Today’s MarTech Top Voice is GumGum’s Founder and CEO Peter Wallace.
We are excited to sit down with Peter Wallace, the GM of EMEA at GumGum. Peter’s extensive experience in the AdTech industry spans affiliate marketing, media agencies, and behavioral targeting, making him a recognized leader in digital advertising. With over eight years at GumGum, Peter has been instrumental in driving the company’s growth, particularly in contextual intelligence and AI-powered advertising solutions. Under his leadership, GumGum has leveraged advanced technology to optimize brand safety, attention metrics, and creative performance across diverse industries.
Join us as we explore Peter’s journey, insights on the evolving landscape of AdTech, and how GumGum continues to push the boundaries of innovation in digital advertising.
MarTech Insights (MTI): Hi, Peter, welcome to the MarTech Top Voice interview series. Please tell us about your AdTech journey and how you started with GumGum.
After university, I didn’t have a clue what to do, which I think is a pretty familiar story. I went to work with an affiliate marketing startup as their first employee – a steep but brilliant learning curve. I then moved across into media agency work for many years, with a focus on all digital channels. My first move out of agencies was to a behavioral targeting business, and then, just over eight years ago, I joined GumGum while the business was still just starting up outside the US. I’ve enjoyed my journey so far. In an ever-evolving landscape, I like having experienced multiple channels including PPC, social, and offline channels. Hopefully, it gives me some appreciation of the bigger-picture challenges for brands.
MTI: What is the best definition of “Contextual Advertising” in the current scenario of cookie deprecation and data privacy?
Contextual has been with us for a long time, but while the basic central principle of locating ads around relevant content remains the same, it is safe to say the definition has shifted. These days, we talk about using advanced AI technology to understand multiple digital environments accurately and at scale to create the perfect match between brands and consumers. In a world of signal loss and increased data privacy, contextual offers a fundamentally scalable, consumer-friendly, rich data set that we’ve proven time and again can drive improved performance for brands. Application of “contextual” in this new world is far-reaching, from brand safety and targeting through to an extremely robust insights and planning tool, as brands are now able to see how they are being talked about on the open web.
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MTI: You recently introduced the GumGum Platform & Mindset Graph. Could you share some examples of your adtech use cases from the gaming and entertainment domains?
The Mindset Graph really is the culmination of our core technologies; context, attention, and creative coming together in an extremely powerful data asset. The Mindset Graph enables brands to surface unique data and insights on themselves and their audiences, activate against this and subsequently quantify the business outcome of the campaign.
One example of the Mindset approach in action is a campaign GumGum ran for the BBC with Havas Manchester to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who. We used high-impact desktop and mobile ads showing a countdown to the launch of the shows and targeted broad contextual categories such as entertainment, TV, movies, sci-fi, and lifestyle, as well as using keyword targeting to align with cast and crew, as well as other sci-fi shows. Then, we measured the Attention Time for our ad formats to understand which contextual categories were delivering the greatest attention and optimizing delivery in their direction. Rugby and boxing, surprisingly, delivered huge amounts of attention.
Total viewing for the Doctor Who Christmas special was 40% higher than the previous series, with over 8 million views on BBC iPlayer. That’s not just about us, but we know that we helped.
MTI: At GumGum, how do you balance the results for better experiences for audiences through your contextual intelligence offerings? What sets your platform apart in the AdTech business landscape?
What sets us apart is the interconnectivity of our data points. We’re working within the hottest topics across the industry, and a lot of other tech businesses are talking about attention. The difference is, we are the ones that are joining together those data points through the Graph for the betterment of our clients.
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MTI: Please tell us more about the GumGum Exchange and its impact on brand safety.
The core aim of the exchange is to ensure the quality of supply. We’re MFA-free, we scan for brand safety and have the capability to surface the highest attention-driving supply – all this at a global scale with top publishers.
MTI: How do you use AI at GumGum? What kind of results have you achieved with AI insights for AdTech growth?
AI, in some capacity, has always been at the heart of what GumGum does. We have our contextual intelligence technology that uses AI to scan text, images, audio, and video to derive human-like understandings. It surfaces contextual signals such as content categories, prominent keywords, sentiment, and threat categories/risks. AI also allows us to optimize performance, and make predictions, and to tap into a consumer’s neural and emotional mindset by understanding when someone is paying attention to an ad, and with what potential outcomes. This enables us to understand creative performance but also, overall, to help drive brands towards better outcomes by delivering more attention.
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MTI: Please mention an AdTech/ MarTech expert you would like to recommend to be featured on our martech top voice series: (why did you choose the expert, please mention the reason):
Rob Webster at TAU Marketing Solutions is someone who always pushes forward and is incredibly well-informed about the space. He also claims to have taught me everything I know.
Thank you so much, Peter Wallace for sharing your insights with our audience. We look forward to having you again with us.
For media inquiries, you can write to our MarTech Newsroom at news@intentamplify.com
About Peter
About GumGum
GumGum is the contextual-first technology leader transforming digital advertising with AI-powered, non-invasive data and media solutions. We champion effective advertising that uplifts and respects consumers. Our proprietary Contextual, Attention, and Creative solutions create the perfect match between a brand and a consumer in the right moment and mindset. Founded in 2008, GumGum is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and operates in 19+ markets.
