

Adam Epstein, co-founder and CEO of Gigi, on building an AI media manager for the Amazon DSP and why agencies now hire software rather than buy it. Adam explains how Amazon's ad business grew from about $5 billion to almost $80 billion, why only an estimated 1,000 people globally have four-plus years of Amazon DSP experience, and how Amazon is turning categories like auto into pseudo-endemic ones....

Mike Khristo, founder and CEO of Layers, joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki on why app distribution, not development, is now the hard part. He spent six and a half years building ad products at Snapchat before starting Layers, an app studio that became growth infrastructure after he shipped his own app and watched the download counter sit at zero. They cover what Layers found analyzing 13 trill...

Momentiv co-founder Sandro Catanzaro on rebuilding the CTV ad server from scratch, and why AI made a long-unfundable idea buildable. Sandro, previously a co-founder of DataXu with stints at Roku, Pathmatics and The Trade Desk, joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to discuss the 18-hour prototype that started the company, why development is no longer the bottleneck, and how running two ad servers...

Iván Markman joined Mediaocean in May 2026 as its first President and COO — a role that didn't exist before he took it. He joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to explain what Bill Wise hired him to fix. Iván traces a path from Overture and Yahoo through MarketShare and Neustar to running search, ad tech, and Edgecast at Verizon Media, where he helped turn the business around ahead of the Apollo...

Corey and Joe talk with Matt Byrne of OAREX, a lender built specifically for ad tech financing, about why long payment terms create a compounding working capital problem across the entire media supply chain. They cover the "ad tech financing tax," why traditional banks avoid the space, how OAREX uses direct DSP and SSP data integrations to underwrite credit banks can't, the lasting impact of the S...

Corey and Joe talk with Brian Wiener — a 30-year digital veteran behind 360i and Profitero — about why he started 37Arc, a "workflow intelligence" company helping CMOs rewire marketing and sales for the AI era. They dig into why most AI pilots fail, how 37Arc uses a voice AI agent to interview entire marketing departments at scale, and why chasing shiny objects beats companies that actually map th...

Corey and Joe talk with Jonathan Kroopf — who helped build Creator IQ and later led creator strategy at TikTok — about founding Devotion with co-founder Cami Tellas. They cover why influence is fragmenting from lifestyle influencers toward everyday people with day jobs, how Devotion helps brands scale from 20-30 macro creator posts a month to hundreds, and why building a real creator community bea...

Performance marketing used to be about who could do the most manual work across the most platforms. Anna Stepura, co-founder and CEO of Adlyse, says that era is over — and the teams still operating that way are already falling behind. In this episode, Anna joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to break down why she built Adlyse as an agentic operating system sitting above Google, Meta, TikTok, Ope...

ost enterprises have invested millions in Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS — and still can't get their data AI-ready. That gap between infrastructure and execution is exactly the problem Joe Luchs spent 15 years watching pile up, first at BlueKai, then at Beeswax, then deep inside Amazon AWS — and it's what he left to solve when he founded Datalinx AI. In this episode, Joe joins Corey Ferengul and J...

Jonathan Frohlinger, CEO of Big Happy, joins Corey and Joe to talk creative as ad tech's most neglected variable, why digital out-of-home is finally having its moment, and how Big Happy built a category-leading business without a big VC round. 

James Avery, founder and CEO of Kevel, joins Corey and Joe  to explore how commerce media has matured from a retailers-only conversation into a category that spans travel, fintech, and beyond. James breaks down Kevel's API-first infrastructure approach, the four Ps of building a world-class retail media network, and why offline attribution is quietly one of the biggest unlocks in the space. He als...

Marketing measurement has long been treated as a planning exercise — but LiftLab's John Wallace is changing that. Corey and Joe sit down with the Founder & CEO to dig into why incrementality is the only measurement that matters, how the Skims TikTok experiment led to a 3x spend increase, and why most MMM outputs are blind to what's actually happening on your campaigns day to day. John also bre...

What does it take to build a performance marketing platform for enterprise brands — and why would you choose that path when everyone else is running the other direction? Corey and Joe sit down with Marco Matos, Founder & CEO of Adora and winner of the Aperiam and Growth by Science sponsored Brand Challenge at POSSIBLE 2026, to find out. Marco shares how his time at Pinterest, Microsoft, Google...

The media market is broken — and it's broken by design. In this episode, Corey and Joe sit down with Marc Guldimann, co-founder and CEO of Adelaide, to unpack why digital advertising operates like a classic "lemon market," where buyers can't assess quality so sellers have no incentive to provide it. Marc explains Adelaide's AU metric — a placement-level quality score built on attention research an...

Andrew Casale, founder and CEO of Index Exchange, joins Corey and Joe to discuss the launch of Index Cloud — a new infrastructure paradigm that allows DSPs and ad tech companies to run bidders, custom algorithms, and data models directly on Index's edge infrastructure. Andrew explains how containerized bidding eliminates the massive cost of internet egress (up to 80% of a DSP's cloud bill), dramat...

Mike True, founder and CEO of Prescient AI, joins Corey and Joe to discuss how the company built a modern media mix modeling platform — starting with an unlikely origin measuring Cardi B's streaming performance during COVID. Mike covers why MMM has had a resurgence, how Prescient is helping brands move from static quarterly budget reviews to dynamic weekly optimizations, and why search is dramatic...

Matt Spiegel, Head of TrueAudience Growth Strategy at TransUnion, joins Corey and Joe to discuss what nearly nine years at the intersection of credit data and marketing technology has taught him about identity, measurement, and the limits of AI. Matt traces TransUnion's evolution from a credit bureau into a full-stack marketing data platform — covering the Neustar acquisition, the build-out of ide...

George Popstefanov, founder and CEO of PMG, (also Koddi, Further, and the Momentum Group), joins Corey and Joe to discuss how he's built and managed a portfolio of independent, technology-first companies across advertising, commerce, and data. George walks through the three pillars that define every business he builds  and how those principles drive everything from product development to acquisiti...

Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki sit down to cover five major trends based on what they are seeing cross their desks: the declining health of the open web and what publishers can do to survive, the rapid maturation of influencer marketing and why its infrastructure still lags its ambitions, the early-innings race to monetize through generative engine optimization (GEO/AEO), a surprising surge in ou...

Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki are joined by Shane Shevlin, co-founder of Bedrock Platform and a veteran of IPONWeb and the early days of programmatic, to discuss what it looks like to build a next-generation media buying platform from the ground up in the agentic era. Shane walks through Bedrock's core mission — making deal-based trading work more effectively at lower cost — and how a multi-agen...

Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki sit down with Terry Kawaja, founder of LUMA Partners and one of ad tech's most respected dealmakers and prognosticators, and discuss where the market stands in early 2026. They break down the M&A landscape — from the post-tariff chill to why late 2025 started to show signs of life — and explains why valuations are split sharply between high-growth capability pla...

Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki are joined by Filippo Gramigna, co-CEO of OneTag — one of the only globally scaled programmatic companies founded in Europe. Filippo walks through OneTag's decade-long evolution, from its origins as a DSP to building a bespoke SSP for Procter & Gamble, pioneering traffic shaping before the term existed, and repositioning multiple times as the market evolved arou...

In this episode, Corey and Joe sit down with Jake Vachal, Managing Director at Raine — a leading banker with a practice focused on Adtech. Jake discusses what's really driving M&A activity right now: a more deal-friendly regulatory environment, PE firms pushing hard for liquidity, and boards grappling with existential questions about their equity story in a world being rapidly reshaped by agen...