The Aperiam Podcast

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...

In this episode of the Aperiam Podcast, Corey and Joe are joined by Todd Sawicki, founder and CEO of Gumshoe.ai, to explore one of the most consequential and least understood shifts in marketing today: how AI search is changing the way brands are discovered, recommended, and perceived. Todd breaks down why the concept of "ranking" is obsolete in an LLM world, what it actually means for an AI to ha...

Corey and Joe sit down with Raghu Kodige, CEO and co-founder of Anoki, to explore how AI is transforming the way brands advertise on connected TV. Raghu breaks down why CTV has historically been bought with the same blunt tools as traditional linear TV — and how Anoki is changing that.  Drawing on his background building Alfonso (now LG Ads), Raghu shares how the "seeing is believing" philosophy d...

In this episode of The Aperiam Podcast, Corey and Joe sit down with Andrew Covato, founder of Growth by Science, to tackle one of marketing's most persistent challenges: measurement. With over 15 years of experience at Google, Meta, Netflix, and Snap, Andrew breaks down why so many brands are still wasting ad dollars on outdated attribution methods, why simply "throwing AI at it" won't fix broken...

On this episode of the Aperiam Podcast, Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki sit down with Michael Richardson, VP of Product at Index Exchange to break down ARTF — the Agentic Real-Time Framework. Michael walks through what ARTF actually is, why ad tech needed a new interoperability standard beyond OpenRTB, and how containerization is enabling companies to run custom logic directly inside publisher inf...

Hosts Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki are joined by Joe Hirsch, founder and CEO of Swivel, to explore AdCP—the Ad Context Protocol.  AdCP represents a new standard for agentic ad buying in the advertising industry, drawing inspiration from the Model Context Protocol (MCP). As AI agents become more prevalent in advertising operations, the need for standardized protocols has never been more critical...

Ravi Patel, founder of SWYM, joins the pod to discuss why programmatic wastes money, how supply control fixes broken auctions, and what disciplined, capital-efficient ad tech building really looks like. 

Gareth Glaser, CEO and founder of Gamera, joins Corey and Joe fresh off announcing his fundraise. Gareth—former chair of Prebid.js and founder of RTK—explains Gamera's mission: creating a shared inventory identifier so buyers actually know what placements their ads run on. They discuss why the sell side has been "the Wild West," how the MFA crackdown proved transparency works, and why his "Gareth...

Fresh from the show floor, Joe Z and Erica Chriss join Corey Ferengul to break down CES 2026. This year felt different—less hype, more real momentum behind AI transformation. From seamless home habitats to ad tech innovations with actual case studies, the team explores why this CES marked a turning point. They discuss the collapse of the "tale of two shows," agencies finally leaning forward on tra...

 Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki wrap up the year by breaking down the biggest shifts in advertising and marketing technology—and what they signal for 2026. They discuss the TVScientific–Pinterest acquisition, trends in ad-tech investing, the rise of AI and agents across the ad stack, growing bot traffic, and mounting pressure on legacy platforms. The episode closes with predictions on LLM ad mode...

Joe and Corey speak with Heather Macaulay, co-founder of MADConnect and Audience Choice winner at the Marketecture Startup Challenge. There is a problem that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: integration debt. Every audience sync, conversion pull, and cross-platform workflow depends on APIs that are expensive to build, harder to maintain, and constantly breaking. That hidden “connectivity tax”...

AI is reshaping every corner of the advertising ecosystem—faster than most organizations can absorb. Joe  and Corey dig into what they're seeing on the ground: agencies rethinking their operating models, brands finally experimenting with AI in planning and measurement, and programmatic moving toward a more automated, decision-driven future. The through-line: this isn’t about replacing people overn...

Joe and Corey sit down with Jenna Griffith for a conversation about what leadership really looks like when a company is going through change. The consistent theme: clarity wins. If you don’t communicate clearly and often, people fill in the gaps on their own—and usually incorrectly. They discuss how to handle internal agendas, why you start with customers when you’re trying to understand what's ac...