Today’s MarTech Top Voice features Piero Pavone, the Chief Executive Officer of Preciso.
We are thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Piero Pavone, the Founder and CEO at Preciso. Piero is a visionary leader shaping the future of programmatic advertising and Real-Time Bidding (RTB). Under Piero’s leadership, Preciso has revolutionized the adtech landscape with its Smart-Bid Technology, a groundbreaking solution that optimizes bid strategies in real-time, ensuring maximum efficiency and performance for advertisers globally. By leveraging advanced algorithms and data-driven insights, Preciso has transformed how advertisers engage in the RTB marketplace, delivering smarter, more cost-effective bidding processes.
Join us as we explore Piero’s vision toward helping shape the future of programmatic adtech while ensuring advertisers stay ahead in the competitive digital advertising landscape.
Get an insider’s look at how Piero is reshaping the future of adtech space through smart strategies and cutting-edge technology.
MarTech Insights (MTI): Hi Piero, welcome to MarTech Top Voice Interview series. You are a top voice in the programmatic adtech marketplace. Please tell us about your journey and how programmatic technologies have evolved in the last three years.
PIERO Pavone: The industry focus over the past few years has of course been on Google’s will-they-won’t-they cookie debacle, to the point where advertiser trust has started to wane as they look to use alternative solutions. Just like other programmatic pioneers in the space, Preciso has been at the forefront of this transition and remains focused on solving for efficient privacy-compliant ad targeting.
We’re ready for a cookieless future because we can now use strategies such as fingerprinting, as well as native ads which focus more on placements than users. We’ve also spent the last three years enhancing our ML capabilities, which makes the bidding process far more efficient than it ever has been.
MTI: What led you to start Preciso? What kind of problems did you solve for your customers in the adtech space?
PIERO: Preciso was essentially the culmination of several years of hard work testing legacy DSPs, such as AppNexus, and similar tools, which led to the development of our own smart bidding tool.
Then, in 2020, when Covid marked the sudden collapse of the travel industry, where most of our clients were focused, we were able to quickly pivot to retail and build on our previous experience to help companies leverage the huge potential of cross-border commerce – a good example being China exporting products to Europe.
MTI: Could you tell us about ineffective advertising strategies that lead to budget wastage? How does Preciso ensure budget optimization for different scenarios?
PIERO: The key here is that we are 100% focused on clients’ goals, not suppliers’ goals. We have great relationships with publishers, but our priority is to those who are placing the ads, so we can be really efficient when it comes to media buying. We’re also looking at the sales funnel from a different perspective to some platforms. Whereas a large part of the industry is focused on the last click, we adopt a multi-touch attribution model that compares the first, middle, and last clicks for much deeper analysis. Again this informs smarter buying decisions and eliminates waste.
MTI: Preciso’s Smart-Bid Technology has made a tremendous impact on the global RTB marketplace. Could you please highlight Smart-Bid Technology’s salient features for adtech customers?
PIERO: Again, we’re one of the only DSPs out there that delivers campaign strategy and optimization that is 100% geared towards the advertisers, because that’s where our expertise has stemmed from, over the last 10 years as an adtech platform.
As a result, we can offer best-in-class supply path optimization, but we can also avoid redundancy in media buying. In both cases, this leads to a higher ROAS for our advertisers.
MTI: What kind of adtech stack would you like to propose to grow a GTM-focused media agency?
PIERO: Building the right tech stack is important, with optimization and efficient media buying front and centre, but as an advertiser, you need that layer of expertise on top of the actual tech. To this end, we aim to train clients as much as possible. Again, this takes their reliance away from the walled gardens which, up until now, have dominated the ad space.
MTI: What’s the future of third-party cookies? How should advertisers prepare for the next set of disruptions?
PIERO: Even if the cookie is never deprecated – and remember, we’re only talking about Chrome, which currently represents around two-thirds (67%) of internet users – advertisers continually tell us that they want to work with first-party cookies, so this is where the future is headed.
Yes, Google may have this conversation again in a couple of years, but honestly, by then we will have moved completely past a reliance, or even desire, to use third-party cookies.
MTI: What are your predictions for the upcoming year – which advertising or AI buzzword will rule in 2025? A message to the adtech industry:
PIERO: Firstly, GA4 has changed a lot for the industry and our clients are looking into how best to leverage these analytics, so this will become a huge focus in 2025.
Secondly, everything is transforming to AI. For instance, at Preciso, we are heavily investing in ML, and doubling the number of programmers across the company. Just like mobile phones and CTV have become default platforms across the industry, so too is AI becoming omnipresent in our personal and professional lives. We’ve been preparing for this for some time now, not least through our close partnership with the AI Chip Centre at the Digital University of Kerala, leveraging advanced AI technology to auto-generate ads – including both text and images – based on keyword inputs.
In summary, if 2024 has been the year of cookieless, 2025 will be the year of all-pervasive AI. There is still a lot to do as advertisers realize it’s not enough to simply be online – now is the time to keep investing, exploring, and discovering AI’s full potential.
Thank you so much, Piero for sharing your insights with our audience. We look forward to having you again with us.
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About Piero
Piero Pavone leads Preciso’s global team of ad tech innovators, enabling businesses around the world to hit the highest win rates in the RTB marketplace.
An expert in display advertising, data analysis and business development, Piero’s passion for programmatic technology led him to establish the innovative bidding platform, to offer practical media buying which would minimize budget waste. Determined to see that all advertisers should benefit from programmatic advertising, his team remains on a mission to open the market to smaller brands. A veteran of digital strategy and online marketing, prior to joining Preciso as Chief Executive Officer, Piero was COO at MainAd, where he led the performance marketing company’s global operations and ad tech innovations as well as its commercial expansion and strategic alliances worldwide.
A thought leader with extensive experience in the online marketing industry, he continues to disrupt programmatic ad buying to open the doors to premium advertising for all advertisers – democratizing access to high quality, qualified traffic at wholesale prices for merchants without the deep pockets of household names. An experienced innovator, entrepreneur, board member and company founder – and a software programmer and data analyst by heart – Piero boasts a long track record of driving successful technology innovations and commercial strategic direction, in a career spanning over 20 years.
About Preciso
Preciso is Europe’s fast-growing RTB marketplace, powered by its flagship Smart-Bid technology and delivering client campaigns in just a few easy clicks. Through use of actual customer journey and machine learning, Preciso technology predicts customer behaviour to calculate which display ad placement to buy in a real-time bidding marketplace – boosting relevance and conversion and putting the power back into the hands of advertisers. Founded in Italy by Piero Pavone, Preciso has expanded over the last few years and now has teams in 6 countries.
