Join Us At MadTechMoney On Oct 11; Industry's Alarming Overdependence On Google; And Last Call To Get Into Popular LightBoxTV Deal
Introducing MadTechMoney - The Event That Connects MadTech & Money
FirstPartyCapital is hosting its first full-length event, MadTechMoney, on October 11 in London.
MadTechMoney aims to bring together martech and ad tech startup founders and the investment community to discuss the financial side of our industry.
What is MadTechMoney and why should you attend?
MadTechMoney brings together ad tech/martech founders and the investment community (private equity, venture capital, corporate development and strategic investors) to discuss key investment trends.
From seed to series A to growth rounds to exit, we examine the opportunities for start-ups to scale tech solutions in the soon-to-be $5 trillion dollar marketing sector.
Learn from the industry’s smartest and most influential capital allocators as they share their insights on the current investment landscape.
And who will be attending MadTechMoney I hear you ask?
Ad tech and martech founders.
Investors (from early stage to growth stage).
Private Equity.
Corporate development teams from strategic buyers.
M&A buyers/sellers.
Details on the event can be seen here. We will be announcing more speakers and more detail on panels in the coming weeks.
We are offering all our LPs and syndicate investors a 30% discount. Please email us on CONTACT[AT]FIRSTPARTYCAPITAL.COM to redeem the offer.
Places are going to be limited for this event. We would strongly advise you book your ticket today to avoid unimaginable FOMO and MadTech envy.
Evolving Beyond The 3P Cookie
The force of negative reaction to Google’s decision to put Chrome 3P cookie deprecation on the back burner for another two years was palpable this week.
Questions about motives and privacy have been coming thick and fast from the industry at large.
Its well-paid PR team have been trying to get ahead of the negative news cycle with a number of well-placed high-profile pieces.
A profile piece in Insider on Jerry Dischler VP/GM, Ads at Google, was arguably the pick of the bunch.
Dischler is the man overseeing Google’s post-cookie strategy. He is “trying “ to walk a thin line between user privacy, the needs of advertisers and anti-trust concerns.
Dischler works on something both core and emerging as one of Google's top executives in charge of its advertising strategy. Google's success in advertising has made it the world's biggest ad seller, but now it faces economic uncertainty and a global pushback against data-driven ads. It falls to him to reinvent digital advertising to keep its $209 billion ad business going.
Let’s just say this individual has an oversized influence on legacy ad tech - which is wholly dependent on 3p cookies in Chrome. We as an industry are too dependent on Google.
Our FPC take on this kicking-cookie-can-down-the-road-again: Google isn’t going to do the industry any favours, and is only paying lip service to keeping a failing legacy system in play.
We now have a situation where the majority of ad tech cos and buyers are stupidly over indexing on Chrome.
Chrome is an “addressable” fiction. It represents about 50% of the global browser market. Of that Chrome percentage you can only really access 60% of the users (because of privacy settings and incognito use). That means that only 30% of the current open web is “addressable”.
We are not properly targeting or measuring for 70% of the open web. Scandalous.
Google is not going to innovate for you. And it is certainly not going to do independent ad tech any favours. Why should it?
At FirstPartyCapital we are investing in a world beyond Google. The soon-to-be-five-trillion-dollars media and marketing landscape is not wholly dependent on it.
This Chrome announcement is ultimately an ad tech drama. The industry will move towards new forms of privacy-first measurement and targeting, and our portfolio companies will play a big part in this new chapter of the industry.
Our advice as always: look to the future.
ATTENTION: Last Call To Get Into The LightBoxTV Deal
We have had a lot of demand for our latest company deal, LightBoxTV. The syndicate deal will be closed in mid-August so you’ll need to be quick if you want to invest.
You can find the details on the deal here:
https://investors.firstpartycapital.com/#/contain/opportunities/detail/f722c262-635c-4d49-902a-737acfca289b
We will be doing a Q&A with co-founders Mark Giblin and Dean Cussell late next week to go a bit deeper into product and the roadmap for next 12-24 months. Detail on that will be sent out soon.
Just in case you are new to the company here’s a quick overview of the LightBoxTV offering:
The company is focusing on the criminally ignored $85 billion dollars of the TV sector. LightBoxTV aggregates inventory and activates media across CTV, siloed walled-garden inventory, AVOD, linear TV et al.
Finecast has already established the market for this new TV ad tech segment. Lightbox is the independent enterprise option.
The founders are ad tech veterans: Mark Giblin, Dean Cussell and Simon Macson have huge experience in product development and building ad tech businesses.
LightboxTV straddles the world between Mediaocean and The Trade Desk - in terms of activation and workflow management for TV. Nobody in ad tech is attacking this opportunity.
Get investing now.
And that is it for this week, readers. Have a great MadTech weekend.