CTV Advertising Platform Publica appoints Ben Antier as CEO

Palo Alto based CTV advertising platform Publica today announced Ben Antier would move into the role of CEO.

Antier, who co-founded Publica in 2016 and has held the role of chief product officer since the inception of the company, will move into the new position with immediate effect.

Publica, a privately held CTV advertising platform who were awarded best early stage technology company at the 2020 AdExchanger awards provide ad serving tools to some of the worlds biggest streaming publishers and smart TV manufacturers.

Publica has reported record growth over the last 12 months and opened offices beyond their Palo Alto HQ in Europe to support their international customers.

Former CEO Cedric Tournay also a co-founder has been elevated to the role of Executive Chairman to focus on strategic growth and corporate development.

Tournay said of the role changes “Publica has always been a technology & engineering led company and it has reached a point in our company’s journey to elevate our CPO to sit holistically across the business from a CEO perspective. This provides Publica with the agility required to continue building market leading CTV solutions for our publishers at a point in time when the technology infrastructure underpinning the TV sector is changing & evolving quicker than ever”

An example of the way Publica leverage data & technology to bring increased performance capabilities to the CTV publishers they work with is visible here in a recent joint case study they shared with leading cloud computing company Snowflake.

Antier said “I am thrilled to step into the CEO role of the company I have helped to build with both of my co-founders, Nabahn El-rahman & Cedric Tournay from the ground up around CTV. As our global customer base continues to grow, as does our requirements around corporate governance and I am pleased to know that we have Cedric with his extensive board level experience leading this for Publica as we enter our next stage of growth both domestically here in the US and further afield via our international teams & offices”

Publica were nominated in both the Digiday Technology awards & Cynopsis AdTech awards in 2020 and continue to build momentum this year with a recent LiveRamp Identity partnership to bring increased audience targeting to CTV & the launch of the ‘Making CTV Happen’ series in partnership with Beet.TV.

For an in-depth interview with Ben Antier about Publica & their growth plans this year, Video Week conducted this recent Q&A.

About Publica

Publica is the leading independent Connected TV Advertising Platform and works with many of the world’s biggest broadcasters, TV manufacturers & OTT Apps. Publica provides solutions for Publishers to maximize their revenue across their CTV inventory through 4 key features:
1.      Unified Auction: holistic yield between direct campaigns and any of the 20 SSPs connected to the platform via server-to-server connections
2.      Ad Pod Management: Optimized ad podding to deliver tv-like user experience while maximizing revenue for the publishers
3.      Audience Management: Ability to forecast and target any First or Third Party Data via a unique integration with the LiveRamp ecosystem designed for CTV
4.      SSAI: Server-Side Ad Insertion solution designed for the scale and complexity of the programmatic ecosystem