Paleo Ad Tech

The episode contains several genuinely valuable technical explanations - notably the mechanics of optimization-by-suppression and the price-flipping insight that birthed DCPM - but roughly half the runtime is consumed by office-life nostalgia, career chronology, and trivia that adds nothing for an operator.

“dynamic pricing came from a series of discussions and innovations around flipping the model from um, optimizing inventory against price to now optimize price against inventory”

“it was optimization by suppression. And what I mean by that is you pick a price point $2.50 and then you optimize inventory. And that's usually by managing geos and frequency and websites and you're pulling them out. But when you optimize those campaigns you end up affecting your scale”

The firsthand account of Right Media's founding is historically interesting but not contrarian or first-principles - most of this ad-tech origin story is well-known lore in the industry, and there are no genuinely counterintuitive arguments or fresh frameworks offered.

“that Price marketplace is not new. It's search. It's a fundamental of search, but um, for display inventory, nobody else was doing it”

“as much as things change, a lot of this stays the same. You know, the questions that we were trying to answer 20 years ago are ah, still the questions we're trying to answer now”

McGrory is a genuine practitioner who was present at the creation of two foundational ad-tech companies and can speak with real operational detail, though the central architects of Right Media's technology (O'Kelley, Walrath) were other people.

“I think I signed four iOS the first day in the office and we were off and running”

“Brian o' Kelly was doing some consulting with Josie and uh, then he joined as VP of engineering working for Matt Phillips. And that lasted, uh, a couple months”

The episode is well-stocked with named individuals, specific CPM figures, acquisition prices, and mechanical descriptions of how suppression optimisation broke down, giving it above-average evidentiary grounding for a conversational retrospective.

“My options were struck at $136 for anyone that remembers the, the Google transaction, I think was sub$10”

“the payback was less than three years. They made triple their revenue on, on the inventory and so just on the price which was, I think a net price was 800 million 800 something”

The host asks a handful of useful technical clarifying questions but wastes significant airtime on trivia and never meaningfully challenges the guest's self-serving framing of Right Media's innovations or Yahoo's acquisition story.

“Now to your knowledge, uh, was Right Media the first to do this sort of price optimization or um, dcpm?”

“Do people have pets in the office?”