Hybrid’s Sergey Kovalev on cookieless future, India plans, and future of ad-tech

Hybrid is a global full-stack programmatic advertising ecosystem. Hybrid fully harnesses AI and ML algorithms to reimagine the programmatic and achieve a completely new level of transparency at every step. The company cooperates with many large companies in its field: Google, Unity, Yandex, AppNexus, AppsFlyer, Rubicon and others. It has over 200 advertising agencies among its clients, including GroupM, BBDO, Dentsu, OMD, among others.

Sergey Kovalev is Global CCO in Hybrid. He started working for Hybrid ten years ago as the head of sales in a tiny office. He has 15 years of expertise in digital marketing and 20 years of experience in sales. Kovalev is in charge of new markets and a product expert with more than five years of experience in international sales. 

In conversation with Adgully, Sergey Kovalev, Global CCO, Hybrid Adtech, speaks about the cookieless world, future plans, the importance of machine learning and artificial intelligence, perceptions regarding billboards, latest trends in programmatic advertising and more. Excerpts:

How do you harness data and machine learning to deliver intelligent and customised campaigns?

We’re working programmatic. And so for us, data is the most important thing; we do every day according to data. We buy audiences, we analyse users’ behaviour on different websites, we look through different mobile applications, and collect everything. So, it’s impossible to work on DSP. We also have our own DSP platform, and we can collect it and reach it, and then use it in our campaign. And the more clients we have, the more data we have. So, we connect to different clients with also the CDT client as a platform that shares this data results and we can run our campaign better. And well, we have lots of data points. We start using our machine learning. Thus, optimisation is always about algorithms. We can analyse each point, create algorithms and machine learning will do this optimisation much better, much faster, even better than each person can do.

What are your products and services that make you stand out from your competitors?

In general, the heart of our platform, DSP, is almost the same as everyone has. It’s the same rules because FTB has the same protocol for everyone. But we built the whole infrastructure of this DSP. We can better plan campaigns, we can better run this campaign, optimise it, we have some special algorithm. It took us about five years to build an algorithm that different mathematics learned, and optimise it. And it’s our key feature. So only because of it, we can do better in advertising investment return to our client. It is the main feature. Another feature is our client service, because we try to be quite close to our clients and help them with algorithmic buying.

How will artificial intelligence and machine learning change the future of advertising technologies in the days ahead? What are the other trends that you foresee?

Machine learning and artificial intelligence will help just optimise it faster, not better. When the cookies leave us, we will work on the user’s behaviour without a clearer understanding where he was before. So, we can analyse better, text, picture or even audio and then create some hypothesis as to what will be interesting for him.  You should optimise according to each creative and artificial intelligence can do it faster.

Are marketers and brands using the true potential of in-image advertising?

People pay attention, people communicate with advertisers, they spend more time thinking about it. That’s why there’s a really big gap between what we can do and what brands can ask from us. That’s why we provide good strategies. We show lots of case studies. And we try to invite lots of advertisers to different tests to different campaigns to make some case studies go into some awards. And I hope in the next two years it will be a much more effective campaign, And also, you are not using only one creative, but you show it in a different picture. And it means that each time people can see different algorithms of communication between picture and banner.

What are the latest trends that you foresee in programmatic advertising?

The latest trend is that everyone tries to receive more performance from programmatic. But in general, it was just a media advertisement. And now the next step will be good performance, also from programmatic so that we can analyse the audience better. That’s why we really understand what people want to see. And according to this, algorithms will harder and harder. Communication will go with different steps, but not at once. So, it’s a main point to collect more data and then make more interesting strategies. And it’s our future. Moreover, in almost all domains, all SSP networks are now connected to the programmatic world. So, we have a better chance to make a more reachable campaign. Another trend is to create some trigger communication. 

Now, we can work with data faster, we can go through it from anywhere. We can keep data for several years, which can be quite a big mess, and hence, we need some good servers to cover it, to understand the consumer’s behaviour. It’s a long-term planning and long-term building strategy.

How are you looking to scale up Hybrid in India? What are your plans and projections for the Indian market?

The Indian market is very important for us. It is unique. We can see high technology here. For us, we can go in two ways. First of all, we develop our platform. But here in India, we also need to adapt our product to the Indian market – the culture, traditions, language, etc. And as a result, everything can be different. That’s why we need to adapt our algorithm. We need to collect more data and integrate local data partners, because they know even more than the global data providers that we have now. So, it’s a long way. And I hope we will go step by step and invite people to collaborate with us and can increase our performance.