Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital, on what he’s paying attention to next year

Though we try our best to explain it, the ad-tech industry can be about as digestible as a steel anvil.

Insert Shiv Gupta, founder of the ad-tech education and training company U of Digital, which offers courses for those looking to figure out what the heck a DMP does. U of Digital’s customers include a broad mix of media and ad-tech companies, including TikTok, Google, GumGum, Criteo, and A+E Networks.

Given his perspective as an entrepreneurial educator, Marketing Brew spoke to Gupta, the former VP of sales at Criteo, about what his clients are asking him about and the trends he’s watching in 2023.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Marketing Brew: What do your clients ask about the most?

Shiv Gupta: Strategically speaking, our clients are asking us to help upskill their teams on what is specifically relevant to their sector and the things that are really important adjacent to their sector. For example, if we’re working with a DSP, that DSP wants to get really, really dialed in on something relevant to a DSP, like programmatic buying or all the different channels in the DSP landscape—CTV, audio, streaming, etc.—but also adjacent categories, right?

Like, “Hey, help us understand clean rooms in depth. Help us understand what’s going on with data management platforms and how they’re evolving toward becoming customer data platforms.” They’re asking us to help them understand how marketers are thinking about in-housing versus working with an agency.

MB: Are advertisers more willing to get into the ad-tech weeds than one might expect?

Gupta: There’s always going to be a spectrum, right? But generally speaking, advertisers are more savvy than ever about this stuff. The big agencies, the big advertisers, they know these concepts way better than they did 10 or 15 years ago.

That kind of lends itself to what we offer—sorry to be self-serving for a second here—but advertisers are no longer wowed by an ad-tech company coming in and being like, “We do programmatic, we do auction-based advertising, you can target people using this data that we collected.” That stuff used to blow advertisers’ minds; it doesn’t blow their minds anymore. Advertisers want to dig deeper.

MB: What are you paying attention to in 2023?

My prediction is that in the next, let’s say, three to five years, I don’t think we’re going to have as clear-cut of a duopoly [Google and Meta] and everybody else. I think it’s gonna be a little bit more of a mishmash at the top…What I’m going to be watching is Apple, and it’s probably a little early for Apple, but I want to see what they do. I’m going to be watching Microsoft to see how much progress they make with Xandr and Netflix, and I’m going to be watching some of the CTV companies, like Samsung, LG, Vizio, and, to a lesser extent, Roku.

Number two, I’m kind of keeping my eye on CTV measurement. The whole Nielsen debacle, you’ve got this gold rush into CTV measurement, and everybody wants a piece of it—iSpot, TVSquared, Data Plus Math…I think there’s too many of them. I think it’s too crowded. So it’s going to be interesting to see [how] that starts netting out, who starts winning, who starts losing, because I don’t think there’s room for all those players.

Number three, I’m watching the DSPs…I think we’re gonna see—if the economy kind of stays as it is, which I think it probably will for a while—some go for, like, pennies on the dollar next year, just out of desperation. There’ll be a little consolidation in the DSP space.

MB: What are the narratives you think are overblown or overhyped?

I ran a Twitter poll [asking if] clean rooms are a product or a feature. Sixty-some percent of about 150 people said they’re a feature.

Clean rooms are interesting and important, but I agree with [the poll results]. I don’t think it’s a standalone product. Eventually, some of these standalone companies, like InfoSum, are going to get picked up. Some may fall flat on their faces and just kind of die off eventually.

I do think that the data management platforms, the customer data platforms, and the measurement companies, you’re going to hear more [from them] next year, like, “Oh, Nielsen now has a clean room.” All of a sudden, companies are going to start being like, “Wait, I use Innovid for my ad serving and for my measurement; I’m just going to use their clean room.”

We already know Google, Facebook, and Amazon have their own clean-room things. I just think the whole clean-room thing is a little overblown right now. It’s more of a feature [than] a product.